Oscar!"

CHAPTER X. GISELLE'S CONSOLATION

The arrival of the expected Enguerrand hindered Giselle from pleading
Fred's cause as soon as she could have wished. Her life for twenty-four
hours was in great danger, and when the crisis was past, which M. de
Talbrun treated very indifferently, as a matter of course, her first cry
was "My baby!" uttered in a tone of tender eagerness such as had never
been heard from her lips before.

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 d