I Am A Polar Bear

Last weekend, I went off to Paris. Because these days I occasionally take inspiration from people rather than throwing a dart at Google Maps, this was inspired by Brogan Tate, who went to Paris earlier in the year for a press trip and put a picture on Instagram of her with Notre-Dame in the background. That reminded me very suddenly that for the first few months of 2025, I kept saying “I need to go to Paris one weekend soon and go to Notre-Dame” and then… I forgot about it. So thanks, Brogan. I went to Paris for the weekend to visit Notre-Dame! After all, it’s the cathedral that inspired my “before it burns down” tag, except this one I’m going to after it burned down.

The trouble is that it’s popular. You can queue for a few hours and hope to get in or you can book free tickets. The next trouble is that the free ticket booking only opens two days in advance. I booked the flight and hotel and Saturday night back in June but there was nothing I could do about the main objective of my trip until less than 48 hours before departure, which meant I couldn’t plan anything. Am I getting 9am tickets or 5pm tickets? Am I getting tickets at all?

Tickets for Saturday go on “sale” at midnight on Wednesday night, Wednesday into Thursday, which is 11pm Wednesday night UK time. I was sitting at my computer at 10:40pm with the window open and long story short, utter failure. Even longer story even shorter, utter failure on Thursday night for Sunday tickets too. I went off to Paris on Friday with no tickets, rage in my heart and nowhere near as much sleep (out of stress rather than the lateness of the hour) as I needed. I woke up at 5am to try to get the next batch of tickets, the ones released four hours in advance but no luck there. Well, there was clearly no point in trying throughout the day. If there had been a big fat nothing on three attempts in a row, that was all I was going to get later on.

For the record, I tested the procedure the week before and that is the only reason I know this system can work. The week before I had a choice of tickets throughout the day, albeit on a day I wasn’t going to be in Paris. I’d also tested in in the very early morning when I’d been under the impression the four-hour batch were the only ones available and that had been fine too. So a glitch on the days I was there or does the big man up there just really not want me going into his house?

So I got up at 7am to take the metro halfway across Paris to be waiting when it opened, which is the best way to pretty much guarantee you’re going to avoid a three or four hour queue with potential disappointment at the end. Of course, arriving half an hour before the cathedral opens means you’re guaranteed at least half an hour’s wait and by the time Mass attendees and the people who’d miraculously managed to reserve tickets, I was waiting about three-quarters of an hour. It was pitch dark when I left my hotel and still not especially light when I emerged from the metro at Cité (and then immediately got lost because Cité is not quite where I think it is).

Notre-Dame is a working church and throughout the day, it holds both Mass and confession, so there was early morning Mass going on when I finally made it through the doors. That’s fine, the tourists can explore the sides and the ambulatory and all the chapels behind the altar and somehow, either they’re quiet or respectful enough to not disturb Mass. Of course, Mass isn’t entirely silent – the priest, or whatever the correct word is in Catholicism, has a microphone and there’s singing and then half the congregation comes up for Communion (as a non-Catholic, that was interesting to watch – this is not the regular church of most participants and everyone does it a little differently so there’s no way to guess whether each person wants to receive it in their hands or have it put directly in their mouths – and no, I know enough about Catholicism and general politeness to not take photos). I was also somewhat surprised to find it was held in French. I mean, it’s a French church in the ancient heart of the capital so I wouldn’t expect English but maybe I would have expected it to be in Latin.

So I made my way around the cathedral. Some people have said that it’s too clean, too light, too characterless post-renovation. I challenge you to remove the soot from the 2019 fire without removing the soot from the previous couple of hundred years (because Notre-Dame had massive renovations in the 1840s, when it had fallen into such disrepair that it took the cathedral appearing in a popular novel of the time, which we know as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, to convince people that it was worth saving). I like it. I don’t say that when it was first built in the 12th and 13th century it would have been light and bright and clean – it might well have been painted in reds and blues and golds from floor to ceiling, like Sainte-Chapelle across the road – but it wouldn’t have been dark and smoky back then. It’ll regain its smokiness eventually. Catholics like candles. Personally, on my first visit after a massive fire that made international news and got billionaires pleading with the government to take their money to fix it, I found it incredibly uncomfortable to see lit candles inside Notre-Dame. But Notre-Dame had candles for hundreds of years that caused no damage and I daresay will continue to do so. But open flames in a building that is currently being celebrated for being rebuilt after fire damage… mmm.

The nave is very lovely but it’s the chapels down at the east end that really interested me, because many of them are painted in that Sainte-Chapelle style. There’s a lot of stained glass, there’s a massive gold disc which is apparently the casing for the Crown of Thorns but if you don’t notice that, it’s still a spectacular thing when the early morning lights shines through the stained glass window behind it. I’m not religious, I don’t get it but I enjoy churches as pieces of architecture and I love stained glass so I really enjoyed this end of Notre-Dame. There’s so much to look at! It’s all so beautiful and the restoration has been done so well!

As Mass was finishing, I slipped into a seat towards the back where I could properly take in the view down the length of the church and I got out my phone and looked for photos of the fire damage. Other than the massive gold cross gleaming at the far end, you’d hardly know it was the same church. The fire started right above my head and pretty much that entire roof collapsed. The nave and quire were just a mass of charred rubble and now it’s pristine. You should look more closely at the ceiling, by the way. Where the arches meet, there are carved decorations called bosses and a few of them are… well, they’re monster and demons. The internet is a bit vague about whether they were Viollet-le-Duc 19th century additions when it was first massively restored or whether they were ultimately 13th century originals. Enjoy looking up at them because most people are going to have no idea they’re there.

I went round a second time. This is maybe half an hour later after my original circuit and it was noticeably busier, especially around the entrance, to the point that I almost had to push past in some places. You go round once to get an idea of what’s going on and what there is to be seen and then you go round a second time more slowly to better appreciate it. Well, maybe in this case, it would have been better to take it really slowly in the first place while it was still quiet. Make no mistake, Notre-Dame gets busy quickly. Of course, when I first went in, a good proportion of the people were sitting quietly attending Mass. There’s a limit on the number of people who can be inside Notre-Dame for safety reasons, so as the Mass attendees left, more tourists could be allowed in and tourists do not sit quietly en masse, as it were. So it wasn’t that there were more people in the church, it was that there were more people walking around taking photos.

I’m very glad I did it. Notre-Dame, despite its renovations, is a very beautiful church. It’s perhaps not my favourite style of Gothic but it’s beautiful, the glass is beautiful and whether tourists gawking for the sake of ticking it off the list or people coming here for genuine religious reasons or whether pride in an ancient monument, it’s clear people really love this building, and you can feel that in the pristine stone. It’s astounding and amazing how minor the damage was after that fire. If English cathedrals are anything to go by, Notre-Dame probably doesn’t have as much in the way of foundations and structure as a building of its size should and it could well have completely collapsed as fire tore away its roof and tried to burn its ancient stone walls. If I was the religious type, I’d almost be tempting to say that it’s a miracle it’s still standing, and to have it back in working order in less than six years is almost a miracle in itself. It’s not finished – there’s still work going on outside, buttresses to be repaired or replaced but all cathedrals of its age need ongoing maintenance, so that should have been happening regardless of the fire. I once heard someone say “If your medieval cathedral isn’t covered in scaffolding, someone isn’t taking enough care of it”.

So my top two tips for visiting Notre-Dame are: don’t bother with the stress of trying to reserve tickets, and be in the queue before it opens at 8am for the shortest queue and the quietest cathedral.