I sat down and she began to talk to us about Helen Keller, who was a perfectly normal little American girl. When she was eighteen months old, she became desperately ill. That was down to fate. So then she could no longer see or hear anything at all. Obviously, put like that, it doesn’t sound like such a big deal, and I was worried that Marie was taking a risk, because when it came to the boys in my class, that sort of thing was likely to make them crack up. But in fact, the way she spoke and her tone of voice gave them goosebumps, and the atmosphere was so tragic that no one felt like laughing or sneering at it. The phrase that came to me was that she had the class “wrapped around her little finger”. Actually I was quite pleased with this expression.

At the same time, Marie looked as though she might fall apart in the middle of her sentences, and it was impossible to tell whether this was a sign of great strength or extreme weakness. In this way, she helped us to visualize Helen, who was trapped in silence and darkness until her parents took on a specialist teacher to help her. The most curious thing about it was that she accompanied her presentation with snatches of music on her cello. Marie said it was to represent Helen’s state of mind and to help us imagine what it would be like to live in darkness and silence. The instrument sounded as though it was howling on its own in a dark place. I couldn’t remember ever having heard her play those pieces. Sometimes it seemed to me that the notes were smashing to the ground, like birds falling from an electric wire. It gave us the shivers, that’s all there was to it.

I looked at the teacher, who was in a corner of the room with her hand over her mouth and seemed to be trying to stop herself from weeping or crying out. It was almost frightening how solemn and silent the class was.

Thanks to her teacher, Helen began to make progress. She learnt to tap words in her parents’ hands and when she tapped “daddy” into her father’s hand, well, he burst into tears. Normally it’s comments like this that turn the class into a tribe of barbarians. It’s hard to believe but this time the boys were mesmerized, and the girls too: everyone seemed to be following Marie’s lips, or the bow as it slid over the strings like a tightrope walker on a steel wire.