| Elegy for the Hands of Louis Braille |
| It pleased De Gaulle to add another hero to the multitude stacked in the Pantheon, as if Paris needed one more plaque of bronze. So the village grave of Louis Braille was opened and the saddle-maker's son rode in triumph back to the city of his visionary labors, where as a student at the School for the Blind, he embossed the hidden page with light and gave the gifts of word and song to those who could not see. But the locals cried in protest at the tardiness of honor, the plunder of the grave, and lopped the hands from the hundred-year-old body, to rebury in the churchyard of Coupvray. |
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