erspective, so harmonious
are they.

And it is better to go forward beneath them with raised head, not too
carefully looking where one walks, for this pavement, rather sadly
sonorous, has recently been soiled and blackened by the charring of
human flesh. It is known that, on the day of the fire, the cathedral
was full of German wounded, stretched on straw beds which caught fire,
and it became a scene of horror worthy of a dream of Dante; all these
creatures, whose raw wounds were baked in the flames, dragging
themselves, screaming, on their red stumps, to try to reach the narrow
doors. One knows also the heroism of the ambulance bearers, priests
and nuns, risking their lives in the midst of the bombs, to try to
save these hapless brutes, whom their own brother Germans had not even
thought of sparing; however, they did not succeed in saving them all;
some remained, and were burned to death in the nave, leaving foul
clots on the sacred flagstones, where of old processions of kings and
queens slowly dragged their ermine mantles, to the music of the great
organ and the Gregorian chants....

"Look!" says my guide to me, showing me a large hole in one of the
aisles, "that is the work of a shell which they fired at us yesterday
evening; then come and see a miracle." And he leads me into the choir,
where the statue of Jeanne d'Arc, preserved, one would say, by some
special grace, is still there, intact, with eyes of gentle ecstasy.

The most irreparable loss is that of the great stained glass windows,
which the mysterious artists of the thirteenth century so religiously
composed, in meditation and dream, gathering the saints by hundreds,
with their translucent draperies, their luminous halos. There also
German scrap-iron rushed in great stupid bundles, crushing everything.
The masterpieces, which no one will ever reproduce, have scattered
their fragments on the flagstones, forever impossible to separate, the
golds, the reds, the blues, whose secret is lost. Ended, the rainbow
transparencies, ended, the graceful, naive attitudes of all these holy
people, with their pale little ecstatic faces; the thousands of
precious fragments of these stained glass windows which, in the course
of centuries, had little by little become iris-tinted like opals, are
lying on the ground--where they still shine like jewels....

A whole splendid cycle of our history, which seemed to go on living in
this sanctuary, with a life almost terrestrial,