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Picture the scene: a bedraggled figure emerges from the darkness, exhausted and soaked to the skin from a perilous boat journey through stormy seas. Her dark, exotic clothing marks her out as other, an alien in this quiet corner of Europe. She has no luggage. She does not speak the language. She is a refugee escaping the horrors unfolding in her homeland that have claimed the lives of her husband and her son. The world she knew has collapsed and her own life is endangered, so she has sought help to escape that fate, leaving behind everything she once owned, everything she once was.
This could be the story of any one of hundreds of thousands fleeing conflict in Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and other war-torn countries in the hope of a new life and the kindness of strangers. But this is not the twenty-first century, it is the nineteenth—June 1871 to be precise. And this woman, Babette Hersant, is French. She is seeking refuge following the collapse of the Paris Commune and ensuing violence. It is not the rocky shores of Italy nor a Greek island where she has come ashore but the windswept coastal sand dunes of Jutland, Denmark.
Babette has arrived at a tiny, remote hamlet of just a handful of buildings. She knocks at the door of a low, simple house and it is opened by two elderly sisters. Their father had been an important man, the founder of this village, a visionary Lutheran pastor who gathered his flock of followers around him. The daughters are good people, committed to continuing the great man's noble works. They are astonished by the unexpected arrival of this stranger in her curious, impractical, fashionable garb who speaks only French. Thankfully the sisters have some grasp of that language and feel concern for their visitor who is barely able to stay upright
with fatigue. Despite the Catholic crucifix hanging around her neck they invite her in and give her water.
The stranger produces a letter of introduction from a mu