After Monday’s catastrophic fire at Notre Dame, I posted the drawing below on the social media. It’s received more than 500 hearts and 42 retweets on Twitter to date, and pushing 170 “likes” on Facebook, so I thought it might be worth a share here. The image was drawn by a teenage boy in about 1942 – let me dissemble no more, gentle reader, it was my father, the artist and cartoonist Richard Hill, as a 17 or 18 year old young man. It circulated in our family for years as his pen-and-ink drawing of Notre Dame de Paris. In the larger original, you can see the eyes of Quasimodo peering out from one of the darkened archways, and a doorbell at the entrance. Well … my father … He died twenty years ago this month, on April Fool’s Day. I suspect it was the date he would have chosen for himself.
The attribution is wrong, however: the cathedral is not the Notre Dame de Paris, but a lookalike, Notre Dame de Reims. That is the cathedral where Charles VII was crowned, as Joan of Arc looked on. There are more than fifty “Notre Dames” in France, and a grand one in Montreal as well.
Whether you are celebrating Easter or Passover this weekend, may it be rich and meaningful and memorable, in a good sort of way. A joyous Easter, and חַג כָּשֵׁר וְשָׂמֵחַ!
Tags: Joan of Arc, Richard Harland Hill