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.