The red room becomes for the young mother a palace of delight. It was a charity to visit a relative, friend, or neighbour when recovery was assured, and very few women would risk losing paradise for such a trifle. And so the room is never empty. There the lady holds a “regal court,” or what we, with less enthusiasm, should call a woman’s club. We may fancy how they chatter, how often the husband is hauled over the coals, how they cry shame on him. “What! this shabby dress! He wouldn’t give you this or that? Ah, the old skinflint!” There prevailed in Italy the very amiable practice of sending all sorts of little presents—flowers, fruit, trinkets, nicknacks. The young mother was entitled also to a little tray, painted or chased, of which charming specimens exist, real works of art. All these presents came in a heap. With his grave and masculine brush, Domenico Ghirlandajo has depicted for us a scene at Santa-Maria-Novella: a maidservant is presenting a cordial on the tray, a friend is amusing herself with the baby, a high-born dame is making her entry in great dignity, a message-girl is bringing in a superb basket of fruit. It is a constant stream of visitors, wonderfully picturesque. As to the husband, he has disappeared among his occupations and his worries; he reappears a fortnight later, to return these civilities with a grand dinner. The child is to belong to the mother until the eighth year; an exquisite period in which the heart will expand. It is as she clasps in her arms this feeble little creature, this messenger from a new world, that a woman comprehends love; life appears to her all bathed in a mysterious light, golden, and warm, and glad. All women, whether cultivated or illiterate, have this sensation. For some time, perhaps for several years, a mother can thus find the restfulness that springs from happiness, and, in making all things minister to her inward joy, she steeps her soul in a felicity to which she foresees no end. No woman, then, ought to deprive herself of the first smiles of her child, his first prattlings, his divine fondlings, which Raphael has depicted and which Erasmus considered so beautiful a thing that he made them a theme for rhetorical exercises. But from the very first the world interposed with tyrannous hand. In old times a woman had been permitted to nurse her child; suckling constituted a part of the maternal functions, approved by moralists and physicians. But now the fashion had changed; the cry of milk-sellers offering milk for the nursery was added to the morning din in the streets of Paris. The smaller gentry and even a certain number of country magnates[64] sent their children out to nurse; and to meet this need, human cattle-rearing became a recognised agricultural industry, which flourished exceedingly, though it was rather speculative for those engaged in it, for the children were sometimes left in settlement of the bill.