Day 31 Rest Day in Besançon (2)

“If you can’t fight, wear a big hat”

Monday 30th April

0 km walked  Distance from Canterbury 742.6 km

The picture above is by Rubens, of St Jerome, dressed as a cardinal (which he never was in fact). He is wearing the traditional galero, the ‘red hat’ which was one of the symbols given in the past (after the time of Jerome) to a cardinal when he was appointed by the Pope. However, its use was suppressed in 1969 and cardinals wear much smaller red hats now. But the galero still has a traditional use which we will come back to.  Here is a picture of the current red hats:

As for the expression ‘if you can’t fight wear a big hat’, I fear I can tell you very little about that. My father used to say it as a kind of gnomic utterance, and it used to be commonly heard. If you look online you can find no agreement about the origin of the saying, nor really about the meaning, but is has a non-complimentary connotation and may mean something like ‘if you can’t walk the walk, then you better talk the talk’. If you can tell me more, I would be interested.

St Jerome was famous as the first person to translate the Old Testament of the Bible from Hebrew into Latin. Prior to that the old translation from Hebrew to Greek, known as the Septuagint, was used by those who did not read Hebrew. His dates are 347-420 which makes him a direct contemporary of St Augustine, 354-430, and they used to write to each other.  Jerome also translated the Greek New Testament into Latin and produced a Latin Text of the entire Bible, called the Vulgate, which became the authoritative Christian text until the time of the Reformation.

A rest day gives the chance to rest, fundamentally, but also the time for a little sightseeing. I don’t try to see everything. I have already since I left Canterbury passed through several places which would merit a week each to explore and generally spent not more than a couple of hours looking at them. And I have missed some places altogether which I should not have, like the cathedral in Laon. But my purpose is not to see everything that can be seen. I am coming to realise as the days go by that the walking is equally, if not more, important as the arriving.

But having said that Besançon is irresistibly interesting as a city, and dates back to pre-Roman times. It has an unusual geographical shape, it is on a deep oxbow loop in the river Doubs. The ‘open end’ is a steep hill, on which is the Citadelle, so it was always a place with very good natural defences. (The citadel is, apparently, a ‘masterpiece of military architecture’, but I am sorry to say I don’t find military architecture high on my list of things to see.) Julius Caesar captured the town during his Gallic Wars. The old town is within the loop, while the new town sprawls on the other side of the river.

I planned to do a little necessary shopping. I left behind a T shirt in a BnB a few days ago which needs to be replaced. I was staying just across the river in a very space age looking place, a tiny part of which is a hotel. Obviously it is on the new town side of the river.

There was a problem with shopping: today is Monday 30th April, and tomorrow is May 1st, a public holiday, the Fête du Travail, of Workers’ Day. So nearly all shops seemed to be shut. Obviously an example of how to faire le pont , or ‘make the bridge’ – a very real thing in France and also, in my experience, in Spain and Italy. Sunday is a day off and Tuesday is a day off and Monday gets squeezed in too. I eventually found a quite chic sports shop which could offer me a Nike T shirt for €42. . I declined. There is a Decathlon store, but it was a long bus ride away and I was fairly sure I would find it closed. But the holiday feeling meant that walking around was very easy, as there were really few people about.

I enjoyed mooching around in the streets, making my way down towards the cathedral, which I visited, and the citadel, which I didn’t, and learning a bit about famous people associated with Besançon, including the writer Victor Hugo, who was born there as were the Lumière brothers, who were (amongst) the inventors of movie films and colour photography.

Some pictures:

The Porte Noire, above, or the Black Gate, is a Roman triumphal arch, dating from the second century. It is called black because it was burned once in a fire. Victor Hugo’s house is to the right and the blue sign in the middle of the picture is over the main entrance of the Cathedral of St John. I was delighted to find that the Cathedral was completely empty of people and enjoyed exploring its hidden corners.

There was a leaflet detailing ( rather unconvincingly, I thought) the seven wonders of the cathedral – rather touristy. But I did like the Rose of St John, a very unusual circular altar, dating from 1050.

And there was lots of stained glass, more modern than old, but still very attractive.

The play of light through the windows in the church was very beautiful:

And one more. If you search a church in France I have discovered there are a few things you will nearly always find: St Thérèse of Lisieux (The Little Flower), St Joan of Arc, and this gentleman, St Denis, Bishop of Paris, patron of France, martyred in the 3rd century in very typical pose:

So back to the big hat. Often when you visit somewhere impressive as you walk, you spend a long time with it in view before you get there. It is nearly always worthwhile to look back over your shoulder as you are leaving it to see a different view, which sometimes is very impressive and you are inclined to miss it.

Likewise when you go to a church it is always worth looking up to the roof, though it is easy enough to forget. There can be very fine details, like this

But keep looking. Over the high altar, very high up was this:

There is a galero. Very easy to miss. Go back to the photo of the nave and look high up over the altar and you will see where you missed it! Quite a lot of cathedrals have one or more of them. And there is a logical explanation. There is a tradition of suspending the galero of a deceased cardinal by a thread from the roof, sometimes but not always directly over the tomb.The fading of the hat is supposed to remind us of the transience of earthly glory. There is also a tradition that as the hat slowly disintegrates its fall signifies the ascent of the late cardinal’s soul into heaven. [There is no evidence to support this.] It is sometimes said that disgruntled rivals suspended the galero with steel wire to delay its fall. I couldn’t possibly comment.

They are only found in cathedrals in which the bishop or archbishop has been appointed as a cardinal. The last Cardinal Archbishop of Besançon was Charles-Henri-Joseph Binet, who died in 1936. So his big hat has been there for quite a long time. We trust the post mortem ascent of his soul has not been impeded by the rather stout wire on which the hat is hanging.  

And that was Besançon. Onward tomorrow.