Birth and Childhood

Abstract

‘C’est une fille!’ The midwife’s pronouncement was calculated to bring little joy to the exhausted mother or her expectant relatives in seventeenth-century France. Queen Marie de Médicis ‘pleura fort et ferme’ in 1602 on learning that she had supplied France with a princess, Elisabeth, instead of a second heir to the throne and ‘ne s’en pouvait contenter’.¹ In 1662 Louis XIV’s first sister-in-law Henriette d’Angleterre (Madame), having impatiently ascertained the female sex of the child that she was in the actual process of bearing, ‘dit qu’il la fallait jeter à la rivière, et en témoigna son chagrin à tout le monde’.² Outside the royal circle the sense of anti-climax was equally keen. Memorialists recording the birth of a girl into an aristocratic family speak of the ‘great regret’ and ‘ordeal’ of the father, and of the mother’s ‘misfortune’.³ Gazette-writers and other well-wishing versifiers stress that couples will rapidly work to correct their mistake:

Mais, n’étant qu’un Amour femelle,

Les époux, redoublant leur zèle,

Vont travailler sur nouveaux frais

A faire un Amour mâle après.⁴

Grandmothers for their part seek to guard against a second ‘accident’ by stern injunctions to daughters not to let their unborn offspring ‘devenir fille’.⁵