Rev. Jean-Marc Fournier remembers rushing to save the relics as an orange and red rain of hundreds of sparkles and slivers of molten debris flooded the cathedral
PARIS — By the time the Paris Fire Department’s chaplain made his way inside of Notre Dame, flames had already consumed most of the cathedral’s roof and its spire had smashed onto the nave.
It was a task that emergency workers had prepared for. Firefighters held two training exercises at the cathedral last year that were focused on saving its treasures. The crown of thorns, for example, which the cathedral calls its “most precious and most venerated relic,” was locked in a chest. As the chaplain began removing a statue of Jesus, he said, his colleagues were fighting the fire from the cathedral’s towers. The flames had started to threaten the wooden structure around the belfry — putting the whole cathedral at even greater risk.“I thought Jesus could help us a little bit and work, too,” he said. “I invited him to worry about his own house if he didn’t want to finish the night under a tent by the Canal Saint-Martin.
A chaplain with the Paris Fire Brigade since 2011, Fournier, 53, saw the bodies of the journalists and cartoonists killed at the Charlie Hebdo newsroom in January 2015. He was also at the scene shortly after an attacker stormed a kosher supermarket two days later. And he was among the hundreds of firefighters who evacuated survivors at the Bataclan concert hall during the Paris attacks in November 2015, where 90 people died in a terrorist attack.
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