For the harnessmaker of Coupvray, a village 20 miles east of Paris, it was an unusually busy day, and he was paying no attention to his three-year-old son playing in the shop. Then suddenly the child began to scream, and in an instant the horrified harnessmaker saw what had happened. The awl the boy had been playing with had slipped into his eye. By the end of that week in 1812, little Louis Braille was totally blind.
In time, he was to make the most of his affliction. He lived out his life as a blind, wasted consumptive, but he devised a system of reading and writing that opened the world of letters to millions of sightless people. Last week, marking the 100th anniversary year of his death, the blind were not alone in paying him tribute. With President Auriol leading the way, all of France was singing his praises.
In Paris, Archbishop Maurice Feltin celebrated a special Mass at Notre Dame. At the Sorbonne, more than 100 blind delegates from 22 countries assembled for a memorial in Braille's honor. Meanwhile, the citizens of Coupvray performed a ceremony of their own. They unearthed Braille's remains, and, keeping a relic for themselves, sent the coffin to Paris. There, escorted by a column of blind men, each armed with a white cane, Braille's body was finally placed where Frenchmen felt it rightfully belonged—in the Panthéon, France's Westminster Abbey.
Cumbersome & Slow. In his life, Louis Braille won little acclaim. He was just another blind man, and in those days few people bothered much about the blind. Only one school — the Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris—was making any notable attempt at all to teach the blind to read. But even its method (big letters embossed on paper) was hopelessly cumbersome and slow.
Nevertheless, at 13, Louis Braille was placed in the school, and under the kindly eye of its founder, Valentin Haüy, he did make progress. For one thing, Haüy saw to it that Braille learned to play the organ, and out of the institution's pitiful collection of embossed books, each divided into 20 parts, each part weighing 20 pounds, Haüytaught the boy the rudiments of reading. Though perpetually racked by his cough, Louis proved an able student. "This sad little dark boy," as Haüy called him, became both a teacher and an accomplished musician.
Thieves & Urchins. In spite of this success, Louis remained a tormented soul. He was still the victim of the school's thieving servants ("The blind are prey to anyone who wishes to prey . . ."), still a target for jeering urchins in the street ("The blind are animals to the Parisians"). But worst of all was the thought of being cut off from virtually all books and written knowledge. "How can I arrange to see?" Louis wrote in his clumsy fashion one day. "How is it possible for me to read that which has been set down by the seeing?" Louis decided that the blind could never master a rapid reading of the ordinary alphabet. They needed—"a device that has nothing to do with the eyes."