The Human Comedy Read Online Free PDF

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