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PARIS — The first person I approached had his hand to his mouth. It was Monday night, nearly three weeks ago, on the plaza of City Hall. He was staring, wide-eyed, at the awful spectacle in front of us: Notre-Dame terribly illuminated from the interior by leaping flames.

Then I noticed that he was weeping. I asked him his name. Mohamed. “Horrible,” he said, and he didn’t need to say more. The presence of Mohamed, a 33-year-old film producer, in the crowd of mourners that night was a quick representation that Parisian grief was universal and ecumenical. Reluctantly, I left the silent crowd that night to return to The Times’s office on the Champs-Élysées so that I could write the story.

In the days since, I have avoided going back to Notre-Dame, or even looking at it too closely during my runs along the river. It is enough to see the great darkened hulk of the cathedral from a distance. There is blackness in the interior, staring out from the openings. The memory of the flames haunts me like a bad dream.