Varieties of Religious Experiences

Our Last full day in Besançon

The Hollyhock growing outside our front door in Besançon.

As I type this, the bells of Saint John’s Cathedral are imploring the faithful to climb up the hill for mass. It’s 18:15 (because that’s how the French count their time) here and they only have this one evening service. I don’t know why this is, I would have expected the Cathedral to have a morning service, but then we did pass three other churches with people coming out of them as the morning went on.

I had every good intention of going myself, thinking it would not be too much to go to the Reformed service in the morning, and the Catholic one in the evening, but a delectable lunch and a long afternoon in the Musee de Beaux Arts have done me in. I trust they will get along well enough without me, for I did do a certain amount of praying on the other side of the old town, called the Buckle, or Boucle, at 10:30 this morning.

France is one of those strange countries that is excessively not religious—the various wars and philosophical “enlightenments” did their work and caused many ordinary French people not to bother to darken the doors of any of its sacred buildings, except for the purposes of tourism—and yet Sunday is a day where almost no shop is open. The Monoprix briefly had it’s doors cracked open in the morning but then shut by noon, and almost all of the cafes, restaurants, brasseries, and patisseries were shuttered. We bought the last four pains au chocolats from a Starbucks of all places, which, according to its foreign business model, was open and selling the usual dry muffins and mouldering lemon loaf slices as on the other side of the world.