An engraving of a hurdy-gurdy player and a young boy playing a flute and beating a small drum. The two players are looking directly at the viewer and a message from the hurdy-gurdy player is conveyed by the verses in French below the image: "De tous les malheeureux mon estat est le pire / Assez gaillard pourtant parmy les aultres geuex / Ie suis á l'hospital comme dans mon empire // Ou ie vis plus contant et a mon aise qu'eux / Mais vng fascheux chagrin me ronge la ceruelle / Sest qu'il me fault laisser la vie et la vielle // Mariette ex Cum Priuilegio. // Rabel in C. David.f.", which translates as: "Of all poor men my state is the worst, although I'm robust enough compared to other beggars. In the hospital it's as if I'm in my empire where I live happier and more at ease than they. But a horrid grief gnaws at my brain. It's that I must leave life and the hurdy-gurdy".

The original print by Rabel - which in turn was inspired by an etching from Jacques Callot's series Les Gueux - has only two brief lines of text related to the player's physical infirmity.

This print is inlaid in folio 13 of the Dutch Drolls album (RCIN 970362). This album originally contained 99 prints on 72 folios, with the prints numbered 1-99 in pencil in a nineteenth-century hand on the mount sheet above each print. A number of other prints were added later, mostly on the versos of the existing sheets and on two additional folios at the end of the album (fols 73-74), probably during the nineteenth century.

For more information see Mark McDonald, The Print Collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo. I: Ceremonies, Costumes, Portraits and Genre, 3 vols, Royal Collection Trust 2017, part of The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo: A Catalogue Raisonné, cat. no. 367.