Yale professor R. Howard Bloch closes his course The Age of Cathedrals by tracing how Gothic cathedrals survived, and were altered by, seven centuries of damage. He moves through the Revolution's iconoclasm, decades of neglect, fire, and the bombardments of two world wars, then centers the lecture on Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the nineteenth-century architect whose restorations at Vezelay, Carcassonne, the Sainte-Chapelle, and Notre-Dame preserved the buildings while reshaping them, including the now-famous modern gargoyles and, by some accounts, his own face carved into the stonework. Bloch unpacks what Viollet-le-Duc meant by restoration, a term that could mean recreating a building as it supposedly should have been rather than as it was, and why that definition still provokes debate. The lecture closes by considering what function these medieval monuments serve now, as objects of faith, tourism, and national memory alike.