The story of Notre-Dame’s restoration starts with a fire, as Claire Tabouret is well aware.

Officials in France have chosen her, a Frenchwoman who, for the last 10 years, has called Los Angeles home, to help bring its $900 million, yearslong resurrection project to the finish line. She will create stained glass windows in several of the southern bays.

And as Tabouret has watched the most destructive fires in Los Angeles history burn her adopted hometown, the parallels have become inescapable.

It all “starts with a fire, which starts a conversation,” she said — a conversation about how “to transform this destruction into a new rebirth, new life.”

The little piece of Notre-Dame’s rebirth that Tabouret, 43, is contributing to is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: Add a contemporary touch to an almost 1,000-year old cathedral.

The only reason Tabouret is getting this chance is because a fire engulfed the cathedral’s roof and spire in 2019. Laurent Ulrich, the archbishop of Paris, then raised the idea of installing new stained glass windows, and, on a visit to the construction site in 2023, President Emmanuel Macron of France signed off.

The French culture ministry, he said, would run a yearlong competition to pick the artist who would design them. The windows, the ministry said, would fill six of the seven chapels on the side of the nave, joining one figurative window in one of the chapels that would remain. Officials said the commission was not to replace anything that had been lost, but to give the cathedral a flavor of the contemporary gesture that had been promised in the wake of the fire.