CLARKSBURG, W.Va. — When former Lewis County Delegate Peggy Donaldson Smith toured the Notre Dame Cathedral this week with her granddaughter, she never thought they may be the last to do so.
Smith and her granddaughter, Tori Riley, spent Monday touring the city of Paris, enjoying a riverboat ride on the Seine River, visiting the Louve and ultimately arriving at the Notre Dame Cathedral between 4 and 5 o’clock that evening.
“We planned on leaving at 7, so we spent that time just going through the Cathedral,” Smith said. “It’s one of the most incredibly beautiful places I’ve ever seen in my life and a very spiritual, beautiful, beautiful places.”
Around 7 p.m., they captured the last of their photos at the alter before exiting the grounds just minutes later.
“They’re saying it started at 7 o’clock, but I know for sure that we left about 7:03 or 7:04. As we left the ground, I was snapping pictures of the cathedral as we walked away,” Smith said.
Reports said the fire started at around 6:50 p.m. It was 7:30 when the devastating blaze had reached the cathedral’s giant spire.
“I’ve fairly certain that it was burning while we were there,” Smith said. “It’s impossible that those flames could’ve been that high within the minutes that it took us to get to the train station and find out. It had to have been burning.
“In our pictures, there was no flames, there was no smoke, we felt no heat,” she added. “There was nothing to indicate that there was a fire, but obviously something was going on.”
Those photos would be among the last taken of the famed cathedral still in tact.
“It was just one of the most beautiful, spiritual buildings I’ve ever been in. I love cathedrals,” Smith said. “I’m a very religious person. I go to cathedrals all over the world, but it was incredibly beautiful, almost to the point that you would burst into tears at the beauty of being in there.”
The two were at the The Gare du Nord train station in Paris, just over 2 miles away from Notre Dame, when they heard the news.
“My mother who lives in Weston as well texted me and said Notre Dame was on fire,” Riley said. “She sent me a news article from BBC, and sure enough it was. I told my grandmother and I told a couple other people that were in the train station.”
At that time, notifications began popping up on everyone’s phones, Riley said.
“And it got oddly quiet,” she said. “The train station is a very busy place with thousands of people, but it was oddly quiet. Some people started crying, and that’s when you realized — this is real, everyone knows and essentially the heart of Paris is now on fire and potentially might be destroyed completely.”
Riley said she still gets cold chills thinking of the events that unfolded that evening.
“It’s very, very surreal knowing that we were some of the last in there and very possibly were in there when the fire started,” she said. “It makes me count my blessings and thank God that everyone’s okay.”
The two watched the BBC live stream while at the station, still in shock of what occurred.
“As we got the information that Notre Dame was on fire, I got scared because it’s Holy Week,” Smith said. “We didn’t know what had caused the fire. It was so quick because we had been there minutes before. We didn’t know if it was a bomb. We hadn’t heard an explosion.”
Fear quickly began to set in.
“We didn’t know if they were going to close the Paris train station, or if the train would not be allowed to move or there might be terrorism in the train under the ocean,” Smith said. “We were scared, and my first thought was, ‘We’ve got to get out of here and get to London. We’ve got to get going and keep going as quickly as we can.'”
Both Smith and Riley are still in Europe, visiting London, Scotland, and other much anticipated destinations before returning to the states.