第16章 The Enchanted Violin (1)(3 / 3)

she made rapid progress and charmed everybody with her prettiness, her grace of manner and her genuine eagerness to please.

when valerius and his wife went to settle in france, they took daae and christine with them."mamma" valerius treated christine as her daughter.as for daae, he began to pine away with homesickness.

he never went out of doors in paris, but lived in a sort of dream which he kept up with his violin.for hours at a time, he remained locked up in his bedroom with his daughter, fiddling and singing, very, very softly.sometimes mamma valerius would come and listen behind the door, wipe away a tear and go down-stairs again on tiptoe, sighing for her scandinavian skies.

daae seemed not to recover his strength until the summer, when the whole family went to stay at perros-guirec, in a far-away corner of brittany, where the sea was of the same color as in his own country.often he would play his saddest tunes on the beach and pretend that the sea stopped its roaring to listen to them.

and then he induced mamma valerius to indulge a queer whim of his.

at the time of the "pardons," or breton pilgrimages, the village festival and dances, he went off with his fiddle, as in the old days, and was allowed to take his daughter with him for a week.

they gave the smallest hamlets music to last them for a year and slept at night in a barn, refusing a bed at the inn, lying close together on the straw, as when they were so poor in sweden.

at the same time, they were very neatly dressed, made no collection, refused the halfpence offered them; and the people around could not understand the conduct of this rustic fiddler, who tramped the roads with that pretty child who sang like an angel from heaven.

they followed them from village to village.