May 30: The Maid of Orléans Burns, Jackson Walks Away from a Duel, A Novel Rewrites the World

May 30 deals in the extreme — in a young woman burned at the stake who became a saint, in a future president who took a bullet in the chest and kept shooting, and in a novel so extravagantly imagined that the literary world needed a new category of language just to describe what it had done. Each story pushes against the limits of what we expect history to contain: the heroism of the powerless, the violence of the powerful, and the capacity of a writer to look at the world and see it more truly by refusing to describe it as merely literal. Between a marketplace in Rouen in 1431 and a Buenos Aires printing house in 1967 — separated by more than five centuries — May 30 has produced three figures who understood, in their very different ways, that the limits the world imposes are not always the ones that matter.

Macondo

On May 30, 1967, Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires published the first edition of Cien años de soledad — One Hundred Years of Solitude — by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. The first printing of 8,000 copies sold out in Buenos Aires in a single week. Within months, the novel had begun its spread across the Spanish-speaking world with a velocity that literary publishing rarely produces; within a decade, translated into dozens of languages, it had become one of the most widely read novels of the twentieth century. García Márquez had written it in eighteen months in Mexico City, working each morning while his family accumulated debt that his wife Mercedes Barcha managed with what he later described as a combination of resourcefulness and terrifying patience. When he finished, she pawned an electric mixer and a hair dryer to send the manuscript to the publisher. The first half arrived; they couldn't afford to mail both halves at once.

The novel that arrived, in two installments paid for by kitchen appliances, told the story of the Buendía family across seven generations in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo — a world in which the miraculous and the mundane coexisted without hierarchy, where a woman ascended bodily to heaven while folding laundry and a man was followed by yellow butterflies wherever he walked and it rained yellow flowers on the day of a patriarch's death. García Márquez called it Magical Realism, though he always insisted he was simply describing the world as Latin Americans experienced it — a world in which folk belief, historical violence, and the surreal operations of political power made the distinction between the real and the impossible less stable than European literary tradition had assumed. The novel won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. It has sold an estimated fifty million copies. The literary category it exemplified — Magical Realism — became one of the defining modes of late twentieth-century world fiction, from Toni Morrison to Salman Rushdie to Isabel Allende. The pawned hair dryer turned out to be a good investment.

The Hermitage Duelist

On May 30, 1806, Andrew Jackson met Charles Dickinson — the best pistol shot in Tennessee, by most accounts — in a duel at Harrison's Mills, Kentucky, arising from a dispute over a horse race bet and, more explosively, remarks Dickinson had made about Jackson's wife Rachel. The circumstances of Jackson and Rachel's marriage were complicated — they had wed believing her divorce from her first husband was final when it was not, a situation regularized only when the divorce was completed and they remarried, but one that their political enemies used against them for decades. Jackson had fought somewhere between thirteen and one hundred duels in his life, depending on how broadly the category is defined; this one was the most dangerous. Dickinson fired first and hit Jackson in the chest, breaking two ribs and lodging a bullet near his heart so close that surgeons never attempted to remove it — Jackson carried it for the remaining thirty-nine years of his life.

Struck, bleeding, and holding himself upright through what witnesses described as extraordinary force of will, Jackson raised his own pistol and fired. Dickinson was hit in the abdomen and died later that day. The duel shocked many who had considered Dickinson its likely victor, and it clarified something about Jackson's character that would define his political career: a capacity for absorbing punishment without yielding that his opponents consistently underestimated. He carried the bullet from the Dickinson duel into the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, into the White House in 1829, and to his grave in 1845. His presidency — which produced the Trail of Tears, the destruction of the Second Bank of the United States, and a thoroughgoing reshaping of American democracy's character and electorate — was the expression of a personality forged in encounters like the one on May 30, 1806: stubborn, combative, willing to absorb damage to deliver it. The man who walked away from Harrison's Mills with a bullet in his chest was already becoming the president he would be.

Joan

On May 30, 1431, in the Old Market Square in Rouen, Normandy, a nineteen-year-old French peasant girl named Joan of Arc was burned alive on a charge of heresy — her relapsed heresy, specifically, for having resumed wearing men's clothing after briefly agreeing to abandon it under duress. She had been captured by Burgundian forces the previous May, sold to the English, tried by a pro-English ecclesiastical court under Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais, and condemned through a process whose conclusion was determined before its proceedings began. She had spent her trial maintaining, under sustained pressure from experienced theologians, that the voices she heard — which she identified as Saints Catherine, Margaret, and Michael — were real and that God had commanded her to drive the English from France. The court found her guilty. The English found her disposal convenient. The stake was lit at approximately nine in the morning.

Joan's story before Rouen is one of the most extraordinary in medieval history: a girl from the village of Domrémy in northeastern France who, at seventeen, convinced the Dauphin of France that she had been sent by God to lift the English siege of Orléans, was given command of French troops, and within months had done exactly what she promised — turning the tide of a war that had been going badly for France for decades. She was captured in May 1430 during a battle near Compiègne, and the king she had crowned offered no ransom for her. Her trial was conducted entirely by enemies who had decided the outcome; her appeals to the Pope were ignored. Twenty-five years after her execution, a rehabilitation trial — ordered by Pope Calixtus III — declared the original verdict fraudulent and restored her name. She was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1920. The girl burned as a heretic in 1431 was declared a saint four hundred and eighty-nine years later. The English crown never formally apologized, though the Bishop of Winchester issued a statement of regret in 1431, reportedly as the flames rose.