The Writer's Almanac for Thursday, May 30, 2019

Late Comfort
by Laura Foley

Dad slippers through dark rooms,
past my sitting haloed by reading light,
creaks the fridge door open,
gropes for frozen treats,
spoons from the creamy quart,
slurps and burps,
then shuffles back to bed,
as if we couldn't see each other,
father turned sweet-toothed child
seeking late-night comfort,
daughter become red-eyed mother
harassed by graduate exams––
making up for neglected study
with caffeinated attention,
thick book propped
against an emptied coffee cup.

“Late Comfort” by Laura Foley from WTF. © CW Books, 2017. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It was on this day in 1431 that Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in Rouen, France. In the centuries that have passed, she's become a national icon in France. She is to the national identity of France, novelist Julian Barnes notes, what Robin Hood is to England.

Statues of Joan of Arc stand all over parks and churches in France, and nearly every French town has a street named for her, called "Jeanne d'Arc." One 19th-century historian wrote that Joan of Arc "loved France so much that France began to love itself."

Joan of Arc was a 13-year-old peasant girl when she began to hear voices in her garden. The voices, she recounted, were those of saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine, and they eventually told her that she needed to save France. At the time, France was engaged in the Hundred Years War, and the English had the French town of Orleans under siege. In April of 1429, Joan of Arc asked the French government for troops that she could lead to liberate the captured Orleans. She'd met with the crown prince and theologians, and they thought she could be of use in the fight against the English, and so Joan of Arc was given an army to command.

She went into battle wearing a white suit of armor and carrying up high a banner depicting an image of the Trinity. An English arrow hit her in the shoulder, but she was OK. Her army succeeded in liberating Orleans: English troops fled, and Joan's army took over their surrounding forts.

In another battle, Joan of Arc — now known as "the maid of Orleans" — was taken hostage by Burgundian troops and sold to the English. She was imprisoned for over a year, often chained to a wooden block, while interrogators attempted to extract confessions out of her. Then, on February 21, 1431, she was brought to trial under an ecclesiastical court. She stuck to her story that she had heard the voices of saints and it was they who commanded her to serve France. Interrogators demanded that she retract her statements. She was convicted of heresy and brought before a large crowd to be sentenced, condemned, and handed over to secular officials. Then, on this day, when she was 19 years old, she was burned at the stake.

In 1456 (25 years after she died), a posthumous retrial was held at which she was exonerated. In 1920, she was canonized a Catholic saint. Joan of Arc has been portrayed in more than 20 films; the first was made by director Georges Melies in 1899. And she's the subject of more than 20,000 books.

One of these is by Mark Twain (books by this author), who spent 12 years researching her life and wrote a book called Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, first serialized in Harper's Magazine and then published as a book in 1896. It's a fictional account and purports to be written by Joan of Arc's page and personal secretary. But the book is mostly devoid of the humor that Mark Twain is famous for. He genuinely admired Joan of Arc, and wrote an earnest book about her.

Mark Twain later said, "I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well."

On this day in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. The monument was first proposed in 1867, but construction didn't begin until 1914; the cornerstone was set in 1915. Architect Henry Bacon designed it to resemble the Parthenon, believing that a defender of democracy should be memorialized in a building that pays homage to the birthplace of democracy. The monument has 36 marble columns, one for each state in the union at the time of Lincoln's assassination. On the south wall is inscribed the Gettysburg Address, and on the north, his second inaugural address. There's a persistent myth that one of the words in the inaugural address is misspelled, but it's not true. Stonemasons did accidentally carve an "E" where they meant to carve an "F," but it was filled in immediately and no evidence remains.

The marble and granite chosen for the monument came from Massachusetts, Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, and Alabama. Bacon intended to show the divided nation coming together to build something of lasting significance.

Sculptor Daniel Chester French studied photographs of Lincoln for years; his Lincoln appears somber, even care-worn, one hand closed in a fist and the other in a more relaxed position. Though it's commonly thought that the sculpture's hands are forming the American Sign Language letters "A" and "L," the National Park Service reports that this was French's way to show Lincoln's strength and compassion. There's also a rumor that the profile of Robert E. Lee — or Ulysses S. Grant, or Jefferson Davis — can be seen in the locks of the sculpture's hair, but the National Parks Service insists that these are merely wayward strands.

The monument was dedicated in front of an audience of more than 50,000 people. Even though Lincoln was known as the Great Emancipator, the audience was segregated; keynote speaker Robert Moton, president of the Tuskegee Institute and an African-American, was not permitted to sit on the speakers' platform. Just over 40 years later, on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. would give his "I have a dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in front of an audience of 200,000.