Clara's Visit

My friend Clara from Lyon came to visit me this weekend.  Of course, she is not really from Lyon, but from the Bay Area like me, but since Lyon is where I met her, and in terms of experience of and facility with French and French culture she is my sœur aînée, I think of her as "Clara from Lyon."

It was nice to be able to show a guest around my stomping grounds, although it did reinforce for me how small a town Cosne really is.  There was a film festival going on at the lone cinema this weekend, which was pretty big news for Cosne, although a glance at the "red carpet crowds" will show the actual scale of the festivities.  Clara and I did not actually end up attending any screenings at the festival; we were not particularly intrigued by any of the offerings, and since Clara had brought a judicious selection of her own recommended films, we ended up having what amounted to a personal film festival at my place over Friday and Saturday.


We watched two Russian films, both excellent--well made, powerfully acted, entertaining, and moving.  The first, which I had heard of before but knew little about, was "Burnt by the Sun," a film made in the early years of greater openness just after the fall of the USSR, and set in 1930s Russia.  It was primarily about the life of an upper class, military family, on the cusp of the time of the great purges, whose members both experienced bizarre continuities with pre-revolutionary, nineteenth-century Russia, and the devastating instability and brutality of Stalin's regime.  It was a very somber film, as was the second (although Clara did point out that the latter left you with your faith in humanity slightly more intact).  That one was called "Prisoners of the Mountain," and although I had never heard of it at all, it proved to be almost as good as the first.  It was about two Russian soldiers in contemporary times, who were taken prisoner by Chechen rebels, and the expected and unexpected dramas that ensued.  It turned out to be one of those films that was able to make you laugh with a particularly black humor, while never letting you forget dramatic weight of the story.  All in all, it was a good weekend for film.

I would also add, as a side note, that both movies happened to include performances by Oleg Menshikov.  He is an actor I had not heard of before, but I suspect I will be seeking out his performances is other films.  Yum.

Clara lighting the candles

Stuffed peppers!

Besides having our fill of Russian films, Clara and I ate a lot of good food this weekend, both in Cosne, where we cooked on Friday night, and in Nevers, where we spent the second half of the weekend.  We also had some good luck with touristing around Nevers on Sunday afternoon.  Nevers, like many small French cities, is usually pretty dead on Sundays, but we were walking around after lunch with another friend and decided to step into the Cathedral, since it was well past the hours for mass.  The Nevers Cathedral is quite impressive--bigger than the cathedral in the nearest large city, Dijon, it dates back to the thirteenth century--Mostly, that is, since the RAF accidentally knocked the roof in during a raid in June 1944.  Not one of His Majesty's Air Force's finest moments, I have to say.


There was one good thing that came of the cathedral being partially destroyed, however, which we--by dint of a bit of serendipity--were able to find out about during our visit.  When we arrived, the church was practically deserted, a great, empty, chilly stone structure with medieval buttresses and unappealing twentieth-century stained glass windows.  As we were wandering among the different icons, though, we were approached by a little old Frenchwoman, very pleasant, who explained that she was the guide to the cathedral, and who told us that she had the key to the baptistère and would show it to us, if we liked.  Unsure of what that meant, we said, "Why not?"  She then proceeded to tell us the story.


Apparently, when victors of the Battle of Britain shelled the cathedral, they blew a rather deep hole in the floor on one side of the nave, and when the workmen were repairing it after the war, they found pieces of marble in the crater.  This was odd, since the cathedral is made of a different stone, and they brought in archeologists to investigate.  The archeological team dug deeper, and discovered the remains of an extremely old baptismal font, the center of a building that once stood on the site and that was constructed in the fifth century.  The old lady took us down a set of stairs in one corner, and through a little door to show us the archeological site that has been uncovered--the base of an octagonal baptismal pool, which was once covered in gilded mosaics and surrounded by marble columns of different colors, and was visited by Christians who were still living under Roman rule.  Our guide described to us what people surmise about the religious practices of the builders and the uses of the font, based on records of similar sites in other places, but we have no written records of the people who built or used this one.  Nobody even knew it was there until friendly fire exposed the remains.  It was amazing, looking at those ruins to think about how distant those early people were, how far removed from us by intervening time and loss of knowledge.  It really was another world.  At the same time, though, that world has not disappeared completely.  There are ruins, and continuities of knowledge and of ritual, a fact which is equally astounding to think about.