Early morning runners stopped in their tracks, dumb-founded. Across the river, still smouldering, loomed the burnt-out form of Notre Dame Cathedral, its spire collapsed, its bell towers and buttresses standing silent in the dawn light.
"Blessee, mais vivante," tweeted Henrik Enderlein, the director of the Jacques Delors Institute, alongside pictures of the shattered shell of the gothic masterpiece that sits at the heart of Paris. "Wounded, but alive."
After a night during which more than 400 firefighters toiled for 15 hours to quell a blaze that tore through the 12th century cathedral, Parisians and visitors were struggling to absorb the enormity of the disaster.