The nurse brought him.  He lay asleep swathed in his swaddling clothes like a mummy in its wrappings, a motionless, mysterious being, but he seemed to his mother beautiful—­more beautiful than anything she had seen in those vague visions of happiness she had indulged in at the convent, which were never to be realized.  She kissed his little purple face, his closed eyelids, his puckered mouth, with a sort of respectful awe.  She was forbidden to fatigue herself.  The wet-nurse, who had been brought from Picardy, drew near with her peasant cap trimmed with long blue streamers; her big, experienced hands took the baby from his mother, she turned him over on her lap, she patted him, she laughed at him.  And the mother-happiness that had lighted up Giselle’s pale face died away.

“What right,” she thought, “has that woman to my child?” She envied the horrid creature, coarse and stout, with her tanned face, her bovine features, her shapeless figure, who seemed as if Nature had predestined her to give milk and nothing more.  Giselle would so gladly have been in her place!  Why wouldn’t they permit her to nurse her baby?

M. de Talbrun said in answer to this question: 

“It is never done among people in our position.  You have no idea, of all it would entail on you—­what slavery, what fatigue!  And most probably you would not have had milk enough.”

“Oh! who can tell?  I am his mother!  And when this woman goes he will have to have English nurses, and when he is older he will have to go to school.  When shall I have him to myself?”

And she began to cry.

“Come, come!” said M. de Talbrun, much astonished, “all this fuss about that frightful little monkey!”

Giselle looked at him almost as much astonished as he had been at her.  Love, with its jealousy, its transports, its anguish, its delights had for the first time come to her—­the love that she could not feel for her husband awoke in her for her son.  She was ennobled—­she was transfigured by a sense of her maternity; it did for her what marriage does for some women—­it seemed as if a sudden radiance surrounded her.

When she raised her infant in her arms, to show him to those who came to see her, she always seemed like a most chaste and touching representation of the Virgin Mother.  She would say, as she exhibited him:  “Is he not superb?” Every one said:  “Yes, indeed!” out of politeness, but, on leaving the mother’s presence, would generally remark:  “He is Monsieur de Talbrun in baby-clothes:  the likeness is perfectly horrible!”

The only visitor who made no secret of this impression was Jacqueline, who came to see her cousin as soon as she was permitted—­that is, as soon as her friend was able to sit up and be prettily dressed, as became the mother of such a little gentleman as the heir of all the Talbruns.  When Jacqueline saw the little creature half-smothered in the lace that trimmed his pillows, she burst out laughing, though it was in the presence of his mother.