The band consisted of a fiddle, a clarionet, and a flageolet from the
Blind Asylum. The three were paid seven francs in a lump sum for the
night. For the money, they gave us, not Beethoven certainly, nor yet
Rossini; they played as they had the will and the skill; and every one
in the room (with charming delicacy of feeling) refrained from finding
fault. The music made such a brutal assault on the drum of my ear,
that after a first glance round the room my eyes fell at once upon the
blind trio, and the sight of their uniform inclined me from the first
to indulgence. As the artists stood in a window recess, it was
difficult to distinguish their faces except at close quarters, and I
kept away at first; but when I came nearer (I hardly know why) I
thought of nothing else; the wedding party and the music ceased to
exist, my curiosity was roused to the highest pitch, for my soul
passed into the body of the clarionet player.
The fiddle and the flageolet were neither of them interesting; their
faces were of the ordinary type among the blind--earnest, attentive,
and grave. Not so the clarionet player; any artist or philosopher must
have come to a stop at the sight of him.
Picture to yourself a plaster mask of Dante in the red lamplight, with
a forest of silver-white hair above the brows. Blindness intensified
the expression of bitterness and sorrow in that grand face of his; the
dead eyes were lighted up, as it were, by a thought within that broke
forth like a burning flame, lit by one sole insatiable desire, written
large in vigorous characters upon an arching brow scored across with
as many lines as an old stone wall.
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