“Gentle, sensitive, and very lovely, at fifteen years of age he united the charms of adolescence with the gravity of a more mature age.  He was delicate both in body and in mind.  Through the want of muscular development he retained a peculiar beauty, an exceptional physiognomy, which had, if we may venture so to speak, neither age nor sex.  It was not the bold and masculine air of a descendant of a race of Magnates, who knew nothing but drinking, hunting and making war; neither was it the effeminate loveliness of a cherub couleur de rose.  It was more like the ideal creations with which the poetry of the middle ages adorned the Christian temples:  a beautiful angel, with a form pure and slight as a young god of Olympus, with a face like that of a majestic woman filled with a divine sorrow, and as the crown of all, an expression at the same time tender and severe, chaste and impassioned.

“This expression revealed the depths of his being.  Nothing could be purer, more exalted than his thoughts; nothing more tenacious, more exclusive, more intensely devoted, than his affections....But he could only understand that which closely resembled himself....Every thing else only existed for him as a kind of annoying dream, which he tried to shake off while living with the rest of the world.  Always plunged in reveries, realities displeased him.  As a child he could never touch a sharp instrument without injuring himself with it; as a man, he never found himself face to face with a being different from himself without being wounded by the living contradiction...

“He was preserved from constant antagonism by a voluntary and almost inveterate habit of never seeing or hearing any thing which was disagreeable to him, unless it touched upon his personal affections.  The beings who did not think as he did, were only phantoms in his eyes.  As his manners were polished and graceful, it was easy to mistake his cold disdain on insurmountable aversion for benevolent courtesy...

“He never spent an hour in open-hearted expansiveness, without compensating for it by a season of reserve.  The moral causes which induced such reserve were too slight, too subtle, to be discovered by the naked eye.  It was necessary to use the microscope to read his soul, into which so little of the light of the living ever penetrated.......

“With such a character, it seems strange he should have had friends:  yet he had them, not only the friends of his mother who esteemed him as the noble son of a noble mother, but friends of his own age, who loved him ardently, and who were loved by him in return.....  He had formed a high ideal of friendship; in the age of early illusions he loved to think that his friends and himself, brought up nearly in the same manner, with the same principles, would never change their opinions, and that no formal disagreement could ever occur between them.......