Chapter 37 — Adèle's childbirth; "think of the children"

Edna stops at the drugstore. Monsieur Ratignolle is putting up a mixture, dropping red liquid into a tiny glass; he is grateful she has come. Adèle's sister has not been able to come from the plantation; the nurse has been there all week; Doctor Mandelet has been coming and going all afternoon. Edna goes upstairs by the private back stair. The children are sleeping. Adèle is in the salon in a white peignoir, her sweet face drawn and pinched, her hair drawn back and plaited "like a golden serpent" on the sofa pillow.

"This is too much!" Adèle cries. "Mandelet ought to be killed!" The nurse insists Madame must have courage. Edna takes her hand. Mandelet arrives and begins the work. Edna stays by Adèle's bed; Adèle will not let her leave for a moment. Edna feels seized with vague dread. Her own remembered births come back faintly — "an ecstasy of pain, the heavy odor of chloroform, a stupor which had deadened sensation, and an awakening to find a little new life to which she had given being." She wishes she had not come. She does not go. "With an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, she witnessed the scene of torture."

When at last the baby is born — alive, well — Edna leans over to kiss Adèle goodbye. Her friend, "stunned and speechless with emotion," presses her cheek and whispers in an exhausted voice the line that is one of the most-quoted in the novel: "Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember them!" The line is meant as moral argument. It lands as moral wound. The chapter is the moment the path of the mother-women closes definitively for Edna. She has watched what motherhood costs at its physical limit, and been told, by the woman who paid the cost, that it is the only argument her friend can give her.