Thus places, sounds, and things, all that strikes the senses and forms the character, inclined him to melancholy.

His mother, too, was doomed to live and die in the clouds of melancholy; and to him, from his birth up, she was the only being that existed on the earth, and filled for him the desert.
Like all frail children, Etienne's attitude was passive, and in that he resembled his mother.

The delicacy of his organs was such that a sudden noise, or the presence of a boisterous person gave him a sort of fever.
He was like those little insects for whom God seems to temper the violence of the wind and the heat of the sun; incapable, like them, of struggling against the slightest obstacle, he yielded, as they do, without resistance or complaint, to everything that seemed to him aggressive.

This angelic patience inspired in the mother a sentiment which took away all fatigue from the incessant care required by so frail a being.
Soon his precocious perception of suffering revealed to him the power that he had upon his mother; often he tried to divert her with caresses and make her smile at his play; and never did his coaxing hands, his stammered words, his intelligent laugh fail to rouse her from her reverie.

If he was tired, his care for her kept him from complaining.
"Poor, dear, little sensitive!" cried the countess as he fell asleep tired with some play which had driven the sad memories from her mind, "how can you live in this world?
who will understand you?
who will love you?
who will see the treasures hidden in that frail body?
No one! Like me, you are alone on earth." She sighed and wept.