Her sex alone makes her weak; she suffers from nervous troubles, inexplicable things which in a man, or even in another woman⁠—a woman whose nephew or cousin he was⁠—would bring a smile to the lips of this stalwart young man. But he cannot bear to see her suffer whom he loves. The young nobleman who, like Saint-Loup, has a mistress acquires the habit, when he takes her out to dine, of carrying in his pocket the valerian “drops” which she may need, of ordering the waiter, firmly and with no hint of sarcasm, to see that he shuts the doors quietly and not to put any damp moss on the table, so as to spare his companion those discomforts which himself he has never felt, which compose for him an occult world in whose reality she has taught him to believe, discomforts for which he now feels pity without in the least needing to understand them, for which he will still feel pity when other women than she shall be the sufferers. Saint-Loup’s mistress⁠—as the first monks of the Middle Ages taught Christendom⁠—had taught him to be kind to animals, for which she had a passion, never moving without her dog, her canaries, her lovebirds; Saint-Loup looked after them with motherly devotion and treated as brutes the people who were not good to dumb creatures.