n giving themselves up to a night's enjoyment.

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.

The old man was playing at random, without the slightest regard for time
or tune. His fingers traveled mechanically over the worn keys of his
instrument; he did not trouble himself over a false note now and again
(a _canard_, in the language of the orchestra), neither did the dancers,
nor, for that matter, did my old Italian's acolytes; for I had made
up my mind that he must be Italian, and an Italian he was. There was
something great, something too of the despot about this old Homer
bearing within him an _Odyssey_ doomed to oblivion. The greatness was so
real that it triumphed over his abject position; the despotism so much a
part of him, that it rose above his poverty.

There are violent passions which drive a man to good or evil, making of
him a hero or