Michel Picaud remembers the first gift he received from an American donor. It was in the spring of 2017, and the 71-year-old retired engineer had been tasked to run the Friends of Notre-Dame de Paris. Notre-Dame, the Gothic cathedral in the heart of the French capital, was “in a very dire state. The flying buttresses were beginning to crumble.” This was two years before the great fire that tore through the cathedral. Restoration was needed even then but proceeded at a lackadaisical pace.
Mr. Picaud’s brief was to raise money in America. In a Zoom conversation from his home in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, he says he was given three years by the archbishop of Paris and a budget of €200,000. Days into his project, he received a call from a lawyer in the U.S. Janet C. Ziegler, 83, had died at her home in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and had left $62,500 to Mr. Picaud’s charity. “It was as if it came from the sky, from the blue,” he remembers. It was his first taste of American generosity.
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