According to another theory these longings are mainly a matter of auto-suggestion.  The pregnant woman has received the tradition of such longings, persuades herself that she has such a longing, and then becomes convinced that, according to a popular belief, it will be bad for the child if the longing is not gratified.  Giles considers that this process of auto-suggestion takes place “in a certain number, perhaps even in the majority of cases."[184]

The Duchess d’Abrantes, the wife of Marshal Junot, in her Memoires gives an amusing account of how in her first pregnancy a longing was apparently imposed upon her by the anxious solicitude of her own and her husband’s relations.  Though suffering from constant nausea and sickness, she had no longings.  One day at dinner after the pregnancy had gone on for some months her mother suddenly put down her fork, exclaiming:  “I have never asked you what longing you have!” She replied with truth that she had none, her days and her nights being occupied with suffering.  “No envie!” said the mother, “such a thing was never heard of.  I must speak to your mother-in-law.”  The two old ladies consulted anxiously and explained to the young mother how an unsatisfied longing might produce a monstrous child, and the husband also now began to ask her every day what she longed for.  Her sister-in-law, moreover, brought her all sorts of stories of children born with appalling mother’s marks due to this cause.  She became frightened and began to wonder what she most wanted, but could think of nothing.  At last, when eating a pastille flavored with pineapple, it occurred to her that pineapple is an excellent fruit, and one, moreover, which she had never seen, for at that time it was extremely rare.  Thereupon she began to long for pineapple, and all the more when she was told that at that season they could not be obtained.  She now began to feel that she must have pineapple or die, and her husband ran all over Paris, vainly offering twenty louis for a pineapple.  At last he succeeded in obtaining one through the kindness of Mme. Bonaparte, and drove home furiously just as his wife, always talking of pineapples, had gone to bed.  He entered the room with the pineapple, to the great satisfaction of the Duchess’s mother.  (In one of her own pregnancies, it appears, she longed in vain for cherries in January, and the child was born with a mark on her body resembling a cherry—­in scientific terminology, a naevus.) The Duchess effusively thanked her husband and wished to eat of the fruit immediately, but her husband stopped her and said that Corvisart, the famous physician, had told him that she must on no account touch it at night, as it was extremely indigestible.  She promised not to do so, and spent the night in caressing the pineapple.  In the morning the husband came and cut up the fruit, presenting it to her in a porcelain bowl.  Suddenly, however, there was a revulsion of feeling; she felt that she