Look up at the high arching nave and the tall, vertical mullions of Notre-Dame de Calais, and you are looking at England. The church is built in the English Perpendicular style, the soaring late-Gothic vocabulary developed for Canterbury, Gloucester, and Westminster, and arguably it is the only church in France constructed in that idiom. This is not an accident. From 1347 until 1558 Calais belonged to the English Crown, and English masons, English priests, and English patrons left their mark on the parish church on the rue de la Paix. Even after Calais returned to France, the building kept its imported skeleton. Stone by stone, it remained a small piece of England that the Channel never washed away.

Notre-Dame's tower has had more lives than most cathedrals. In 1785, after Jean-Pierre Blanchard made the first hydrogen balloon crossing of the English Channel, Louis XVI ordered the balloon and its small boat-shaped basket hung up inside this church as a votive to the new age of flight. Two years later, the tower became a scientific instrument: surveyors used it to sight signal lights at Dover Castle across the water, threading trigonometry between the Paris Observatory and Greenwich to settle, once and for all, how far apart the two royal observatories really were. And in 1843 a restorer named Monsieur de Rheims scraped through coats of whitewash and uncovered medieval frescoes hidden beneath: a woman with a banner of nine golden bezants, a Virgin and Child, a kneeling bishop, all wrapped in a Latin motto that repeated, ten times, the words Le Jour Viendra. The day will come.

Charles de Gaulle had just returned from a Polish front and from German prison camps when he met Yvonne Vendroux at a tea in late 1920. She was twenty, the daughter of a Calais biscuit-maker. He was thirty, a captain with a future no one could yet see. They were married here on 7 April 1921 by Monsignor Baudrillart. There were no televisions, no microphones, no Free French armbands; just a young couple in a church whose pointed arches had been built for kings of two countries. A generation later, those kingdoms would be allies, and one of them would broadcast his refusal of defeat to the other across the same Channel his ancestors had spent six hundred years contesting. Yvonne stayed at his side for fifty years.

On 23 September 1944, as the First Canadian Army was prising Calais loose from its German garrison, Allied shells struck Notre-Dame. The bell tower collapsed through the roof into the north transept. The high altar, mostly the work of Adam Lottman and finished by 1648, survived. So did the painting once attributed to Rubens of the Descent from the Cross, which turned out to be by Pieter Van Mol. Reconstruction did not begin in earnest until the 1960s. The nave and tower came back between 1963 and 1973. Gérard Lardeur began installing new stained glass in 1976. The choir and chapel were not fully restored until 2013. Seventy years to put the building back. Le Jour Viendra, the old fresco had promised. The day did come, slowly.

Walk around the exterior and the word that comes to mind is fortress. Notre-Dame is broad-shouldered and low, with thick buttresses and a stocky bell tower, more defensive than soaring. The plan is a Latin cross with side aisles, transepts, and a side chapel, and the interior is lit by windows that feel oddly large for so heavy a shell. George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, the brother of two English kings, was married here in 1469 to Isabel Neville by the Archbishop of York. Henry VIII heard mass here before riding out to meet Francis I. And then, four and a half centuries later, came a young captain and his bride from the rue Royale. The church has outlived all of them.