But the interior will be new in another way. Although the building is owned and managed by the French state as a protected historical monument, the interior furnishings, which were extensively damaged by the fire, were largely non-historic and belonged to the Roman Catholic diocese of Paris. Church officials chose to completely redecorate. The cost is small in the context of the overall restoration but will have a huge impact on how visitors experience the church.

Early last summer, I visited a foundry in the Rhône Valley to see some of the church’s new furniture. There I met Guillaume Bardet, a sculptor and designer who was commissioned by the diocese to create a new altar and other liturgical objects. In the furnace room, we watched two workers in visors and heavy aprons pour molten, white-hot bronze into a series of molds. Rough, unfinished sections of Bardet’s new baptismal font lay on the ground nearby. His altar was waiting to be polished in the next room.

He explained that when working with clay models, he looks for shapes that feel simple and unchanging. The bronze altar is huge and appears rooted in place, but its curved edges suggest a pair of upraised arms. Our hope is that this will appeal not only to believers, but also to the large number of tourists who are unfamiliar with Catholicism or even Christianity. “They need to understand this too,” Bardet said. “They need to understand that we are talking about the sacred.”

A week later, When I entered the nave of the church, I had a hard time at first appreciating the beauty of the place. It was still a busy construction site. Around us, workers were dismantling scaffolding, pulling electrical cables, and polishing the marble floor. Our small group pushed deeper into the cathedral, craning our necks to see the soaring vaults and crossing the transept towards the choir at the east end of the church. In the side chapels we could see magnificently restored murals dating to the 19th-century restoration of Viollet-le-Duc. Outside a chapel, a lone restorer knelt on the stone, his back to the swirl of activity. She was applying pink stains with a thin brush to a column painted with clovers. In this confined space, approximately 250 different companies employing 2,000 workers managed to cooperate and take turns throughout the duration of the project. “It works because people are happy and proud to work at Notre Dame,” Jost explained.

We went outside and boarded an elevator that carried us through the scaffolding to the top of the north wing, where we ascended to the attic of the church. We were now above the ceiling vaults, out of reach of the public; We were in the part of the church that was most damaged by the fire and where most of the work done in the last five years had been concentrated. When we looked up, we saw blue sky through the wooden beams that were not yet covered with lead roofing. We passed through the crowded walkways and made our way to the passage where the two arms of the transept meet the nave and choir. The base of the collapsed tower had passed through the stone vaults here, crushing the main altar on the ground below. The stonemasons had just closed the jagged hole in the cellars. The smell of fresh wood wafted from the oak beams and spiral staircases of the new tower.