rue; it deserves to be respected.
She wishes to keep her child: forcibly separated from him at the moment
of birth, she is ever seeking to rejoin that part of herself which a
cruel violence snatched from her, but which has its root in her heart.
When they take it from her to bring it up at a distance, it is a second
separation. The mother and the child weep in common, but their tears
are disregarded. This is not right. These tears, in which we think we
see only weakness, ought not to be disregarded. They show that the
child needs her still. Nursing is not yet finished. Intellectual
nourishment, like physical food, ought in the beginning to be
administered to the child under the form, as it were, of milk, fluid,
tepid, mild, and full of life. Woman alone can so give it. Men expect
too much at once of this new-born babe, whose teeth, scarcely formed,
are painful. They want to give it bread, and they beat it if it does
not bite. In God's name give him more milk: he will drink willingly.

Who will believe some future day that men have thus undertaken to nurse
and feed these sucklings? Ah! leave them alone to women! A lovely
sight to see a child rocked in the arms of a man! Take care, awkward
idiot! It is fragile; handling it in your clownish hands you may break
it.

This is the dispute between the master and child: man imparts science
by methods proper to man, in a state of fixed rules by very precise
classifications, with angular, and, as it were, crystallised forms.
Well! these crystal prisms, as luminous as they may be, wound by their
angles and sharp points. The child, in a soft and tender state,
cannot, for a long time, receive anything which has not the fluidity of
life. The master grows angry and impatient at the slowness of the
pupil, and knows not how to succeed with him. There is but one person
in the world who has the delicate perception of the careful management
which the child requires, and this one person is she who has borne it,
and who forms for ever with it an identical whole. Gestation,
incubation, and education, are three words which are long synonymous.

Much longer than people would believe. The influence of the mother
over the child, whose faculties are developing, is greater and more
decisive than that which she exercised over the suckling infant. I do
not know whether it be indispensable for the mother to feed it from her
breast; but I am very sure it is necessary that she shoul