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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: 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
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