Pleasure and Privilege by Olivier Bernier

Author:Olivier Bernier [Olivier Bernier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/United States/Colonial Period
ISBN: 9781640191990
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2018-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

In a world where the arts flourished, science prospered, and there was a lot of gossip to keep up with, it is no wonder that children were sometimes forgotten. Anyone who remembered them and took a good look would have found that there were two different kinds of children: those offspring of the aristocracy, and the others. The others were, on the whole, incomparably better off.

Middle-class children would one day be expected to earn money and further the family fortunes: They had to be educated accordingly. They lived in smaller apartments or houses than children of the nobility, so they were more visible and their parents often noticed them, sometimes even took care of them. They seemed quite real.

Aristocratic children, on the other hand, entered a limbo at birth; they reappeared again just in time to be sent away. They had their uses, of course: The name must go on; they served to keep the mother’s dowry in the family; they were a way of holding onto honors and money: A child of three could be given the colonelcy of a regiment, an abbey, or the reversion of a governorship. They were sometimes necessary for family occasions - baptisms, weddings, funerals - but apart from these brief appearances, they were largely ignored. Children didn’t seem quite human, somehow.

The newborn baby’s disappearance was quite literal: No upper-class mother breastfed her own offspring. Within hours of the birth, the baby was taken off to the country outside Paris and left there for three or four years in the care of a wet nurse. Curiously, it never seems to have occurred to people who considered the lower classes as scarcely human that leaving their children with the creatures might have some effect on them. So the baby was whisked off and shared a peasant woman’s milk with her own child. It was also treated just like the other children there - or worse if, as sometimes happened, the parents neglected to pay the wet nurse her salary.

Very little care was taken to ascertain the nurse’s reliability, so she might be a drunk or careless. Sometimes there was an accident, and the child died, no surprise to anyone, given the generally high rate of infant mortality. There were cases of a child, dropped carelessly, being crippled for life: Talleyrand’s so-called clubfoot resulted from broken bones suffered when he was dropped by his nurse and left unattended afterward.

If the baby survived this exile, he was brought back to the parents’ house at the age of three or four and turned over to a governor or governess who usually had more interesting things to do than look after a young child. There was no question of having one’s offspring racing through one’s salon or eating at one’s table; they were kept upstairs, usually on the same floor as the servants, and safely out of the way. Some really devoted mothers might actually see their children almost every day for five minutes or so, but most were far too busy and would remember to ask after the little boy or girl at least once a month.

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