Near home there was a barber, who knew me by sight; he loved the fiddle, and didn’t play it altogether badly. At the moment I was passing by, he was playing some piece or other. I stopped in the street to listen to him (anything will do as a pretext for an anguished heart); he saw me, and went on playing. One customer and then another came by, in spite of the time and of it being Sunday, to entrust their fates to his razor; but he didn’t attend to them. He missed them without missing a single note; he went on playing for me. This courtesy made me come openly to the shop door, and stand there facing him. At the back, lifting the chintz curtain that hid the back of the house, I saw a dark-haired girl in a light dress, and with a flower in her hair. She was his wife; I think she had seen me from within, and came to thank me with her presence for the favor I was doing her husband. Unless I am mistaken, she even said this with her eyes. As for the husband, he was now playing with more feeling; without noticing his wife, or the customers, with his cheek glued to the instrument, his soul passed into the bow, and he played and played …
Divine art! A group of people was beginning to form, and I left the shop door, and went walking home; I came into the lobby and went noiselessly up the stairs. I have never forgotten this episode of the barber, either because it is linked to a grave moment in my life, or because of this maxim, which compilers of such things may lift and insert in school compendiums if they wish. The maxim is that we forget our good actions only slowly, and in fact never truly forget them. Poor barber! He lost two beards that evening, which were tomorrow’s daily bread, all to be heard by a passer-by. Suppose now that this latter, instead of going away as I did, had stayed at the door listening to him and making eyes at his wife; then, completely given up to his bow and his fiddle, then he really would have played with a desperate intensity. Divine art!