With the fire extinguished, officials began what the Paris prosecutor, Rémy Heitz, told journalists would be “a long and complex investigation,” though for now he said they were considering the disaster an accident.
“Nothing at this stage suggests a voluntary act,” he said.
The nearly 50 investigators assigned to the case were focusing on interviewing workmen who had left the site but had been engaged in the restoration of the cathedral not long before the fire broke out.
The first fire alarm Monday was triggered at 6:20 p.m., and checks were carried out but no fire was found, Heitz said. A second alarm went off at 6:43 p.m., he said, and fire was discovered in the wooden framework of the attic.
Whether the catastrophe could have been averted was a question now plaguing the officials, citizens and visitors who continued to congregate on the banks of the Seine River to contemplate the mutilated monument, an unequaled jewel of Gothic architecture.
Whatever the cause of the fire, Parisians awakened to the new reality at the heart of their damaged capital: the city’s symbolic center damaged like never before in its more than 800 years of history, not by the furious revolutionaries who defaced it nor by misguided restorers who denatured it.
“It’s exposed to the sky. It’s an absolute tragedy, beyond anything we could have imagined,” said Stephen Bern, who has served as an adviser on France’s monuments to President Emmanuel Macron.
Macron made an immediate effort to heal the psychic wound, promising late Monday night to rebuild the cathedral.
Macron said an international effort to raise funds for reconstruction would begin Tuesday.
“We will rebuild Notre-Dame,” he said. “Because that is what the French expect.”
The billionaire Pinault family of France pledged 100 million euros, or about $113 million, to the effort, as did the French energy company Total, and L’Oréal and the Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation, which was established by the family that founded the cosmetics giant. The family of Bernard Arnault, owners of the luxury goods group LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, plan to contribute 200 million euros.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.