Humbert's childhood and Annabel

Humbert Humbert, born in Paris in 1910 to a Swiss father and English mother, loses his mother to a lightning strike when he is three. He grows up in the luxurious Hotel Mirana on the Riviera, cared for by his aunt Sybil. At thirteen, he falls passionately in love with Annabel Leigh, a girl of his age, during a summer at the beach. Their intense but unconsummated romance is cut short when Annabel dies of typhus four months later, an event that Humbert believes permanently warps his desires, creating a lifelong obsession with nymphets—girls between the ages of nine and fourteen.