A Song in the Night

Horatio Gates Spafford (1828-1888) was an American evangelist remembered today as the author of the hymn "It is Well with my Soul." In November 1873, he was at home in Chicago when his four children perished in a shipwreck. His wife survived, "saved alone," and afterward continued to Paris, where Spafford joined her shortly before Christmas. "A Song in the Night" unfolds over four days in December 1873 as the traumatized Spafford haunts the boulevards of a city still reeling from the events of 1870-1871. In Paris, he meets with old friends and acquaintances and encounters an itinerant preacher with visions of the divine. The hours blur together as he wanders the dreamlike cityscape before finding himself, at last, in the burned-out ruins of the Palais des Tuileries.