A PRIVATE CHARITY OF PARIS.
Translated from the French for The Chautauquan.
Among the many interesting charitable institutions of Paris there is none more noteworthy than the private asylum for the blind conducted by the Sisters of St. Paul. This work was begun in 1850, by a woman of great piety, energy and sense, Anne Bergunion. Two blind girls were confided to her care. She proved to be remarkably adapted to training the peculiar characters which the nature of this affliction almost invariably causes. Gradually there grew up a large institution under her supervision. A writer in a late number of the Revue des deux Mondes has given an exhaustive account of the work. The details are most interesting and suggestive. After describing the home of the Sisters and their work, he says: “They have reserved the least comfortable part of the building for themselves, and have given over to the blind the large rooms where the circulation is free, and there is opportunity for exercise. Passing from the convent into the asylum for the blind, I entered the workshop. Twenty workingwomen, whose ages ranged from twenty-five to fifty, started up at the sound of strange footsteps. The sight was pitiful; the faces and eyes seemed expressionless. There was nothing to warm up their terrible pallor, and in their attitude there was a restless attention, as if they were troubled by a presence which they could not define nor understand.
“There is great difference between the different forms of blindness. There are eyes that have been paralyzed, which appear living, but yet are dead. They show neither joy nor sorrow, but remain fixed. A blind person does not move the eye when questioned, but by an unconscious gesture turns the ear to the speaker. Others are projecting, and seem almost bursting from their watery eyelids; they look like those marbles of whitish glass with which the children play; others again are almost invisible, showing only an inflamed line between the nearly closed eyelids. With some the lids are immovable; others continually flutter, like the wings of a frightened bird.
“I saw no coquettishness in the arrangement of the hair, in the pose of the head or the body. Shut up in darkness, they are ignorant of the resources of feminine graces; hearing and touch teach them nothing of them. Their tidiness is extreme, however. If well taught, a blind person can not endure on his garments a particle of dust or drop of water; it wounds his sensitive touch.
“The most of the inmates were born blind, or at least became blind so young that they have no remembrance of the light. For them the sun is bright, not because it shines, but because it is warm. There are some among them who have been made completely blind by an accident or a criminal action. Here is one whose eyes seem to have been torn out, and eyelids to have closed over the void. When she was quite a little girl, she owned a tame finch; at night it slept in its cage, but all day it was at the side of its young mistress, now on her head, again on her shoulders; it drank from the same glass with her and took the food from her lips. One day the eyes of the child attracted it; it picked at them and destroyed the sight. There is another who had a pet chicken. She had been accustomed to taking it in her little arms, rocking it, cuddling it, adoring it; they played together until suddenly, one day, the chicken, dashing itself against the face of the child, tore out both its eyes.
“I have noticed among the inmates a woman whose eyes are white; a faint shade marks the outline of the iris. She seems to be about fifty years old; her complexion is sallow, and above her prominent forehead the brown hair is traced by silver; her mouth has a sad, almost bitter expression; her form is thin, and her bony fingers move very swiftly as she knits. When twenty-three years old she was sought in marriage by a young man for whom she did not care. He insisted, she refused. One evening he came to see her with a gun on his shoulder, and demanded: “Will you marry me? Yes, or no.” “No,” she replied. He drew his weapon and fired. The entire charge hit the upper part of her face. When they had picked her up and wiped away the blood, they saw that she was blind, and hopelessly so. Before the court the fellow did not lie. “It is her own fault. I will marry her all the same, if she is willing.” The poor girl did not think it best to give her hand, when asked in this way. She found the Sisters of St. Paul, and has been with them for twenty-five years.
“It seemed very silent to me in the work-room. I am sorry for it. Conversation is as necessary to the blind as light for those who see; to them silence is night, noise is light. This is so true that in the Institution for Blind Young People, the black cell, the cell in which unruly members are confined as a punishment, is one where no sound is heard. I believe that conversation should always be allowed. The blind find an inspiration in it which gives zest to their work.
“Music is their great passion, and some excel in it; the ear is most sensitive; at a sound in the least out of tune their foreheads will contract painfully. A woman sang for me here. She was about thirty-five years old, with pale face and fine features. She sang a fandango intended to be gay, but which was very mournful, coming from her discolored lips. Her voice was true but weak and worn. The poor girl is a worn-out artist. She had been dragged from city to city; had “done” the watering places and springs, had given concerts, and never touched the proceeds. When she had ruined her voice the manager had abandoned her. The poor child, hungry and cold, sought the St. Paul Asylum. She has a shelter here while she lives. She knits, sings, and, perhaps, sighs for the time when she heard the crowd clap after she had sung her piece.
“A blind Sister, with one who has her sight, looks after the workshop. There is but one kind of work here—knitting; it seems to have become mechanical; they knit without thinking, as one breathes without knowing it. Four of the young girls sang a quartette for us, but they knit all the time without ceasing; the blind Sister beat time with her head, but continued to knit; the women in the shop turned toward the singers, listened, and knit. The blind Sisters teach this work. It takes about six weeks to make a skillful knitter, and initiate her into all the mysteries. They earn very little money in this way, however. The wool and patterns are furnished by the contractor, and for the knitting of a pair of child’s socks they will pay but a few cents. It takes a skillful knitter at least four hours to do the work, and then the work must be finished off by some one who sees, the buttons put on, the buttonholes made, and the ornaments attached. In spite of the great industry of the workers the shop earns in this way only about 1,300 francs per year. The great curse which burdens the blind, above all blind women, is that they can not earn a livelihood. It is safe to say that were it not for the Sisters of St. Paul all the persons whom I saw there would have died of hunger. There has been an effort made to find a trade for blind women by which they could at least earn their bread; it has not succeeded. The affliction is so heavy that it seems to paralyze their energies. One trade which seems peculiarly suitable for them, which is learned quickly and requires only a little attention, is that of making lines for fishing, and the like; the tools needed are not costly, and the trade is easy. Many of the blind practice it, and some are very skillful; yet, by the busiest day’s work, they can not earn more than fifteen cents. It is ridiculous to think of furnishing food, clothing and lodgings, on this sum. There has been a great deal of ingenuity spent in trying to teach them trades which require great skill; tact, however, can never take the place of sight. This fact has been forgotten by those who have tried to profit by the services of the blind, rather than put the means of earning their daily bread into their hands. An attempt was made to teach them to turn articles, but the results were curious rather than useful. The trade which they are taught should be as easy as possible; the method should be simple, the tools few and easily handled. Knitting is the model work for them.
“Passing from the work-room we enter the children’s department. There are three classes, corresponding to the ages of the pupils: the intermediate, primary, and the school for the very young. Every one is blind, and as in the work-room, they knit, or rather learn to knit in the intervals between their lessons and play. I find that the same methods for teaching reading and writing are used as are common in institutions for the blind. The instruments for writing are the point, the tablet, and the guide invented by Louis Brille. This system satisfies the intellectual needs of the blind, but does not permit them to enter into communication with persons who have not studied the system. In this system each letter of the alphabet, each figure, each punctuation mark forms in relief a certain number of points. By pressing the ends of the fingers over the projecting points of these letters a blind person will read as rapidly as a person who sees will read the printed volume. Often I have seen the blind follow the lines of one of these books with his left hand, while with his right he reproduced it on M. Brille’s apparatus. A blind man named Foucant invented a very ingenious instrument composed of ten blunt points fastened in an iron triangle, and furnished with a spring. The instrument is mounted on a guide whose ten ends move in the groove of a frame. The apparatus moves on the guide from left to right, as in writing, and the guide moves up and down to mark the lines. The base of six points are placed in juxtaposition, and rest on a sheet of lead, the black surface of which is applied to a sheet of white paper; by striking the head of the point there is obtained a black point. By this means Roman letters are formed, each letter being composed of several points; in one word I counted fifty-eight. By this instrument some of the blind write very rapidly, and it is very valuable to them, as it gives them an opportunity to correspond with those who see; but this writing, clear as it is, has one great drawback; the blind can not read it. The impression produced by the stroke of the point is too feeble to be perceptible to the most delicate touch. After this invention, there still remained the problem of giving the blind a method of writing which could be read by them and by those who see. I believe that the problem has been solved. Count Jay de Beaufort has invented a very simple system. Abandoning the methods of Brille and Foucant, the Roman letters and the English writing, he has adopted a kind of heavy sloping style of writing which resembles the round hand, and is written wrong side to, like engravers’ and lithographers’ work. A little time and attention enables the pupil to master this style. A sheet of paper, which is at the same time solid and soft, is placed on a frame containing a tablet which is marked with deep, straight and longitudinal furrows. By these furrows a straight line is obtained, and the distance between them determines the height of the letters. A light cloth covers the tablet. When the paper is placed on the frame and over the cloth, a letter made on it will of course be raised. That is, the layer of cloth underneath the paper causes each mark to indent the paper without breaking it. With a point or style the letters are traced on the paper. When the page is detached and turned over, the raised letters appear, recognizable to the eyes, and to the touch of the finger. The blind greatly appreciate this system, which is superior to all that have been invented for them, for it is the only one which puts into their hands a sure means of communication with those who see. Count Jay de Beaufort kindly gives lessons at the Institution for Blind Young People, and among the Sisters of St. Paul has trained several teachers, who in their turn are instructing their pupils.
“The pupils that I saw in the children’s classes are not yet large enough to be set at Beaufort’s system. The studies taught there resemble those in all primary schools: Reading, writing, numbers, history and geography. They omit sewing, which is too difficult, and embroidery, which is impossible. Very often they have lessons in composition to teach them to unravel their thoughts and express them with precision, a thing which is difficult for those who see, but which must be very painful for the blind. I wished at one time to assure myself of the degree of advancement in the intermediate class, where the girls were from fourteen to sixteen years old, and I asked the three most advanced pupils to write an essay on a given subject—a walk into the country. Of course the subject was interesting only as it was being written on by the blind, and I hoped to find some expressions which would denote the peculiar feelings which they experienced. But, no; their instruction had come from those who could see, and they employed the language of their teachers, not even modifying it to fit their infirmity. The three essays were very little different in form. They all described a trip which they had taken to the suburbs of Paris. “It was a beautiful morning of spring time.” “It was a beautiful morning in the month of May,” was the general tone; but I shrugged my shoulders in impatience when I read: “What a delightful prospect met our view.” It made me think of a composition prepared by a deaf mute in which he spoke of “The symphony of the song of the birds, and the musical murmur of crystalline springs.” In their desire to appropriate feelings which they can not understand, these poor people try to reproduce a language which to them can mean nothing.
“There is much that is strange about the dreams of the blind. I was struck with this while talking with some young people in the Institute for the Blind. They told me complacently of what they “saw” in their dreams. I was puzzled to know whether the dream of a blind person was like that of one who could see. I have found that the blind who have had their sight up to the age of reason, for a long time preserve the dreams of the time when they could see, as if the stored-up images reproduced themselves in the night. Little by little these images grow feeble, become dull, confused, and end by disappearing after fifteen or twenty years of blindness. As for those who are born blind, their dreams are in black. I convinced myself of this at Saint Paul, where I often talked with three blind Sisters, who were very intelligent. They explained to me that the phenomena of their dreams were borrowed from the sense of touch and hearing, and never from sight.”
