Connecticut western news., 1876-10-13
A Blind Murderer.

There are grim dramatic elements in the horrible tragedy which took place in this city, says the New York Herald, when blind musician killed his in- fant son, fatally wounded his wife and shot himself dead. Jules Blank, the murderer and suicide, who leaves a let ter accusing himself alone, had, it ap- pears, been tenderly reared, but loved a life of adventure, and followed this i'm pulse by leading @ seafaring life until disease came and yelled his eyes with a " drop serere." He was married, and as the blind professors income was but scanty his wife became @ chorus singer at the Academy of Music and afterward followed the rollicking fortunes of Mile. Aimee's opera 6oufe, occasional ly getting small parts. The blind. and disappointed man and the light hearted young woman, with her head full of airy tunes, were not calculated to pull pleasantly along through life. So a weird, mockirg picture steals before our eyes. The gleaming of many lights, the its widest freaks, the ring of the merry chorus, the intoxication of tumultuous applause are in the foreground. Back of that we see the blind husband grop- ing through his little room, 8 prey to the b1tterest of bangs. He is jealous and he is blind. Jealousy does not want eyes to picture it's fancied wrong, but 1t needs all the senses to blot the visions out. 'l have loved my wife and she loved me, too," he wrote, but the thought that must have wrought most on his disordered mind was, can she, the young, the gay, no doubt the tempted, still love me, the poor and blind9 How the blackest thoughts dis torted themselves into fiendish shapes we can dimly imagine. There was for him no awaking from this nightmare of the brain. He waR blind, and he could never hope to start from his imaeinings as Richard springs from the rack where on he has tossed in the blindness of sleep to cry:
 "Bave mercy, Jesu Soft did but dream '-
 Ben Johnson, in his best comedy. gives picture of husband, jealous without cause, who asks, while his fin gers tremble: "Which of them kissed my wife frst2" There we can laugh, for we know he IS a victim to busy brain, and can be undeceived. Jules Blank AAsttse IAfsEO ti tiSI1bASSA AOU ta i1tGlS AS these thoughts dropped to his brain, but he felt that with his wife in all the facti- tious dazzle of her life, amid blandish- ment and fiattery-in the furnace of the passions, as it were-he had no safe guard for his honor; he was blind. Wretch that he was, he never dreamed once that he could trust the woman who washed the paint from her cheeks and stole from the stage to their humble home where her child and her husband waited. He was blind to the world with out and all eyes for tho grinning demon within. Coward, he could not trust as he could not watch; and the demon told him he could murder 'ro look from him and his bloody work to the picture of John Milton, old aud blind, and en- during his domestic infeiicities while he gave to the world the incomparable l fruits of his great poetic soul, is like shifting the g ance from he'll to heaven.
 Happy 1t is tbat such & crime as the
 blind musician.s can le contrasted be- fore weak humanity with the great blind
 singers blameless life.