On the south-west corner of the facade of Notre Dame cathedral is a horned chimera, peering out at the Left Bank of Paris with an awestruck gawp. The director Jean-Jacques Annaud, 78, was a boy when he picked out the beast for his second ever photograph; he took it with a camera given to him by his mother (the subject of his first photograph). They lived on the outskirts of Paris, and she would bring him to the cathedral every Thursday. “She used to go there to light a candle for a friend who was ill,” he explains. “My parents weren’t believers, but she had that Christian tradition of doing that kind of thing.”
So it was understandably dismaying for Annaud when, decades later, on the evening of 15 April 2019, the place that kindled his directorial eye was transformed into a Dantesque inferno. He was in a family house on the west coast of France as the news of the fire broke; without access to television, he listened on the radio as its spire collapsed and flames licked the towers. His main residence was just a few hundred metres away, near the Pont Neuf.
