Birth and Childhood

Abstract

‘C’est une fille!’ The midwife’s pronouncement was calculated to bring little joy to the exhausted mother or her expectant relatives in seventeenth-century France. Queen Marie de Medicis ‘pleura fort et ferme’ in 1602 on learning that she had supplied France with a princess, Elisabeth, instead of a second heir to the throne and ‘ne s’en pouvait contenter’.1 In 1662 Louis XIV’s first sister-in-law Henriette d’Angleterre (Madame), having impatiently ascertained the female sex of the child that she was in the actual process of bearing, ‘dit qu’il la fallait jeter a la riviere, et en temoigna son chagrin a tout le monde’.2 Outside the royal circle the sense of anti-climax was equally keen. Memorialists recording the birth of a girl into an aristocratic family speak of the ‘great regret’ and ‘ordeal’ of the father, and of the mother’s ‘misfortune’.3 Gazette-writers and other well-wishing versifiers stress that couples will rapidly work to correct their mistake: Mais, n’etant qu’un Amour femelle, Les epoux, redoublant leur zele, Vont travailler sur nouveaux frais A faire un Amour mâle apres.4 Grandmothers for their part seek to guard against a second ‘accident’ by stern injunctions to daughters not to let their unborn offspring ‘devenir fille’.5