The countess, compassionate to all true love, promised to do her best, and pursued the affair so warmly that at the birth of her second son she did obtain from her husband a “dot” for the young girl, who was married soon after to Beauvouloir.  The “dot” and his savings enabled the bonesetter to buy a charming estate called Forcalier near the castle of Herouville, and to give his life the dignity of a student and man of learning.

Comforted by the kind physician, the countess felt that to her were given joys unknown to other mothers.  Mother and child, two feeble beings, seemed united in one thought, they understood each other long before language could interpret between them.  From the moment when Etienne first turned his eyes on things about him with the stupid eagerness of a little child, his glance had rested on the sombre hangings of the castle walls.  When his young ear strove to listen and to distinguish sounds, he heard the monotonous ebb and flow of the sea upon the rocks, as regular as the swinging of a pendulum.  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.  The graceful pose of her child lying on her knees made her smile sadly.  She looked at him long, tasting one of those pleasures which are a secret between mothers and God.  Etienne’s weakness was so great that until he was a year and a half old she had never dared to take him out of doors; but now the faint color which tinted the whiteness of his skin like the petals of a wild rose, showed that life and health were already there.