Chapter 9
It was three hundred steps to the attic, most of them through a narrow stone chimney, into the yellow reek of the smoke. The
firefighters worked from the final landing, blasting at the flames beneath the roof of Notre-Dame with low-pressure deluge
guns. Leonard Debois thought it was like using one of his son’s Super Soaker squirt guns on a bonfire, but no one knew what
kind of damage a higher-pressure blast of water might do to ancient stone, stained glass, and thirteenth-century oak. Leonard
Debois was near the top of the stairs, holding the serpentine length of the hose—as thick as a boa constrictor—when he heard
a terrible, squalling roar, and Jean Laurent, on the step above him, began to scream Revenir! Revenir! Men struggled back down the stone steps while the sound rose and rose around them, until Debois could hear nothing else,
until his teeth vibrated from it.
The spire of Notre-Dame tilted slowly, inexorably, down into billowing sheets of fire. The spire might’ve been made of wax,
at the end, the way it seemed to bend and collapse, shedding lead sheathing, which would soon begin to boil and fill the sky
with toxic smoke. Debois was running by then, they were all running, away from the heat, away from the thunderous crash behind
them. When the spire finally collapsed into the rest of the building, the entire roof erupted in a blast of super-oxygenated
flame. It looked for all the world as if the cathedral had been struck with artillery, struck by a falling bomb. Debois ran,
yelling Putain ca, putain ca, the whole way, but the sound of the roof collapsing behind him was too loud for him to hear himself.
Later, when he spoke to others of the 2019 inferno that had consumed Notre-Dame, Debois told his friends the fire sounded
almost triumphant at the end: like a dragon screaming.