Hemingway was wrong: Paris is not a moveable feast. For those of us who thought so — and foolishly believed there were sights that could be put off until a future visit — the fire that consumed the 400-year old covered market Le Marche des Enfants-Rouges is a painful rebuttal. That includes me. In January 2019, during a day trip to the French capital for the first time in nearly four decades, I decided not to visit Notre Dame, telling myself I’d go next time. After all, wouldn’t it always be there?

Cathedrals may appear formidable but, like all works of human hands, they have fragile spirits. Fire, accident and neglect can alter their quintessence. We may argue about Notre Dame as it was and as it now is, but we have no choice but agree to its impermanence.

The church has been restored after the cataclysmic blaze that occurred less than three months after my regrettable decision. But the effort took more than five years and came at a cost of about €700 million (roughly $780 million) in donations, including sizeable funds from Bernard Arnault and his LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE conglomerate. The church property was owned and run by the French state — not the Catholic Church — and thus uninsured (unless you consider government upkeep a kind of self-insurance).

It’s not yet clear what kind of insurance the marche had. It was renovated from 1994 to 2000 in an attempt to revive its status as a neighborhood produce market. In 2005, the municipal government awarded management to ESG, a private company that runs public markets in Paris and elsewhere in France. ESG embarked on what turned out to be a lucrative food-hall business model, which also allowed a few traditional shops (butchers, greengrocers) to remain alongside stalls that offered prepared food.

The likelihood is that the marche’s tenants took out their own insurance for equipment and supplies. But was ESG covered for the 1,100-square-meter physical property, including the metal, glass and tile roofing? The British paper The Guardian reports that the 1990s renovation cost an estimated €3 million in today’s money. Much may depend on the fire’s cause. It is too early even to surmise.

You may say a covered market isn’t a cathedral. But the marche reflected a Paris beyond the radiating Haussmann avenues or the Eiffel Tower or the imperious Louvre. It was — from what I can tell from passing by in July on another short trip — a neighborly place with a comfortable veneer of history. King Louis XIII granted a royal patent for it in 1615, when the Marais area of Paris was shifting from agricultural to residential use — and thus in need of a place to shop for groceries.

For a century and a half, it was simply known as the “(the little market of the Marais). It took on its more poetic name after the closure of a nearby charitable foundation established in 1536 by Marguerite of Navarre, the sister of King Francis I. The 80 or so orphans who lived there wore red uniforms — . The orphanage closed in 1772 and the market adopted its name soon after.

The broader and more violent lines of history took place before and in the periphery of the little market in the Marais. Francis’ royal line died out with the assassination of his grandson Henry III in 1589. The next king was the grandson of Marguerite, Henry IV — whose conversion to Catholicism from Protestantism helped calm religious conflict and inspired the saying “Paris is worth a mass.”It was his son, Louis XIII, who granted the market its license. Beyond that, the marche persisted despite the French Revolution, the occupation of Paris after the fall of Napoleon, the Prussian bombardment in 1870, the exigencies of the Paris Commune the year after, two world wars — and a proposal to turn it into a parking lot in 1990s that the neighborhood fought off. That same community must now come together to save it once more.

Comparisons have been made between the marche and London’s Borough Market, which claims a thousand-year past and a more recent history as a food-hall tourist attraction. But the marche had a concise charm and a more tenacious presence on its site — Borough Market is more than 15 times its size and, like nearby London Bridge, has shifted its location over the last century or two.

Will the fire be the final chapter of Le Marche des Enfants-Rouges’ four centuries of survival? The shops and restaurants that thrived in the location may move elsewhere to keep hold of their customers. But the marche itself can’t. It wouldn’t be the same.