When the crisis came, I summoned all my powers of resistance, and braced
myself so well for suffering, that I bore the horrible agony--so they
tell me--quite marvelously. For about an hour I sank into a sort of
stupor, of the nature of a dream. I seemed to myself then two beings--an
outer covering racked and tortured by red-hot pincers, and a soul at
peace. In this strange state the pain formed itself into a sort of halo
hovering over me. A gigantic rose seemed to spring out of my head
and grow ever larger and larger, till it enfolded me in its blood-red
petals. The same color dyed the air around, and everything I saw was
blood-red. At last the climax came, when soul and body seemed no longer
able to hold together; the spasms of pain gripped me like death itself.
I screamed aloud, and found fresh strength against this fresh torture.
Suddenly this concert of hideous cries was overborne by a joyful
sound--the shrill wail of the newborn infant. No words can describe that
moment. It was as though the universe took part in my cries, when all at
once the chorus of pain fell hushed before the child's feeble note.

They laid me back again in the large bed, and it felt like paradise to
me, even in my extreme exhaustion. Three or four happy faces pointed
through tears to the child. My dear, I exclaimed in terror:

"It's just like a little monkey! Are you really and truly certain it is
a child?"

I fell back on my side, miserably disappointed at my first experience of
motherly feeling.

"Don't worry, dear," said my mother, who had installed herself as
nurse. "Why, you've got the finest baby in the world. You mustn't excite
yourself; but give your whole mind now to turning yourself as much as
possible into an animal, a milch cow, pasturing in the meadow."

I fell asleep then, fully resolved to let nature have her way.

Ah! my sweet, how heavenly it was to waken up from all the pain
and haziness of the first days, when everything was still dim,
uncomfortable, confused. A ray of light pierced the darkness; my heart
and soul, my inner self--a self I had never known before--rent the
envelope of gloomy suffering, as a flower bursts its sheath at the first
warm kiss of the sun, at the moment when the little wretch fastened on
my breast and sucked. Not even the sensation of the child's first cry
was so exquisite as this. This is the dawn of motherhood, this is the
_Fiat lux_!

Here is happiness, joy ineffable, though it comes not