the Virgin and Child returns to the cathedral after a torchlight procession
Her very delicate face observes the child Jesus with gentleness but seriousness: Mary already senses the martyrdom of the Cross. Housed in the neighboring church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois since the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris on April 15, 2019, the famous statue has just returned to the cathedral, Friday November 15 in the evening, accompanied by a procession with torches of the Parisian clergy and faithful.
A serene and fervent crowd, singing hymns to the Virgin, crossed the Seine, surrounding a replica of the statue, while the work of art was transported safely by truck to the square in front of Notre-Dame. In front of curious tourists, cyclists eager to slip past, the chaplains of the cathedral and the knights of the Holy Sepulcher – a brotherhood responsible for watching over the relic of the crown of thorns – parade in good order. “Our Lady is coming home” announced Mgr Ulrich at the start of the procession. During a short ceremony on the square, he censed the statue and addressed the faithful: “The crowd that you represent this evening is reminiscent of the crowd that surrounded the cathedral on April 15, 2019. A crowd full of pain and hope, who said to himself that it was not possible that the Virgin Mary was injured. The cathedral was, but the Virgin held on. »
The Virgin and Child is famous for its beauty, reflecting the refined style of the late Gothic period; but also because it embodies the dedication of the cathedral: it is also called “Notre-Dame-de-Paris”. Finally, her fame was magnified by the poet Paul Claudel who was converted, during Christmas vespers of 1886, just behind the one also called “The Virgin of the Pillar” (read box at end of article).
In the preceding days, the statue still benefited from a light restoration that The Pilgrim followed for you exclusively: “We cleaned it of the dust that covered it, mixed with the water from the fire hoses that it received,” explains Nathalie Pruha, curator-restorer of sculptures, in charge of the operation. On her foot, the specialist also removed “drops of wax projected by the candles”.
With her colleague, Xavier Llerena, Nathalie Pruha also “filled in some small cracks and restored the patina to the back of the coat which had been blackened. » At the request of Marie-Hélène Didier, curator of Historical Monuments at the Department of Cultural Affairs of Ile-de-France, in charge of movable objects in the cathedral, Xavier Llerena lightly resculpted one of the crown jewels of the Virgin, which was eaten away, with “a coating of lime and sand” he specifies. Marie-Hélène Didier, who comes every day, however, asks him to file down the rounded edges of this flagship a little: “it must not stand out from the others and look too new. This restoration is necessary only so that the eye is not struck by irregularities in the crown line. »
She tells the story of this statue, which Gabrielle Maksud, one of her students, investigated a few years ago: “We only know that this statue arrived at the cathedral in 1818, coming from a chapel in the cloister of the canons now destroyed, the Saint-Aignan chapel. » It was then installed on the trumeau of the portal of the Virgin, the north portal of the facade of the cathedral. “It was the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc who, in 1860, during his major restoration of the monument, noticed that the statue was not adapted to this space and, moreover, had been deteriorating for forty years. is exposed to bad weather,” continues Marie-Hélène Didier. He then leans it against the south-eastern pillar of the transept – the place it returned to on the evening of November 15, 2024.
The extreme quality of this sculpture from the second quarter of the 14th century, and the fact that it wears a rich dalmatic under its coat, are signs of a high-ranking order “either aristocratic or ecclesiastical”. Also “art history specialists wonder today if it had not, from the beginning, been commissioned to adorn the cathedral” concludes the curator. This will therefore be the second time that the Virgin and Child has found her rightful place in “her house”, Notre-Dame-de Paris.
The Virgin of the Pillar and Paul Claudel
In his work My conversion (1913), the poet describes this moment:
“I was standing in the crowd, near the second pillar at the entrance to the choir on the right side of the sacristy. And it was then that the event that dominated my entire life occurred. In an instant my heart was touched and I believed. I believed, with such a force of adhesion, with such an uprising of my whole being, with such a powerful conviction, with such a certainty leaving no room for any kind of doubt, that, since then, all the books , all the reasoning, all the chances of a troubled life, have not been able to shake my faith, nor, to tell the truth, touch it. I suddenly had the heartbreaking feeling of innocence, the eternal childhood of God, an ineffable revelation. »
