accustom herself to wake up from sleep at her nursling's slightest cry; she must learn to dress it, which is altogether a special process, as French babies do not wear petticoats, but are bound up with a square piece of thick flannel, called a "lange," into a tight, motionless bundle; and, above all, she must never call her mistress "you." No servant in a decent family in France is ever allowed to speak to her masters otherwise than in the third person; instead of saying "do you want me," she must adopt the respectful form, "does madame want me;" nothing shocks more in a servant's mouth than the familiar use of "you." But, difficult as this transition appears, the French are so naturally imitative that even an unlicked cowkeeper often gets through it rapidly, and picks up with surprising facility the external neatness and deferential form of phrase which all good Paris servants possess in so marked a degree.

A large number of these nurses are, however, hopeless monsters, with whom no improvement is possible; perhaps even the majority of them are in that category. Stupid as turkeys, dirty, idle, and often thieves as well, they remain peasants all over, are impatiently supported during the duration of their nursing, and are joyfully discharged the moment the child is able to be weaned. Some of them quietly cut up damasked napkins to make them into nightcaps, or privately send a monthly hamper home filled with the products of silent depredation. But if the nurse is a good-hearted, honest woman, with a trifling supply of intelligence and sense, she quickly attains a position of comfort in her place. Living in constant intimacy with her mistress, sleeping in her room, going out with her every day, often spending her evenings working with her by the side of the baby's cradle, she generally finishes by acquiring her regard, and when the "nourriture" is finished, and she goes back to her village, the parting is often tearful and sad. In cases like these she grows rich; in addition to her wages, which vary between the two extremes of 30s. and 47. a month, according to the means of her masters and her own merit and good looks (27. 8s. is the ordinary rate), she receives a quantity of presents. She is entirely dressed at her mistress's expense, and at the christening and the first tooth every member of the family gives her ten or twenty francs. A year's nursing in a good place may put 60l. or 701. into her pocket, for she has no outlay for clothes, and then she can satisfy the great longing of a nurse's heart, and buy herself a house when she goes home.

Some of the most successful and prolific members of the profession perform as many as four or five separate nursings, and receive every year a gift from each of their old masters. But the career is not always so productive. In a number of houses, especially amongst the shopkeepers and clerks, they get nothing but their bare wages, and are obliged to do part of the house-work; the really good places are, of course, rare. And in addition to the uncertainty of the sort of family they may fall in, there are all the risks of accident. Numbers of unlucky women come up to Paris to be hired, and either wait vainly for a place for six or eight weeks at their own expense, or lose their milk, and are discharged almost as soon as they are engaged, in which case they receive absolutely nothing, their first month's wages being absorbed by the office fee.

The nurses of Paris are not exclusively French; the number of strangers there is so considerable that foreign nurses may be seen as

well. Pasiégas, from the mountains of Santander, with their two long tails of plaited hair swinging in the wind, and with a band of black velvet on their green serge skirts for every child they have suckled; Swiss peasants, with their knot of black ribbon on the top of their heads; Neapolitans, with their yellow satin bodices and their coiffures of heavy gold pins, may all be seen in the Champs Elysées; but though these costumes are pretty and effective, they want the bright cleanliness of the white cap and apron of the Bourguignonne.

In addition to the private offices which have existed in Paris since 1821 for the distribution of nurses, the direction of the hospitals (which is in the hands of the municipality) has a large and well-organised administration for the same purpose. But while nurses for home service can be obtained from this special department, it occupies itself more particularly in placing out children at nurse in the country. The practice of sending babies into the villages is not only employed for foundlings and for the other children who are in the care of the municipal corporations of the various towns of France, but it is also adopted to a considerable extent by the poorer classes, and by mothers who, having out-door occupations of their own, cannot keep their children with them. In order to facilitate the choice of nurses for this large class of infants, the direction of the hospitals of Paris keeps a staff of corresponding doctors in every canton for one hundred miles round the capital, whose duty it is to inspect and select the women who offer themselves as candidates for nurslings, to visit the children confided to them, to attend them in case of illness, and to send in a monthly report on their condition. The nurses and children are also under the surveillance of a special inspector appointed in each sous-préfecture. The cost of this service is paid by the town of Paris; it amounts to about 10,000l. a year. But, notwithstanding all this care, real or apparent, the mortality amongst the children is frightful, as all Parisians who have sent their children out to nurse know to their cost. The women passed by the local doctors are sent up in herds in charge of a matron, who delivers them at the central office, where they are again examined by the medical officers. Those who are definitely admitted are lodged and partly fed gratuitously while waiting for a place or for a child to take home. Their wages, which, for nurslings in the villages, are fixed at a minimum of ten shillings a month, but which ordinarily average about 17., are guaranteed to them in certain proportions by the town, which also keeps the parents informed of the state of the child. It may interest English mothers to learn that, in addition to the wages, sugar and soap are generally given also.

Nurses may also be engaged at the lying-in hospitals, but, in practice, the better classes in Paris almost invariably address themselves to the private offices, which, though they are dearer than those of the town, and offer less absolute guarantees for the character and health of the women they collect, present the advantage of a large immediate choice, without the restrictions and conditions imposed in the official depôts.

These details show to what an extent the hiring of human milk is carried in France; the article is one of regular consumption, and its market is organised by the state as if it were gunpowder or tobacco. Like those two products it is possible that it may finally become a monopoly in the hands of the government, and that it may one day appear in

the national budget as an important source of revenue. Nothing is impossible in so administrative a country, and even this fantastic notion of the state directing the baby food of the future soldiers of France may some day, perhaps, be realised.

No means exist of forming an exact idea of the total number of wetnurses annually employed. In the departments no statistics whatever exist on the subject, excepting as regards foundlings; in Paris, where a monthly report is made to the prefect of police by each Bureau de Nourrices, no account of their operations is communicated to the public. It is, therefore, only by estimation that an approximate notion can be formed on the subject.

The present annual average of enfants trouvés for all France is about 25,000: some 2000 of them die immediately, but the remaining 23,000 may be supposed to be put out to nurse in the country. It is probable that at least 50,000 more are similarly placed by their own relations; indeed, M. Husson states that the capital alone sends 15,000 children to country nurses every year. The total number of babies annually quartered in the villages may, therefore, be taken at a probable minimum of 73,000.

While, however, it is thus possible to form an arbitrary idea of the quantity of women who receive nurslings in their own cottages, no calculation at all can be made of the number of wet-nurses engaged for home service. If it be put at only three per cent. of the total number of births in France (which average about 950,000), it would come out at 28,500; but this is mere guessing. Judging by the immense number of them who are found in Paris alone, it would look as if this figure is materially under the reality. Anyhow, whatever be the true number of mothers who desert their own children to earn money by suckling those of others, there can be no doubt that it is considerable, especially when it is borne in mind that in France, where nobody cares about the morals of his neighbour, and where servants' love affairs are no concern of their masters, very little prejudice exists against the employment of unmarried women as wet-nurses; they are even preferred in some cases, because they are generally cheaper than their married competitors, because they have no husband who may suddenly arrive in a state of affectionate inebriation to embrace his lawful wife, and because, having no home ties, they can be retained afterwards as ordinary maids. As the total annual number of illegitimate births in France is about 70,000, there is here a large field of supply, in addition to the established current from Burgundy. The country girls who take to nursing are as much influenced by the idea that they will grind off their village rust during their year service, and so become fit to get places as cooks or housemaids afterwards, as by the necessity of escaping from the position of abandonment and difficulty in which a great part of them arrive at the moment of their confinement. In the great nurse-growing provinces many young girls purposely become mothers, without waiting for the superfluous process of matrimony, in order to at once fit themselves for the trade which their mothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins have followed before them. It is curious that the favoured district of the Côté d'Or should simultaneously produce the strongest wine and the most nourishing milk of France: perhaps one helps the other. But it is rather a contradictory fact that,

according to the census just completed, the population of this very department is diminishing.

The moral side of the question is double. It is evident that the abandonment of their own children by the women who go out as nurses is a shameful consequence of the eager thirst after money, which is such a special attribute of the French peasantry: as far as they are concerned the system is vicious to the core. But the mothers who employ them are in no way affected by it; their disobedience to the natural law which obliges all mammalia to suckle their young, does not diminish their affection for their children. The hired milk which feeds them, and the lusty arms which carry them, are simple tools in the hands of the rightful mother, who reserves to herself the thousand joyous cares of watchful maternity, and who seems to love her offspring all the more because she does not offer it the first service of life. And there is one absolute advantage in the system; it enables the weaning to be postponed till the child has got through its first year of existence, and till the woful sorrows of tooth making are somewhat gone by. Furthermore, the habits of 'domestic life in France are organised on a footing which deprives the wet-nurse of all real charge of the child she feeds, and prevents her being alone with it. As a rule, she is never out of her mistress's sight, at all events until she has thoroughly acquired her confidence by several months of irreproachable service. In some of the most extravagant cases (and really they are not rare), she is sent, with the baby, to sleep at the grandmother's house if her mistress goes to a ball, so that she may not be left, even for a few hours of the night, without a careful eye to watch her

movements.

When half a dozen nurses get together, as they often do on the benches of the Champs Elysées, they relate to each other the most astounding stories of the places they have got. There must be something in the occupation which inspires lying, for it is impossible to conceive anything more wildly imaginary than the descriptions which these nourishers of the Gauls of this generation invent about the success which they have attained. According to their own account, their mistresses are all princesses, their wages as high as the salary of a councillor of state, while the presents they receive would fill a daily wheelbarrow. When one has done another begins, and when they go home each one relates with indignation to her mistress what horrid lies "that nurse with the blue ribbons, with a baby in a grey Cashmere cloak" has been recounting to her, blandly forgetting that she herself had lavishly contributed to the

stock.

And so they go on till their time is finished, when they return to their cottage homes, to tell even more monstrous legends of their experience of Paris life.

298

THE NOTARY'S NOSE.*

THE Taliacotian Art, so called from its inventor, but now more correctly known as the "Rhino-plastic operation," by which a nose is restored, where that important feature has been destroyed by disease or accident, is founded upon what surgeons call "the doctrine of adhesion," by which they mean the tendency of cut or newly-divided surfaces to unite together the "doctrine" being, we should imagine, the science that teaches the surgeon to avail himself of this principle in nature, not the principle itself.

The methods by which this happy result is brought about, by cutting a piece of flesh from a slave, as was done by the ancients, or from another person, or from the patient's own arm, or from his cheek, or by a flap from the forehead, or, as our own surgeon, Liston, has more recently introduced, from the upper lip, are so singular, and the results obtained are so remarkable, that the process has always been attended with great curiosity, and sometimes by not a little incredulity and ridicule.

Dr. Thomas J. Pettigrew, for example; has consigned a paragraph or two to the subject in his interesting opuscule on "Superstitions connected with the History and Practice of Medicine and Surgery," as if it was closely allied to what is superstitious in art, and so it is in reference to what is designated as "sympathetic action," as we shall afterwards have occasion to show at greater length.

Garengeot, a celebrated French surgeon, asserts that he had seen a nose, which had been bitten off in a quarrel, thrown upon the ground, allowed to get cool, taken up, fixed to the face, and adhere again; and he records ("Traité des Opérations de Chirurgie," vol. iii.) that M. Galin produced a similar union of a considerable portion of the nose after it had been bitten off and spit out into a dirty gutter. It was well washed, and, upon the return of the soldier, who, having suffered this mutilation, had pursued his adversary, re-applied to his face. Garengeot examined the man on the fourth day, and found the wound completely cicatrised. Blegny ("Zodiacus Medico-Gallicus," Mar., 1680) records a similar case of union after a sabre cut; and Mr. Carpue, in his excellent "Account of Two successful Operations for restoring a lost Nose," makes reference to Lombard, Loubet, and others, who have been successful in like cases. Sir Leonard Fioravanti, a Bolognese, states, in his "Rational Secrets and Chirurgery Reviewed," that, when in Africa, he was witness to a dispute between a Spanish gentleman and a military officer, which led to a combat, in which the latter struck off the nose of his adversary, and it fell into the sand. Fioravanti took it up, washed it with warm water, dressed the part with his balsam, bound it up, and left it undisturbed during eight days; at the expiration of which time he examined it, and was surprised to find that the wounded parts had adhered.

Taliacotius, the inventor of one form of operation, relates that, in a fray between some drunken young men, one of the party had his nose cut off by a sword. The assailant fled, and was pursued by his opponent,

*Les Nez d'un Notaire. Par Edmond About.