Alcestis Author:Blanche Warre Cornish Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. MELANCOLIA. It was at the door of that theatre three years before, that Josquin had first met Elisabetha and Nodin, when he had arrived there a... more » tired wanderer, to whose imagination, for two months past, it had been a paradise and haven of rest. Josquin was then a runaway, not from the parental roof, but from a big family mansion in Vienna, which to. him was ever after the type of all dull, deadly, impossible existence, the abode of his father's family. The name of Dorioz was only adopted by him when he began his musical career; it had been hismother's ; she had been an artist, a Frenchwoman, Nanine her name. And with this name of his mother, Hasse associated him when he called him a frivolous Frenchman; and it gives him his first claim on our notice, for he was the son of a poet-mother, and therefore marked with favour by the heavenly powers. It was but a dim memory that the boy kept of the sensitive, passionate Nanine, but sometimes an image came before him, pale and faded like an old fresco, a suffering face with tender brown eyes, a dress of saffron and a chaplet between her fingers. And sometimes the same image of a pale woman, with the eyes lighted up while she played on a violin. Josquin's father, Alexander von Gasparein, had been fashionable and dilettante ; he had fallen in love with Nanine in Paris, and though he had incurred the displeasure ofhis family, by honestly making her his wife, he devoted himself, after her early death, to training the little boy she left him to be as like his mother as possible ; and it was not difficult, for he had inherited from her a spark of genius. And yet the father had not intended his son to be an artist; he had thought to lead him just to the point he wished, not considering that it is a very narrow line that...« less