NOVA: "Lost Tombs of Nôtre-Dame" (ZED, Arte France, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Earthshot Report KPBS showed a NOVA episode called “Lost Tombs of Nôtre-Dame” (to give the famous cathedral’s name in the original French instead of “Notre Dame,” as it was called in the English titles for this program). The lost tombs were uncovered in the reconstruction work following the horrific fire of April 15, 2019 that destroyed the cathedral’s iconic spire and did severe damage to the rest. While construction workers were testing the remaining foundation to make sure it could still support the weight of a rebuilt cathedral, they discovered two lead sarcophagi that had been buried centuries before and been forgotten. One bore a plaque identifying the corpse buried within as Nôtre-Dame canon Antoine de la Porte (d. 1710), who was significant enough in the church’s hierarchy there’s a painting of him in the Louvre leading a service at Nôtre-Dame. The other was apparently from 100 to 200 years before and there was no plaque or other marking on the coffin to identify him. A team of archaeologists, anthropologists and forensic historians opened the lead caskets to determine who the mystery body had been and what both he and de la Porte died from. They also found bits and pieces of cathedral sculptures that had been part of a wall between the “choir” and the “nave” of the church. During the Middle Ages Roman Catholic priests would literally shut the door behind them and carry out the High Mass service, including the Eucharist, out of sight of the congregation on the ground that this made the “mysteries” of the faith even more mysterious. This ended when the Reformation started, and among the major criticisms Martin Luther and other Reformation leaders had of the Catholic church was that it shrouded its services in so much mystery that ordinary congregants couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be going on. Also the early Protestants accused their Catholic brethren of literally being cannibals, because one of the big points of dispute between Catholics and Protestants was over whether the wafer and wine literally turned into the flesh and blood of Christ. The Catholics said it did; the Protestants said that was merely a metaphor to acknowledge Christ’s sacrifice for the salvation of humanity.

As a result of both the Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the choir screens were taken down and the High Mass at last occurred in full view of the audience – though it was still in Latin and remained so until the papacy of John XXIII (1959-1963), who convened the Vatican II conference which gave Catholic churches permission at long last to conduct their services in the languages of the countries in which they took place. The Nôtre-Dame choir screen was taken apart and the fragments of the sculptures that had once adorned them were simply buried in the church’s basement, though there was another nearby French church whose choir screen was intact and that gave the various members of the Nôtre-Dame team the clues they needed to reconstruct the Nôtre-Dame choir screen. For some reason, both corpses had been buried with an ample supply of plants – was this left over from the belief of the ancient Egyptians that you had to bury a dead person with objects they had handled so they’d have them in the afterlife? – some of which might have had medicinal properties. By doing various tests on the remaining bones, the researchers deduced that the unknown body had died at about age 30 and had had tuberculosis. They also came up with a pretty good guess as to who the mystery corpse was. In fact, they came up with two candidates – a knight named Édmound de la Madeleine and a scapegrace François Villon-esque poet named Joaquin Rubollet – but decided the mystery man was more likely de la Madeleine than Rubollet because the corpse had grown up in the east of France (as had Madeleine) and not the west (as had Rubollet). They were able to deduce just what parts of France the corpse had come from based on the digestive patterns they inferred from the surviving bones: a discipline called “forensic pathology.” There was also one talking head, Frédérique Duran, who was credited as an “archaeobotanist,” meaning someone who analyzes remains of plants to determine how old a human was whose body was found with those plants and when they lived. Overall, this NOVA show was quite interesting even though all the names of various experts and their disciplines tended to blur together after a while.