Just keep in mind the oddness of the setting, picture the cheap red-painted warehouse, smell the pungent odor of wine, listen to the shouts of hilarity, stay firmly in that neighborhood, among those workmen, those old-timers, those poor women throwing themselves into a night’s pleasure!

The musical ensemble consisted of three blind men from the hospice for the blind—the Quinze-Vingts. One played violin, the second clarinet, the third the flageolet. The three together were paid seven francs for the night. At that price, of course, they offered no Rossini or Beethoven, they played what they wanted and what they could, and no one complained—sweet tact! Their music was such an assault on the eardrum that once I had scanned the crowd, I turned my attention to this trio of blind men and was immediately disposed to indulgence as I recognized their shelter hospice uniforms. The players were seated in a recess before a casement window; to make out their faces, one had to come in close. I didn’t approach right away, but when I did, that was it: The party and its music fell away. My curiosity was roused to the highest pitch, my soul crossed over into the body of the clarinetist. The violin and the flageolet players both had commonplace faces, the familiar face of the blind—wary, attentive, unsmiling—but the clarinetist’s was one of those phenomena that stop the artist and the philosopher in his tracks.

Imagine Dante’s plaster death mask, lit by the red glow of the oil lamp and topped by a thicket of silver-white hair. The bitter, sorrowful expression of that magnificent face was heightened by blindness, for the dead eyes were alive with the mind’s energy; it shone through like a burning beam of light, generated by some unique unceasing desire, writ firmly on the domed brow crossed by deep creases like the brick courses in an old wall.

The old fellow was blowing randomly into his clarinet without the slightest concern for rhythm or melody; his fingers lifted and lowered, pressed the ancient keys with mechanical habit. He was not at all disturbed at producing what musicians call “sour notes,” the dancers noticed them no more than did the two colleagues of my Italian fellow—for I had been hoping he was an Italian, and he was Italian. There was something grand and despotic in this old Homer, who harbored within himself an Odyssey consigned to oblivion. It was a greatness so authentic that it even triumphed over his abject condition, a despotism so lively that it prevailed over poverty. Not one of the violent passions that lead a man to good or to evil, that make a convict or a hero, was lacking in that nobly carved face, lividly Italian, hooded by graying eyebrows that threw their shadow over deep hollows where one feared to see reappear the glow of thought, as one fears to see emerge from a cave’s mouth some bandits armed with torches and daggers. There lived a lion within that fleshly cage, a lion whose rage had been vainly spent against the iron of the bars. The flame of despair had guttered out in the cinders, the lava had gone cold, but the gullies, the crags, a wisp of smoke, still bore witness to the violence of the eruption, the ravages of the fire. These ideas, awakened by the sight of that man, were as hot in my soul as they were cold on his face.

Between contra dances, the violin and the flute players, utterly intent on their glass and bottle, would hook their instruments to the buttons of their reddish redingotes, stretch a hand to a small table set within the window recess where their refreshment stood, and regularly offer the Italian a full glass. He could not reach it himself, for the table was set behind his chair, and each time the clarinetist would thank them with a friendly nod of the head. Their actions were executed with the precision always amazing in blind men from the Quinze-Vingts, which seems to imply they can see.

I drew closer to the three blind men to listen to their conversation, but when I neared they must have recognized a non-laborer type and fell silent.

“What country are you from, you playing the clarinet?”

“From Venice,” the blind man answered with a faint Italian accent.

“Were you born blind, or are you blind from—”

“Blind from an accident,” he answered brusquely, “from a case of the damned gutta serena.”

“Venice is a beautiful city, I have always dreamed of going there.”

The old man’s face brightened, his creases shifted, he grew violently excited. “If I went there with you, it would be worth your time,” he told me.

“Don’t talk to him about Venice,” said the violinist, “or this doge of ours will start up his rant, on top of the fact that he’s already got two bottles’ worth in his belly, the prince does!”

“All right now, let’s begin, Papa Canard,” said the flutist.

The three of them set to playing again, but all the while they performed the four contra dances, the Venetian sniffed me out, sensing my unusual interest in him. His face dropped its chilly expression of sorrow; some sort of hopefulness flushed his features and flowed like a blue flame along his wrinkles; he smiled, and he mopped his brow, that bold formidable brow; in time he became jolly like a man climbing onto his hobbyhorse.

“How old are you?” I asked him.

“Eighty-two!”

“How long have you been blind?”

“Fifty years now,” he answered, with a tone that implied that his regrets had to do not only with the loss of his sight but with some great power that had been stripped from him.

“Why do they call you the doge?” I asked him.

“Ah, it’s a joke,” he said. “I am a patrician of Venice, and I might have become doge as readily as anyone else.”

“What is your name, then?”

“Here, I’m called Old Man Canet. My name can never be registered any other way on the public records, but in Italian it is Marco Facino Cane, Prince of Varese.”

“What! You’re descended from the famous condottiere Facino Cane, whose conquests were inherited by the dukes of Milan?”

“É vero,” he said. “Back then, to avoid being killed by the Viscontis, Cane’s son fled to Venice and got himself registered in the Golden Book. But now there are no more Canes and no more book.” He made a frightening gesture—of patriotism long dead and of disgust for human affairs.

“But if you were a senator of Venice, you must have been rich. How did you lose your wealth?”

At my question he lifted his head toward me, as if to consider me with a movement that was truly tragic, and he replied, “Through a number of misfortunes . . .”

He had no further interest in drinking; with a gesture he waved away the wineglass the old flageolet player held out to him, and then he lowered his head. These details were not likely to quench my curiosity. During the contra dance the three fellows played next, I contemplated the old Venetian nobleman with feelings that devour a man of twenty. I could see Venice and the Adriatic, I could see its ruins on that withered face.