Kate Chopin: Désirée's Baby  -  Summary

The short story “Désirée’s Baby” is written by Kate Chopin and it is about the problems of slavery and segregation.

One day Monsieur Valmondé, a wealthy French Creoles in antebellum Louisiana, finds a baby lying asleep in front of a stone pillar. Even though the toddler is of unknown origin and unfamiliar to him, he takes the child to his wife, Madame Valmondé and they call her Désirée. After a while people start to gossip but Madame Valmondé does not worry about the questions where Désirée comes from and whom she belongs to, although these questions are important at that time. She believes that Providence had sent her the child she could not conceive.

Désirée is eighteen when Armand Aubigny falls in love with her, knowing her for many years. Armand, son of another wealthy, respected and well-known French Creole Family proposes marriage to her, they wed and Désirée is in the family way. He reminds, that she was nameless and her origin was questionable.

Four weeks after the couple became parents, Madame Valmondé visits Désirée and her newborn. Being all aflutter Désirée tells her mother that Armand is the proudest father in the county and that he even has stopped punishing the Negroes, since the baby was born. He softened.

When the baby is about three month old, Armand starts avoiding Desirée and ignoring their little son completely. All of a sudden it seems like Satan takes hold of him. But Désirée can’t figure out the reasons for his avoidance.

As she sits in her room watching a little quadroon boy fanning her child she gets an idea for his behavior. She calls for her husband and asks him tearfully what it means. He answers that the baby is not white, that she is not white. But Désirée denies that accusation. Immediately she writes a letter to her mother who tells her to come home. She asks Armand if he wants her to go and he agreed. He does no longer love her, because she has brought unconscious injury upon his name and his home.

At the same day Désirée and the baby leave Armand forever and go back home to Valmondés.

A few weeks later Armand has a bonfire, burning all of Désirée’s and the baby’s belongings. He finds a letter from his mother in which she thanks God that Armand would never have to know that he belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.