The elder, on the other hand, took care of his things out of mere vanity.
Unconsciously, the mother acquired a habit of scolding Joseph and holding up his brother as an example to him.

Agathe did not treat the two children alike; when she went to fetch them from school, the thought in her mind as to Joseph always was, "What sort of state shall I find him in ?" These trifles drove her heart into the gulf of maternal preference.
No one among the very ordinary persons who made the society of the two widows--neither old Du Bruel nor old Claparon, nor Desroches the father, nor even the Abbe Loraux, Agathe's confessor--noticed Joseph's faculty for observation.

Absorbed in the line of his own tastes, the future colorist paid no attention to anything that concerned himself.

During his childhood this disposition was so like torpor that his father grew uneasy about him.

The remarkable size of the head and the width of the brow roused a fear that the child might be liable to water on the brain.
His distressful face, whose originality was thought ugliness by those who had no eye for the moral value of a countenance, wore rather a sullen expression during his childhood.