“ Notre-Dame: A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals” (Viking) was written in a single week, immediately after last year’s fire, and, because Follett’s proceeds from the book are being donated to the restoration fund, it is meant not only to commemorate the building’s past but to help insure its future. It is a timely reminder that change is a part of the life of such places and that renovation can do more than just return us to the status quo.

In a new book that surveys the nine hundred years between when the cathedral was built and when it nearly burned down, the novelist Ken Follett explains how those creatures came to be part of it, and argues that their addition, in the nineteenth century, marked the beginning of the cathedral’s architectural and cultural renaissance. Notre-Dame has its fair share of gargoyles, but, as lexicographers would have you know, its most famous beastly adornments don’t qualify: those demonic-looking lions, dogs, elephants, and birds that line the roof don’t channel water and are therefore technically called chimeras. In French, the word for gargoyle- gargouille-has origins in the words for throat and gurgle. Mounted dragon heads then became a thing, and soon churches all around Europe had waterspouts carved to look like dragons. So Romanus erected what was left of the beast outside his church, where, eventually, rain started to pour through it. Romanus burned the dragon at the stake, and, although the dragon’s body turned to ash, its head, apparently made of some kind of demonic or dragonic Kevlar, would not catch fire. In the middle of the seventh century, the story goes, a water-spewing dragon was terrorizing that city, flooding its fields and eating its virgins-but when a priest (and soon-to-be saint) named Romanus approached it with a crucifix, the creature surrendered. Notre-Dame has some of the most famous grotesques in all of Europe, but the creatures, and that legend, originated in nearby Rouen. Legend has it that gargoyles are supposed to prevent this sort of thing.

They were largely successful, but within two hours the fire had spread throughout the roof, and the seven-hundred-and-fifty-ton spire had fallen, along with most of the latticed timbers of the vaulted ceiling. Priests and firefighters raced to save the relics, liturgical artifacts, and art inside. The fire started early in the evening, sparking in the dry rafters of the roof. For a hundred and seventy-five years, they protected Notre-Dame de Paris from war, weather, and tourists-and, arguably, they managed to do the same under considerable duress one year ago, when, on April 15th, a blaze nearly destroyed one of the world’s most famous cathedrals.

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