Page:Romain Rolland Handel.djvu/9



HIS LIFE

Handel family was of Silesian origin. The grandfather, Valentine Handel, was a master coppersmith at Breslau. The father, George Handel, was a barber-surgeon, originally attached to the service of the armies of Saxony, then of Sweden, later of the French Emperor, and finally in the private service of Duke Augustus of Saxony. He was very rich, and purchased at Halle in 1665 a beautiful house, which is still in existence. He was married twice; in 1643 he married a widow of a barber, who was ten years older than himself (he had six children by her); and in 1683, the daughter of a pastor who was thirty years younger than he was: he had four children by her, of which the second was George Frederick.

Both parents sprang from that good old bourgeois