August 26 Thursday —In Redding, Conn. Sam wrote to Héléne Elisabeth Picard.
It is a lovely picture, dear France, & I am very glad to have it. Nothing else in the world is ever so beautiful as a beautiful schoolgirl, & certainly there is a prodigal wealth of that beauty in this picture. This Joan is to my taste!—fair, & comely, & sweet, & refined; whereas four artists out of five make Joan coarse & clumsy, & thirty or forty years old. They seem to think that because she was a peasant she couldn’t have been otherwise. Then they spoil the argument by making the Virgin Mary, who was also a peasant, fair, & comely, & sweet, & refined —& white. Which she wasn’t.
I wish | could have seen the thousand girls marching. It would have stirred me to know I was so close to Joan of Arc! to know that the ancestors of one some of these children played with her in the shade of the bois chenu; that I could touch one of these & send that contact quivering back five centuries along an unbroken stream of red blood & deliver the thrill of it into the heart of a comrade of the Maid of Orleans who had kissed her lips & spoken with her face to face.
You inquire how I am. I am not very well. Then how can I write letters? I don’t; the others attend to it. This is the only one I have written since – since – oh, I don’t know how long!
But I am very comfortable, & thoroughly well satisfied; for I am buried deep in the solitudes & silences of the woods & the hills, & don’t ever want to see a city again. And shan’t. The others go to New York every few days, but I never intend to go again. I am glad I built this house. It was a lucky thought.
With all good wishes / Sincerely Yours / S L. Clemens, C.S,
I most respectfully & affectionately kiss my hand to that little Scotch-French Jeanne d’Arc.
P. S.
I’ve broken the letter open for a reason that moves me to laugh. When the stenographer had typed it, he placed it, with other letters, on my daughter Jean’s desk (she is my secretary), & she read it. She went driving, afterward, & I prepared the letter for the mail. But as soon as she returned she brought it to me & said I must open it and change something in it.
“Well, Jean, what must change?”
“You have said the Virgin Mary was not white.”
“Very well, where’s the harm?”
‘Why, it’s shocking!”
“You numscull! What is there about it that’s shocking?”
“Can't you see, papa? The idea of saying the Mother of the Saviour was colored!” It’s sacrilegious.”
“Sac—oh, nonsense! Jean, in her day the population of the globe was not more than a thousand millions. Not one-tenth of them were white. What does this fact suggest to you?”
“I—I don’t know. What does it suggest, papa?”
“It most powerfully suggests that white was not a favorite complexion with God. Has it since become a favorite complexion with Him? No. The population of the globe is now fifteen hundred millions; one thousand & six millions of these people are colored—two-thirds, you see, of the human race. There was not a white person in Nazareth, when I was there, except a foreign priest. The people were very dark. Don’t you suppose they are the descendant’s of Mary’s townsmen? Of course they are. Now what have you to say, Jean?”
“Well, I can’t help it, papa; the idea of a colored Mother of the Saviour is still revolting, & you must change it,
“My dear, I won’t. To my mind one color is just as respectable as another; there is nothing important, nothing essential, about a complexion. I mean, to me. But with the Deity it is different. He doesn’t think much of white people, He prefers the colored. Andrew del Sarto’s pink-&-lily Madonnas revolt Him, my child.” That is, they would, but He never looks at them.” [MTP]. Note Andrew del Sarto (1486-1530), Florentine painter