50. Notre Dame, Part 3: The Black Death

by Diana S. |
Nuns at the Hotel Dieu care for Black Death patients

“Charity is dead.”

― Guy de Chauliac

Welcome back to our FIFTIETH EPISODE! Next episode will be our THIRD BIRTHDAY and I’m celebrating with a listener Q&A! Over the next few weeks, please ask me any questions you like: questions about the show, about me, about France, about whatever, and I’ll share my favorites in the next episode for all to hear. You can submit questions via the show’s Facebook page or by sending me a message. Thank you again for all your support over the past three years!

Episode 50: “Notre Dame, Part 3: The Black Death”

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Now is a great time to revisit a few relevant episodes:

Thank you again to everyone who made a contribution on Patreon! I had to pay my income taxes last month, which meant adding up my total expenses for the podcast over the past year – it’s a lot. Your Patreon contributions are the only income I receive for the show, and thanks to your support, I don’t have to use advertising. Boo, advertising! We’ve all got Casper mattresses already, right? We fall asleep on them listening to Audible books…you get it.

Special thanks to the good folks at Bello Collective for featuring me on their most recent newsletter, #78 – The Queuedown.

Notre Dame through the ages

Notre Dame, as viewed in the Middle Ages.

Transcript

Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and it’s great to be back in the States! Thank you so much to those of you who reached out to say hello and wish me bon voyage. My mom had an amazing first time in Paris, and I’ll need to get around to updating my Paris recommendations page soon. In case you missed it, I ended up doing an impromptu interview with Oliver of the delightful podcast, The Earful Tower. We chatted about life in an ancient city, where layers and layers of history stack up on top of one another like so many sediments in a rock. You can hear our interview in his episode, “Fascinating French History” which aired June 3rd 2019. Thanks so much for having me on your show, Oliver! If you haven’t checked out The Earful Tower yet, it’s great. One last announcement – at the end of this episode I’ll be announcing a very special upcoming milestone!
 
Okay, now that I’m back and officially unpacked, it’s time to pick up where we left off, in the middle of our series on that very great lady, Notre Dame Cathedral. Since I don’t particularly feel like producing a 28 part series about every aspect of the great cathedral’s 800 year history, I’m skipping around a bit. What makes Notre Dame Cathedral so interesting isn’t simply her architecture, it’s her relationship to the city around her. What happens in a wildly inconstant, rapidly changing city when a building in its heart stands more or less unchanged for almost a millennia? What kind of relationship does a city’s people develop with a monument, and how does that relationship change as the city’s people do? So in this series, we’re skipping around to view Notre Dame from the perspective of Paris itself, in whatever stage she was in at the time. In the first part, we reimagined ancient, provincial Paris, a struggling backwater without a strong identity of its own, trying to find stability. Just before the end of the first millennium, Gothic architecture blossomed across France, proving to the world that this region was no longer stuck in the Dark Ages, but was actually thriving, civilized and worth of attention. In the second part, we learned about the construction of Notre Dame cathedral during the Crusades, at a time when France struggled to assert its importance on the world stage, with mixed results. When King Louis VII married Eleanor of Aquitaine, only for her to leave him for his greatest nemesis, Henry II of England, it planted the seeds for troubles which would eventually consume the armies of Europe. But the collapse of their marriage, and Henry VII’s subsequent desperation for a new wife and an heir to the throne, planted another kind of seed: in a desperate plea for a son, Louis VII did what any king of his age would do: he made an offering to God. He would give his capital city, the seat of all French power, the cathedral her people deserved. And it worked! Louis’s son, Philippe Auguste, and Notre Dame Cathedral both made their way into the world within a few years of each other. Under Philippe’s rule, France transformed from an early feudal nation into the most powerful country in Europe, and Paris grew into a beautiful, technologically advanced, enormous capital city, with a glorious, glittering cathedral at its heart. But of course, the good times don’t last forever, and in this episode, we’re moving to the Paris of the fourteenth century, enjoying the glow of her first golden age, living in splendor and absolutely convinced that the good times are here to stay. But the good luck of Paris is about to run out, and Notre Dame, the heart of the city’s holy life, is about to find itself at the center of a terrible and deadly curse.
 
In 1285, most Parisians would have considered themselves lucky: they’d enjoyed a period of unprecedented prosperity, mostly thanks to the rule of Louis IX, or as we know him, Saint Louis, the only French king to have an NFL team named after him. Saint Louis was a complete nutjob, even for the time, who liked to wear a hair shirt and spend literally hours praying before bed every single night. His contemporaries described him as “bowed by fasting and mortification” and he liked to do things like wash the feet of his noblemen, who were unimpressed but probably grateful for the spa treatment. There’s no way a guy this religious was going to make it through the 13th century without going on a Holy Crusade, so sure enough, he did so, to the great annoyance of the French. Luckily, the same devotion to duty and ability to focus which allowed Louis to say a billion Ave Marias every night also gave him the acumen to build France into a great nation. Before it could become a great nation, it had to become a big one: Louis picked up the territories of Aquitaine and Provence, and used the newfound wealth of these regions to fund his projects. With his trademark attention and care, Louis created a series of political institutions which would administer the country for centuries, including the Grand Conseil and the Parlement. He created institutions like the national archive, ran the country on a reasonable budget, reformed the justice system, built the gorgeous Saint-Chapelle a few blocks away from Notre Dame, and became one of the world’s great patrons of the arts. In short, Louis turned France into a superpower, with Europe’s strongest army, her wealthiest kingdom, and her most influential culture. Alas, Louis had bigger dreams, and eventually the hair shirt got to itchin’ and he made his way out on yet another Crusade, one which would be his last. Within a few months, the great, saintly Louis died, and was carted home to be buried in Notre Dame cathedral. For centuries, historians assumed Louis died of some camp disease like dysentery, but earlier this very week, an international team of researchers announced a very different finding: as one forensic pathologist explained: “His diet wasn’t very balanced.” Saintly Louis didn’t eat his vegetables, and his skeleton was riddled with traces of scurvy. The now glorious and powerful throne of France passed on to his son, Philip the Bold, whose nickname sounds like a prank. Philip was insignificant in every way: he couldn’t command an army, he didn’t have any opinions of his own and if he did, nobody listened to them, and he didn’t accomplish very much before dying after 15 uneventful years on the throne. We won’t waste any more time on him. Ever the unimaginative, Philip’s son was also named Philip, and this new Philip, Philip the Fair, grandson of Saint Louis, became the king of France in 1285. He inherited a country which was large, rich, well-armed, culturally influential and well-run. Thanks to his grandfather’s skillful rule, “all the organs of public life, like those of a living body had come into existence, had found their place and, oh the whole, were there to retain it.” The new king was young, fierce, energetic and ambitious. France’s future was looking bright. No one had any idea what was coming.
 
Right from the start, Philip’s greatest downfall was money. Money flowed through his hands like water. Philip’s budget was outrageous: when he wanted to acquire territory, he didn’t conquer it with an armor, he bought it outright, at the kind of price you’d think another country would charge for a piece of itself. When Philip wanted to leave a mark on Paris, he didn’t pave the roads, or fix an ailing monument, he razed entire neighborhoods and tried to build the most extravagant place possible. Philip tried every trick in the book to raise money: he created new taxes, he raised the taxes that already existed, he screwed around with the gold coins, which started gettin’ reeeeal skinny, he enacted severe punishments against tax evaders and counterfeiters, he expelled the Jews who had just started returning to France and stole all their money and belongings, he began taxing businesses for the first time and it just! wasn’t! enough! At last, Philip was left with a one, last, drastic fundraising option – an option no king had ever dared to touch: God’s gold.
 
Philip the Fair, grandson of the only canonized king in French history, sent an army after the Pope himself. Young people! So disrespectful to their ancestors! Within a month of the attack, the Pope was dead, and Philip worked like crazy to get a pro-French replacement Pope, and he succeeded: meet Pope Clement V. Pope Clement knew exactly what side his bread was buttered on, and he was perfectly happy to call that last pope a worthless heretic and sodomite and whatever else Philip wanted him to say. With a French pope rubber-stamping all of Philip’s requests for holy gold, Philip saw an opportunity to tap one last source of wealth, sitting right in his backyard. With the approval of his bestie, Pope Clement, Philip the Fair set out to steal the money of the Knights Templar. It would be the worst mistake of his life.
 
The Rue Vielle du Temple sits in the middle of the Marais, just a few blocks away from Notre Dame. Today, the street holds my favorite cafe in Paris, and I’d often find myself wondering just which ‘Temple’ the street name referred to. Sitting as it does in a traditionally Jewish neighborhood, still filled with kosher bakeries and butchers, I’d assumed the street’s name referred to one of the many synagogues dotting the area. In fact, the Rue Vielle du Temple’s name is one of the last traces of an institution so powerful it rivaled the royal palace, whose members inspired awe and terror in those who crossed their path: the infamous Knights Templar. Headquartered in an enormous fortified castle, the Knights Templar were a remnant of the First Crusade. Charged by Louis VII to defend the poor pilgrims of Christ, the Knights Templar got their start protecting pilgrims from ambushes near holy sites. Eventually they made their way onto the battlefields, where they wreaked havoc and collected enormous, fabled treasures along the way. They established a vast network of international real estate and banking, and were so efficient in their money management that when Saint Louis got himself held captive during an ill-fated Crusade, the Templars were able to pay off the last bit of his ransom with just the money they happened to have on board the Templar ships closest to Louis. In other words, they were so rich they could ransom a king with whatever they dug out from under the couch cushions. By the reign of Philip the Fair, the Knights Templar had gone a little bit to seed – sure, they were still famous, but in an aging, retired soccer player kind of way, past their prime but in denial about it. When they had the nerve to remind Philip the Fair of his outstanding debts – and worse yet, refused to lend him money at the rates he wished, Philip and his new Pope decided it was time to strike. One night, the Pope’s henchmen broke into the great Templar castle and arrested everyone inside, while the King’s men swooped through behind them to seize all the knights’ treasures. While the Knight Templar fortune disappeared into Philip’s bank vaults, the Knights themselves disappeared into cellars, where they were tortured to death. In the months and years to come, Philip and Clement burned hundreds of Templars at the stake, until finally, in 1314, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar went on trial. For seven years, he’d been tortured in the cellar without breaking, and the king and pope had run out of patience. That March, Philip the Fair constructed a grand scaffold on the front steps of Notre Dame Cathedral. Standing on the scaffold, the Grand Master and his associates shouted out their innocence and denied anything they’d ever said in the cellars. Enraged, Philip ordered the men be taken off the scaffold and burned at the stake instead. As flames consumed the Grand Master, he is said to have uttered a terrible curse: 
 
Pope Clement, iniquitous judge and cruel executioner, I adjure you to appear in forty day’s time before God’s tribunal. And you, King of France, will not live to see the end of this year, and Heaven’s retribution will strike down your accomplices and destroy your posterity.
 
Within minutes, the Knights Templar were finished – but their curse continued ringing for one hundred years.
 
Here’s the Cliff Notes version of Philip the Fair’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Reign: in forty days, the Pope died of a mysterious disease. Philip installed his three sons in a luxurious castle, and all three moved in with their wives. Within a few months, Paris discovered that two of the wives were using the castle as a hookup spot for their boy toys. The King proceeded to execute the boy toys in truly disgusting, very public fashions. His two daughters in law were made to watch before being exiled to a distant castle. Meanwhile, the King’s sons tried to move on from the scandal. One son got divorced from his adulterous wife, who went into a nunnery. She was the lucky one. Another son didn’t feel like going to all that trouble, so he simply smothered his wife to death between two mattresses and remarried five minutes later. That left the third son, whose wife was acquitted of any involvement in the scandal. Her husband was happy to forgive and forget, and years later when he became king he gave his wife a lovely gift: he gave her the scandalous castle that had killed her sisters in law and forced her to live in it for the rest of her life. Sure puts your family’s feuds into perspective, huh?
 
Son #1, who couldn’t be trusted with mattresses, ruled France for all of eighteen months before dying of pneumonia. Son #2 claimed the throne, locked his wife up in the Bad Vibes Castle, then died of tuberculosis after a measly 6 years. Finally Son #3, whose wife got thee to a nunnery, ascended to the throne with his new wife, who produced three daughters before dying after another 6 years on the throne. Within 14 years of the Grand Master’s curse, the 300 year old Capetian dynasty snuffed out. It got worse: after the throne passed to a cousin, Philip the Fair’s only daughter made a claim for the throne. Trouble was, she was married to the King of England. That skirmish over the throne is now known as the Hundred Years War, to give you some sense of scale. 
 
The good times were fading fast, and they were about to get worse. 
 
While the king and his sons were busy marrying, murdering, remarrying, and dying, Paris was exploding in size. The pavilion in front of Notre Dame where the Grand Master and his accomplices had been condemned was now completely filled by market stalls and squalid huts. The great wall of Paris built by Philippe-Auguste now squeezed the population in like a too-tight belt, and Parisians stacked on top of one another, building cheap and building fast. This was an era of cheap, lousy tenement housing, not temples to God and country. If you’d like to see the glorious architecture of 14th century France, all that’s left in Paris are a couple of crooked, timbered houses on the Right Bank, which Oliver and I discussed on the Earful Tower interview. Everything was chaos: the tiny ersatz streets mushrooming up in the night didn’t even have names, and it took hours of wandering to find any destination in Paris. Wealthier Parisians kept out the city’s stench by tossing fragrant herbs and grasses on the ground every few months, but the poor made do with old straw, filled with fleas and dog waste. Parisians simply couldn’t breath, choking on their own sewage, stepping on one another’s necks, running over one another in the streets. Children were a burden, and they were abandoned on the front steps of Notre Dame Cathedral in growing numbers every year. The city was reaching a breaking point, and in the summer of 1348, a few decades after Philip the Fair’s death, halfway through the century-long war he’d caused, the breaking point arrived.
 
Across the street from Notre Dame cathedral sat the Hotel Dieu, the largest hospital in Paris. The leaders of Notre Dame oversaw the administration and funding of the hospital, which was staffed day to day by nuns. Founded to care for poor people, dying people, old people and those children who kept getting abandoned on the church steps, Hotel Dieu was already overcrowded by 1348. The hospital offered just under 300 beds, which cared for about 1,200 people per year, which was nothing compared to the 20,000 beggars living in Paris streets at the time. The hospital wards were filthy, without ventilation, often without windows, and the river next door brought damp and decay inside. There was no heating, and the only cleaning seems to have been very energetic sweeping – we’ve still got the 14th century receipts for an annual order of 1300 brooms. It’s important to understand that people didn’t come to the hospital in the 14th century so they could receive medical care: they came to the hospital to get warm, to get fed, or to get buried. 
 
If you were a patient at the Hotel Dieu in 1348, you kicked off your stay by confessing your sins. Next, you stripped down and handed over your clothes to a nun for washing, then climbed, naked, into bed with three or four strangers. Nobody cared what was wrong with you, but they grouped you together based on how close you seemed to death. For example, if you’d been kicked in the head by a horse and looked pretty close to death, you might be sharing a bed with someone dying of dysentery and someone else who’d been stabbed. Fun! If you somehow managed to recover from whatever brought you to the hospital in the first place, you were required to stay an extra week to make sure you really were better. Of course, you’d probably spend that week picking up new diseases from your bedmates, and the whole processes would begin again. If you died, they’d sell your clothes off at auction. The odds are nearly impossible that you would ever, at any time, see a doctor.
 
In October 1347, in the city of Theodosia, located in the Black Sea near modern Ukraine, a handful of boats pulled slowly into port. When the dockworkers made their way over to the boats to help upload their holds, they found the sailors dead and dying, slumped over the oars. Many sailors were covered in huge black boils, and those who weren’t already dead were spending their last moments vomiting, coughing until their eyelids turned blue, and fainting. The Bubonic Plague had arrived in Europe. Europeans had heard rumors for years of a pestilence spreading across Asia, a so-called Black Death that killed everyone in its path, but they didn’t pay much attention to it until the disease arrived on their doorstep. Within months of the plague’s entry into Theodosia, another plague-ridden boat entered Marseilles. From there, the plague marched up through Bordeaux, then to Lyon, then into Rouen. Rouen is a 60 days journey from Paris on foot. Somewhere in Rouen, one of the locals read the signs and fled towards Paris. The plague hopped a ride with them, and exactly 60 days after the plague arrived in Rouen, it crossed through the great wall of Paris, and introduced itself to the 200,000 people inside.
 
According to Jean de Venette, a friar living in the Left Bank at the time, “in the August of that year a very large and bright star was seen in the west of Paris, after vespers, when the sun was still shining but beginning to set.” While the comet shone overhead, rats scurried along underfoot, nestling into the reeds and straw on the floor, depositing death everywhere they went, efficient and egalitarian. Most people who got sick, died. Most people who died, died quickly. You could catch the plague through contact, if a flea bit you, and you’d die within a few days. You could catch the plague through the air, if a sick person coughed on you, and you’d die within a day or two. You could catch the plague by touching infected blood, and you’d die within a few hours, before you’d even had time to display any symptoms. In an isolated village, the plague could kill everyone it was going to kill within four to six months. In a city like Paris, the plague would sweep through, then retreat in winter while the rats disappeared underground, only to reemerge in the spring and sweep through the city again. The plague left behind entire villages of vacant buildings, and those haphazard, shoddy homes of overcrowded Paris fell quickly into ruin and decay. Every morning, new piles of bodies stacked up in front of now-empty houses. The normal operations of the city stopped, simply because there were no more bureaucrats to operate them. With one-third of the royal notaries dead, Paris couldn’t even collect her own taxes. Parisians trying to escape the horror in the city confronted more nightmares on the road – fields of sky-high wheat lined the roads, left uncut by the peasants who had dropped dead in the field. What was the point? There was no escape. Before long, the city descended into anarchy.
 
The Black Death turned the world upside down. Nothing had meaning anymore: doing the right thing killed you, and the only way to survive was to reject the foundational relationships and responsibilities of society. As Boccaccio recorded in his great Decameron, “fathers and mothers refused to visit or tend their very children, as if they had not been theirs.” As one cardinal in Avignon wrote, “the sick are treated like dogs by their families – they put food and drink next to the sick bed and then flee the house…Neither kinsmen nor friends visit the sick. Priests do not hear the confessions of the sick, or administer the sacraments to them.” Conditions were no better in Paris. As friar Jean recorded, “the young were more likely to die than the elderly, and did so in such numbers that burials could hardly keep pace. Those who fell ill lasted little more than two or three days, but died suddenly as if in the midst of health…In many towns and villages, the result was that the cowardly priests took themselves off, leaving the performance of spiritual offices to the regular clergy, who tended to be more courageous.” Pope Clement VI, who might have done better than to carry on the name of the guy who got cursed by the Templars, was completely overwhelmed. Jean explained, “Pope Clement mercifully gave the confessors in numerous cities and villages the power to absolve the sins of the dying, so that as a result they died the more happily, leaving much of their land and goods to churches or religious orders since their right heirs had predeceased them.” Pope Clement himself wasn’t exactly a great model of selfless sacrifice. On the orders of his doctor, the Pope spent plague summers sitting between two enormous, roaring fires kept raging around the clock in his apartment. As it turns out, his doctor was on to something: the unbearable, agonizing heat kept away contagious visitors and flea-bearing rats. As for the King – well, what King? King Philip VI was the cousin who inherited the throne sideways after Philip the Fair’s sons all died out. Nicknamed “Philip the Fortunate” for his genetic lottery ticket, Philip’s wife was not so lucky. After she died from the plague, Philip displayed incredible leadership qualities by getting the hell out of dodge and hiding out in Normandy until the epidemic was over. So France suffered through this apocalyptic death spiral on her own, with her religious leadership roasting itself at home, and her political leadership holed up in the countryside. Any survivors wandered around dazed and shellshocked. “Men and women,” wrote one witness, “wandered around as if mad” with their livestock wandering the streets “because no one any inclination to concern themselves about the future.” As one memoir recorded with characteristic bluntness: “Charity was dead.” Every social tie unravelled, every bond of love or loyalty was broken. Was there anyone decent left alive? Didn’t anyone in Paris have courage, or honor, or love?
 
“So high was the mortality at the Hotel Dieu in Paris”, wrote friar Jean, our witness on the Left Bank, “that for a long time, more than 500 dead were carried daily with great devotion to carts in the cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris for burial.” Yet the daily horror taking place wasn’t enough to break down the community within. Inside the hospital walls, an army of nurses provided round the clock care. With no understanding of what caused the disease, and no way to offer any kind of effective relief, the best the nuns of the Hotel Dieu could offer was humanity and grace. The nuns couldn’t offer morphine, but they could offer food and water. They couldn’t cure you, but they could make sure you were administered with last rites, and could die knowing that your affairs were in order. You would be buried in a mass grave, but at least you would be buried. In a world where parents abandoned children and priests abandoned their flock, the nuns of the Hotel Dieu would stay by your side until the very end. Even while the king himself struggled to collect money to run the country, Notre Dame Cathedral kept money flowing to the hospital, along with food, brooms, and most precious of all, more nuns. No one was under the impression that the nuns would be spared: they succumbed to the plague at the same rate as everyone else. The miracle wasn’t that nuns lived through the Black Death, it was that they died, and other nuns volunteered to step into their place. 
 
Who were these women, who demonstrated courage when so many others fled? Medieval records provide clues about their origins: French nurses at the time were often nicknamed “penitentes” or “filles repenties” – that is, “fallen women.” Many French nurses got their start as beggars or even prostitutes, relying on the Hotel Dieu for food and shelter. Instead of leaving, many women rededicated their lives to the holy orders serving those like themselves. Life at the hospital was hard enough, but during the plague it grew worse: with so much contagion and patient turnover, the laundry room was in use 24 hours a day. From time to time, the nurses might be asked to pay a house call on a wealthy patron, but otherwise they had little opportunity to see life outside the hospital walls – not that life was much better outside the grounds, anyway. From 5 AM until 7 PM, the nurses spent their days bathing, comforting and feeding the crowds of dying plague victims, keeping them warm, and helping them find their way to the bathroom, which was impossible at night – it would be 100 years before the nurses would receive a lantern to light the way. Despite the hardships and the inevitable danger, when the rest of Parisian society seemed to crumble, Notre Dame Cathedral kept its hospital open, and the nuns kept it running. “The sisters endured with cheerfulness and without repugnance the stench, the filth and the infections of the sick, so insupportable to others that no other form of penitence could be compared to this species of martyrdom.” As friar Jean noted with great tenderness, watching from across the Seine, “A very great number of the saintly sisters, not fearing to die, nursed the sick in all sweetness and humility, with no thought of honor…now they rest in peace with Christ.”
 
 
When I first started thinking about the long history of Notre Dame and its relationship to the city of Paris, the Black Death stands out to me as a point of transition. Prior to the 1348 epidemic, Notre Dame spent most of its existence under construction or hosting important state functions. But Notre Dame is more than a glorified reception hall, or a royal court: it’s a house of God, a house of service. While Notre Dame always offered pomp and circumstance at the right occasion, the Black Death highlighted the way in which the cathedral also offered comfort and care and spiritual peace to the city’s residents. At a time when church clergy were abandoning their flocks and forsaking their most important duties, the cathedral and her hospital opened their doors and fulfilled their obligations to the most desperate members of the community. Notre Dame is an iconic building, an architectural masterpiece, a center of historical significance, but it is also, at its most essential part, a neighborhood church. When times were good, Notre Dame was there to show off and dazzle visitors. But when times were bad, Notre Dame was there, too: offering shelter, mercy, and prayers for a better future. 
 
Looking at the burned out rubble of Notre Dame in person last month, I remembered more than ever that Notre Dame is an organ of the civic body. Then, as now, she pushes up right against the narrow streets and shopfronts, completely embedded in the noise and mayhem of the city. Our Lady is inseparable from the city which surrounds her, and vice versa. As one architectural historian wrote, “The medieval church carried with it a message: that the anchor of the city, the place that gave it meaning and connected it to heaven, was public. Here, in the shadows of the church, is where babies were abandoned and plague victims tolerated. Here is where you could beg for help if you were desperate. At the heart of the city – the transition zone between earth and heaven – was a promise of empathy.” During the fourteenth century, when the last thread of community seemed ready to snap, Notre Dame, her leaders, and her tireless nuns and nurses kept the city alive. Now, Paris has an opportunity to return the favor.
 
Thanks for listening to the Land of Desire. Guess what? It’s that time of year: The Land of Desire is turning three! Can you believe it? Three years, fifty episodes and half a million downloads later, I’d like to celebrate by hearing from all of you! I want to do another Q&A, so over the course of the next few weeks, ask me anything! I’ll create a thread on the show’s Facebook page, but you can feel free to send me a message through the show’s website, thelandofdesire.com, or message me on Twitter. Ask me about a past episode, or about the production of the show, or heck, ask me about my trip or my favorite French snacks! Whatever your questions might be, I can’t wait to share my favorites with everyone else. Thank you for three amazing years, a project that has gone beyond my wildest dreams, and all the kindness you’ve shared with me along the way. Until next time, au revoir!

Further Reading

  • This series gave me an excuse to pick up my favorite single volume history of Paris, Alistair Horne’s The Seven Ages of Paris. I first read this book at 19. Like the Hermione Granger that I am, I figured how better to prepare for moving abroad than studying? This book helped me understand how to move through an ancient city properly, and it’s still my #1 recommendation when anyone asks for a book to read before visiting Paris for the first time.
  • Also, duh, it’s time to re-read Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame if you haven’t done so already. It’s dramatic! It’s outrageous! It’s really a lot more medieval architectural history than you were expecting! It’s the reason we have any Notre Dame at all and not a Haussmann apartment block!
  • An interesting undergraduate thesis: How Much did the Gothic Churches Cost? An Estimate of Ecclesiastical Building Costs in the Paris Basin between 1100-1250, Amy Denning
  • On The Roof of Notre-Dame, Before It Burned, Lauren Collins
  • Building A Cathedral, Nicolas Kemper – I was halfway through the script when this essay was published. It’s startling how much it crystallizes exactly what I was struggling to say! A tremendous essay and one I hope I can pay reasonable tribute to.

Sources

Join the Discussion

  • Hi Diana! This episode was cut off in the version downloaded by my podcatcher. It ends abruptly at 28 minutes. It is complete here on your webpage. I thought you’d want to know.

    • Hi Jennifer,

      Thanks so much for letting me know about the podcast episode – unfortunately, it’s taking awhile for all the podcatcher apps to ‘catch’ the new, fixed file! iTunes didn’t update until today, and Spotify is still waiting. Sigh. Thank you for letting me know, hopefully everyone’s episodes will be updated ASAP!
      – Diana

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