The Grandidiers. from the Germ. by W. Savile (Paperback)

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 III. PROFESSOR BESTVATER. The reader has by this time, I presume, made the acquaintance of Herr George Grandidier sufficiently to have discovered that he was a good kind of man, and reasonable enough, as long as he had his own way, but that if anything went "against the grain" he would work himself into a passion, and mix up things which in reality had no connexion with each other. In this sense, then, I must ask him to take Herr Grandidier's last words, and on no account to assume from them that he considered good Madame Louisa Dorothea and Professor Bestvater were at all too intimate. Far from it! no angel could be purer than she was; and Herr Grandidierwould have given any one a piece of his mind who had dared to entertain the smallest suspicion to the contrary. He had just as little intention of making any imputation on the professor beyond that of being an artist. The professor's bad example, coupled with the indulgence of the mother, had been the ruin of the son. Madame Grandidier had always taken Edward's part, and by her leniency had marred the success of his father's system of education; this seemed quite clear to him, and was the obvious purport of what he had said. The professor was an artist?of that there was no doubt; but who had dubbed him a professor was less clear 1 It certainly was not the Berlin Academy of Arts ! Notwithstanding this, however, the appellation was of more value to him than all his pictures, for by this title, and by a gift he possessed of making after-dinner speeches in prose or verse, he gained his livelihood. He had for years been a welcome guest in certain Berlin circles?inthe houses of rich parvenus who were much given to entertaining, and by whom a person possessed of a title and the gift of eloquence was considered indisp...