"Cleophanes, the unworthy son of the excellent Themisto- cles did not receive his mother's milk and, for the same reason, Xantippos, the son of Pericles; Caligula, son of Germanicus; Commodus, son of Marcus Aurelius; Domitian, son of Vespasian; and Absalom, son of David, whom I ought to have mentioned first, all degenerated. Is it a wonder if Aegisthus was an adulterer? He was suckled by a goat! A wolf gave suck to Romulus, whence came the cruel instinct to inveigh against his brother Remus and to ravish the Sabine women as though they were just so many ewes."
I understood at once. I knew my Cloridia's child-rearing repertoire by heart. Her passion, in the hours that followed every successful confinement, was to wax eloquent concerning the extreme importance of feeding the newborn infant at its mother's breast.
"You will agree with me, Princess, that the bond of filial love arises from having been engendered, but is increased by nursing the child with one's own milk," she explained in gentle, persuasive tones.
La Strozzi uttered not a word.
"Examples of this include Graccus, the valorous Roman," continued Cloridia, "whom they arranged to be met first at the gates of Rome on his return from the wars in Asia, by his mother and his nurse at the same time. Thereupon, he brought forth two gifts which he had taken care to procure during the campaign: a silver ring for his mother and a golden girdle for his nurse. To the mother, who was pained to find herself placed behind the nurse, Graccus replied: "You, mother, made me after bearing me nine months in your womb. But, once born, you banished me from your bosom and from your bed. This nurse received me, fondled me and served me, not for nine months but for three full years."
The Princess remained silent.
"This discourse by a pagan should make us blush," insisted Cloridia, "for being born Christians, we make the most perfect profession of faith, founded upon our belief and acts of charity; and if we are taught to love even our enemies, how much more does our faith teach us to love our children?"
"My dear," responded a tired but determined voice, which I imagined to be that of the Princess, "I have already suffered enough for this little one, and for his three brothers, without exhausting myself even further by giving him my milk."
"Oh, listen to me, I beg of you," insisted my indomitable consort, "if only you were to consider the pleasure of which you are depriving your child in banishing him from his mother's bosom, I do not believe for one moment that you would do this. For little ones, there is no pastime as sweet in the whole wide world; no comedy comparable to those tears of impatience and those sudden movements upon touching the breast, and at last, that joyful laugh when the infant opens its mouth and sinks its nose and its whole face into its mother's warm bosom."
The tender images evoked by my beautiful midwife of a spouse did not, however, seem to move the noblewoman.
"Why should I make such a sacrifice," she replied with a hint of impatience in her voice, "only to receive kicks as soon as he's able to make his first footsteps and later ingratitude and presumption when he has grown to manhood?"
"But this is precisely why children nowadays have so little love for their parents," Cloridia dared hotly to venture. "God so decrees that the lack of love at their beginnings reaps scant love once they have grown up."
"My husband has already hired a wet-nurse a long time ago. He has sent for her and she will soon be here. Now, leave me, I wish to rest," said the Princess, brusquely dismissing her.
When Cloridia emerged, red in the face and with clenched fists, she almost failed to notice me. She went rapidly down the back stairs; I followed her. Once we reached the kitchen, she exploded.
"Ah, the politics of modern childbearing!" she thundered, causing several scullery-maids to turn sharply towards us.
"Cloridia, what has happened?" they asked curiously.
"Oh, nothing! It is just that the ineradicably fertile fashion has sprung up," she moved, accompanying her words with great gestures and grimaces, "that mothers who are not of the common herd squeamishly disdain to give their breast to their own offspring, who've so long annoyed them by weighing down their wombs."
Once they had grasped the argument, the scullery-maids began to laugh heartily. One of them, whom I knew to have a two-year-old daughter, drew one breast out from her blouse and squeezed the milk from it, which sprayed forth, showing that she was still nursing her little one at the breast.
"Does that seem vulgar to you?" she exclaimed, laughing broadly.
"Adieu, little ones, adieu!" raged on Cloridia, seeming almost a prophetess and waving her arms as she paced the kitchen, striving to release her suppressed fury at the Princess of Forano. "Those who bore you can no longer bear you, for you made yourselves too odious with that all-too-tiresome pregnancy; too painful did you prove in that pressing child-bearing. The European infant is thus constrained to begin his life's journey on an unknown poop, when 'tis not a bestial one, and to wander on his peregrinations under a degenerate star, depending upon an alien nutriment. Maternal nature, thus disappointed, not to say abjured, is cast aside and milk flees the paps for fear of some deformity or the tedium of discomfort. Here we find the origin of the discrepancies between offspring and parents. The nobility of filial sentiments degenerates even from the cradle when the feeding's wrong. The spirit's genius is weakened when the body's abandoned to bovine rusticity. With milk, we drink down inclinations, and these will be sordid when their origin is a cowshed!"
It was not the first time that I had witnessed such a scene. The tale was forever repeating itself: whenever Cloridia assisted at the confinement of a noblewoman, the joy of the birth always gave way to her anxiety to use every means to convince the new mother to give the infant her own milk, without having recourse to wet-nurses, or worse, to goats or cows. All to no avaiclass="underline" what for a woman of the people was the most natural thing in the world (among other things, for economic reasons) became an unthinkable and outrageous chore in the eyes of a countess. And my Cloridia, who had herself given suck to our two daughters for the first three years of their lives, suffered from seeing this more than she could say and was ill-resigned to it.
After at last relinquishing her indignation with a sigh of resignation, she turned to me and, with a beautiful smile, embraced me.
"Where had you got to? Hardly had the Princess lost her waters than I sent for the little ones, but I urgently needed help and that poor lad, that Buvat, almost died of fear on seeing blood."
"I know, forgive me, but I have an excellent piece of news," said I, wishing to inform her of the agreement I had reached with Atto concerning the dowry for our little girls.
"Forget it, you will tell me later. Now let us put on our costumes, I would not miss seeing the bride for anything in the world."
We retainers and servants of the Villa Spada had indeed been permitted by the Major-Domo, Don Paschatio Melchiorri, to attend the wedding, but attired in peasants' fine festive costumes specially made up for us. Thus, we would provide a rustic setting for the celebration of the nuptials, in perfect harmony with our rural setting.