Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

The Notre Dame fire does emotionally impact people, especially those who have seen it.  So Gothic, so imposing, so spiritual that I have lighted candles there for departed ones.  But I was a child who read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Christo and The Man in the Iron Mask, and the literature of that great period in French literature enthralled me as a child.  I read the novels over and over.  So when I first went to Paris, I imagined I saw Maureen O'Hara and Charles Laughton wandering like ghosts.  The cathedral is easily the most beautiful building in Paris, and set on it's island like a jewel, it anchors the right bank and left bank, the Louvre and the d'Orsay.  I believe the last time we visited, with our older son, his wife and our younger daughter, we got into Paris at an ungodly hour of eight am, and we took a taxi to our hotel on the left bank and walked a  very short walk to Notre Dame, and marveled at the structure for an hour, then sat in Luxemburg Gardens until it was possible to go to a cafe for lunch.  We'd seen the best first.  I know they'll rebuild, but for Parisians it must feel like a huge open wound in their city.  It seemed beyond time almost, and now we know it was crumbling and at risk.  Something we didn't want to think about.