Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [46]
Doctor Vespa says you will give birth before you think. I don’t exactly know when I am due. I am always made to worry. Everyone tells me I should be wary of the eighth month, which, thank goodness, will soon be over. Meanwhile I’ve ordered the hard, embroidered mattress we will use when I deliver. I’ve already hired the woman who will watch my baby. God willing, I’ll be well enough to provide the rest.31
Lucia felt very strongly about nursing the baby herself. In the past, the infants of the aristocracy had been put in the care of wet-nurses. Lucia’s generation, influenced by the new literature on childbirth and childcare generated by the ideas of the Enlightenment, was interested in a closer, more intimate relationship between mother and child. In Lucia’s case it was not merely an intellectual point of view. She yearned to breastfeed her child in order to fulfil the maternal instinct she felt growing in her. In this respect, she had a strong ally in Doctor Vespa, who, like many male obstetricians of the time, wanted to reduce the role of midwives and wet-nurses—in large measure to enhance his own authority and control. “He is encouraged by the fact that milk serum has started to ooze out of my right breast first,” she informed Paolina.32 Her sister had mixed feelings about breastfeeding her second-born; she remembered it had been a rather painful experience the first time. If she decided to go ahead anyway, she explained, she would probably breastfeed only the first few days, and then pass the child to the care of a wet-nurse. Lucia, under the influence of Doctor Vespa, argued against the idea of switching midway.
If you are not willing to raise the child with your own milk all the way, then you should think twice since changing to an inferior milk after such a short while would certainly be harmful for the child; and to suddenly interrupt your breastfeeding after allowing the milk to reach its natural flow would be harmful to you.33
As to why this was so, Lucia was forced to admit Doctor Vespa was “rather short on details.” Memmo had raised his daughters to be always curious and inquisitive in order to improve their knowledge. But the doctor simply said Paolina’s plan was “folly” and that she should not go ahead with it and that Lucia should tell her so. “I asked him if he could explain to me the reason behind his belief, as we are used to doing all the time, but he merely replied that we should just trust him because what he said was solidly grounded.”
By the end of March, Paolina, being one month ahead of her sister, was about to deliver at any moment. Lucia was in a state of utter fretfulness. She filled her letters with short, nervous questions. How was Paolina feeling? When did she expect to give birth? Was she in any pain? What had she decided to do about her milk? Was the bloodletting reducing her blood discharges? It is hard to imagine anyone being more anxious over a sister’s impending delivery. “Now I’m sure of it,” she wrote on 20 March, unable to stand the excitement any longer. “I know you’ve delivered. But what have you delivered?…Oh I am so happy…And you are such a strong girl I needn’t worry.” She assumed Paolina was breastfeeding the first few days, and she urged her once again not to give up. “I would be so happy if you decided to continue giving your own milk to the little baby,” she insisted. “It is better for him as it comes from the same body that has already nurtured him. It’s lighter, more easily digestible than the one of a stranger, whose milk thickens over time.”34
It turned out Paolina had not yet given birth when Lucia wrote her this letter but she had by the time she received it: another girl was born and she was christened Isabella, like their mother.*7
Despite the fatigue, Paolina made the effort of sending a short note to her sister a few hours after delivery in order to reassure her. In one of those curious double-takes caused by the slowness and irregularity of communications, Lucia could