Without herself suspecting it she was very different from her father, her mother and her brothers; and she could neither show herself to them in the truth of her nature, nor see them in the truth of theirs without suffering. So she did show herself, and she forced herself not to see them. She formed, spontaneously and ingenuously, opinions of those she loved which were in harmony with her own heart and so directly contrary to the evidence that they would have seemed false or flattering in the eyes of a malevolent observer. She would say to her mother, who was so ordinary and material: “Mamma, you are so quick to see;” to her father so cruelly egotistical: “You are so kind, papa,” and to her brother who was so positive, so self-sufficient: “You understand everything,” and she believed it. But the delusion in which this gentle creature imprisoned herself, left her a prey to the most complete moral solitude, and deprived her, to a very dangerous degree, of all judgment of character. She was as ignorant of herself as of others. She languished, unknown to herself, for the society of some one who should have sentiments in harmony with her own. For example, I observed in the first walks that we took together, that she was the only one who could really feel the beauty of the landscape formed by the lake, the woods that surround it, the distant volcanoes and the autumn sky, often more blue than the sky of summer because of the contrast of its azure with the gold of the leaves, and which was sometimes so veiled, so sadly vaporous and distant. She would fall into silence without any apparent reason, but really because her whole being became dissolved into the charm of things about her. She possessed in the state of pure instinct and unconscious sensation the faculty which makes the great poets and the great lovers, namely, the faculty of forgetting oneself, of dispelling oneself, of losing oneself entirely in whatever touches the heart, whether it be a veiled horizon, a silent and yellow-tinted forest, a piece of music or a touching story. I did not, at the beginning of our acquaintance, formulate the contrast between that combative animal her brother and this creature of sweetness and grace who ran up the stone staircases of the château with a step so light that it seemed scarcely poised, and whose smile was so welcoming and yet so timid. I will dare to tell all, since I repeat it, I am not writing in order to paint myself in beautiful colors, but to show myself as I am. I will not say that the desire to make myself beloved by this adorable child, in whose atmosphere I began to feel so much pleasure, was not caused by this contrast between her and her brother.