e like a radiant star over their birth seems to
watch over them through life. It may be then, Louise, that motherhood
reserves joys for you which I shall never know. It may be that the
feeling of a mother for the child of a man whom she adores, as you adore
Felipe, is different from that with which she regards the offspring of
reason, duty, and desperation!

Thoughts such as these, which I bury in my inmost heart, add to the
preoccupation only natural to a woman soon to be a mother. And yet, as
the family cannot exist without children, I long to speed the moment
from which the joys of family, where alone I am to find my life, shall
date their beginning. At present I live a life all expectation and
mystery, except for a sickening physical discomfort, which no doubt
serves to prepare a woman for suffering of a different kind. I watch my
symptoms; and in spite of the attentions and thoughtful care with which
Louis' anxiety surrounds me, I am conscious of a vague uneasiness,
mingled with the nausea, the distaste for food, and abnormal longings
common to my condition. If I am to speak candidly, I must confess,
at the risk of disgusting you with the whole business, to an
incomprehensible craving for rotten fruit. My husband goes to Marseilles
to fetch the finest oranges the world produces--from Malta, Portugal,
Corsica--and these I don't touch. Then I hurry there myself, sometimes
on foot, and in a little back street, running down to the harbor, close
to the Town Hall, I find wretched, half-putrid oranges, two for a sou,
which I devour eagerly. The bluish, greenish shades on the mouldy parts
sparkle like diamonds in my eyes, they are flowers to me; I forget
the putrid odor, and find them delicious, with a piquant flavor, and
stimulating as wine. My dear, they are the first love of my life! Your
passion for Felipe is nothing to this! Sometimes I can slip out secretly
and fly to Marseilles, full of passionate longings, which grow more
intense as I draw near the street. I tremble lest the woman should be
sold out of rotten oranges; I pounce on them and devour them as I stand.
It seems to me an ambrosial food, and yet I have seen Louis turn aside,
unable to bear the smell. Then came to my mind the ghastly words of
Obermann in his gloomy elegy, which I wish I had never read, "Roots
slake their thirst in foulest streams." Since I took to this diet, the
sickness has ceased, and I feel much stronger. This depravity of taste
must have