Louis D'Aboville spent much of his early life between the four walls of his bedroom due to a constant series of illness.
The D'Aboville household lived in Saurange Manor, situated in the countryside on the outskirts of Lyon. Saurange Manor was a large estate built by Albert D'Aboville's great-grandfather in 1747. It had the neoclassical stylings of the era, with a three-story central building flanked by wings from the east and west. True to the style, Collame Manor was a streamlined building wrapped by a colonnade. Much of Saurange's interior retained the neoclassical sensibilities installed during its conceptions, but many of the living quarters were altered according to contemporary trends. During Louis' residence at Saurange, bedrooms and studies adhered to French Empire design and were overflowing with drapery and broad furnishings. Louis described that the deep-blue drapes undulating from his bed made him feel as if he were being devoured by a massive beast.
Saurange Manor also boasted a marvelous garden that surrounded the house for a square mile at its creation. It was added to by later generations, but these additions were continuously destroyed and redone as none compared to the original garden. If you were to travel up the long drive to Saurange Manor, you would be welcomed by a long fountain fed by arcs of water at three-foot intervals. Massive, reaching elm trees framed the house and were trailed by rosemary. During the infancy of Albert and Vivien's marriage, they were known to host numerous festivities in their gardens which were renowned for their elegance and thrill. The gardens proved to be a source of fascination for the D'Aboville children; Evelyn, a homebody which would seem most at home in the library, spent her days wandering the gardens in deep contemplation.
That is not to say Louis spent much time in the grandiose gardens outside his window. He actually got very little use out of them. Louis was a child of ill-constitution, which is to say that he spent much of his time bed ridden. It is unsure when he contracted tuberculosis (known then as consumption or mal de vivre), but since the early age of six, his symptoms were so severe that he was restricted to his bed for months. It was truly a miracle if he were able to make it out to the antechamber of his room at least once a week. In this year, so sure was his family that he was going to die that they kept a small coffin in the cellar. The coffin was supposedly costumed order. The craftsman who was commissioned to build the coffin visited the D'Aboville's to get Louis' measurements supposedly came on one of the few days in which Louis was lucid, meaning that the boy was pitifully aware of the creation of his own coffin.
During the early years of his illness, Vivien would sit at Louis' bedside and read to him for roughly an hour. Camille, later reflecting on this exchange, observed that her mother would pick books at random from the library, so the suitability of these works for a dying child is questioned. Judging from the pre-1810 books recovered from the Saurange Manor library, Louis could have been listening to stories ranging from Greek epics to books on geography. In 1824, Louis recalled in a letter to a friend that "I was seldom conscious in those early days battling consumption... I know not was read to me, but I remember they manifested in my dreams as nearly-human beasts with odd numbers of limbs and twisted heads putting me through intense bodily torture... all this was accentuated by the voice of Mother, distorted to the point in which it had become only a low, grating drone."
The toll consumption took on Louis' body is seen in comparison with his sister, Camille, who was nearly the same age as him but was allowed a normal childhood. At ten-years-old, Camille was obviously taller than Louis, with a rounded physique and a warm coloration. Louis, however, had hollowed cheeks and sallow skin. During the long period of remission after his initial illness in 1810, Louis spent much his time by the window, watching his sisters play in the garden. He felt immeasurable envy as he watched them frolic from what he felt to be an 'enclosure'.
From roughly the age of 7 to the age of 8, he had a strong disdain for his sisters. Camille especially made frequent visits to him on his sick bed but Louis would outright refuse to respond to her. He only ever uttered words to his mother and the nurse who was later hired to take care of him. He had little opportunity to talk to his father since he seldom visited his son. It wasn't until his mother decided to teach him piano in tandem with Camille that he finally warmed up to her. They would sit side by side at the piano, Louis playing the lower notes while Camille played everything above middle C. It should be noted that Vivien was reported to noticeably flinch during these lessons whenever her children's hands neared in part that she viewed Louis' illegitimacy as a disease of its own.
It was around this time when Louis began composing his first stories. A tutor, Monsieur Eugene Gigot, was hired to instruct Louis in everything a young man of his status needed a basic knowledge of: arithmetic, geography, history, and Louis' favorite, literature. He was a difficult student to teach according to his tutor's resignation letter four years after her took the job. Louis did not pay attention to anything that was not immediately interesting to him and he did not excel in any subject. There was an exception in the former of those two statements; Louis had a great love of literature and would study stories dutifully. He was known to make bold interpretations which, according to Gigot, were insidious. M. Gigot found Louis' interpretations of Descartes and Voltaire especially troubling. Louis was most likely not malicious, but whether it was because of irritation or ignorance, M. Gigot despised the boy. At this point, Louis began to feel frustrated with what he was reading, as he felt like most authors barely scratched the surface of ideas he found new and interesting. This was most likely because his interpretations were in no means related to the authors' intent, but that is more a subjective matter. In any case, he began writing his own stories to make up for the deficit in the works he studied. His first work as a child has not survived the tests of time, but according to M. Gigot's report to Louis's parents, he thought they were "lamentations of an ill mind and body living within self-pity." Unsurprisingly, Albert and Vivien were neither fazed nor offended by this description of their son and his artistic endeavors.
Louis, upon seeing his teacher's reaction to his writing, began other works with the intention of pleasing M. Gigot. He decided that the stories had to be deeper to grab the attention of an adult so used to reading the works of great philosophers. He couldn't have been more wrong. As he refined his already revised stories, they became more and more unbearable to Gigot. Gigot claimed that Louis lacked natural talent, yet worked and worked as if he had it in him. If Louis knew that Gigot felt like this, he did not show it. His resilience (and perhaps ignorance) pushed him forward.
These stories were also shared with his family (minus Albert, who did not even feign interest in the life of his son). Louis would gather his mother and sister into the sitting room. Vivien wrote that on one such of these occasions, Louis read a story about robbers who had made their way into high society, but when their neighbors began to suspect foul play, they ate all their gold and tried escaping by swimming across the river. They were unsuccessful, as their bellies full of gold dragged them to the river-floor and drowned them. Evelyn, who was then five-years-old, reportedly burst into tears upon the end of this story and would not stop for several hours. Despite the violent nature and gruesome descriptions in his stories, Vivien was somewhat entertained by them. She wrote, "Louis' stories are like the call of a crow in infancy; the sound remains harsh and discordant, but you can't help feeling glad that it exists at all."
Louis was somewhat of a prolific writer at this age. While very few manuscripts of this early writing are available, Camille remarked upon his obsession in a letter she sent to a friend later on in life. "My brother was an odd character, ever since infancy." She wrote, "He would sit for hours writing while moving very little. When he would finish a page, he would either stack it in a messy pile to his write or throw it in the fireplace without a second glance and set to rewriting it again." It seems that Louis' connection to writing at this point in his life was more frightening to his family than anything else.
