MOCK MOTHERS. 11 



care. It may have carried with it some seeds of disease ; 

 it most probably found little that was wholesome in the 

 squalid hut to which it was removed; perhaps, as they 

 who paid for the child said, the woman herself was not 

 competent to play the part of mother in a wholesome way 1 . 

 Certainly, the little body wasted, and acquired the hard 

 and swollen belly, which at that time in Italy, as it is 

 now in England, was too well known to the sight and 

 touch of men, who in vain sought to supply with drugs 

 the want of healthy homes among the poor. Though the 

 child was not loved, there existed in the mind of nobody 

 a criminal desire that it should die; and since, therefore, 

 it wasted at the breast of its third mother, a fourth was 

 hired, under whose care its health improved. With this 

 nurse the boy remained still at Moirago and by her he 

 was weaned in the third year of his life. In the next 

 year, Clara Micheria claimed him at last, and took the son, 

 who had learned to prattle at the knees of strangers, home 

 to her own sad lodging in Milan. The doubtful charac- 

 ter of Fazio's relation to her she a girlish widow, he a 

 toothless old geometer, aged sixty filled her life with 

 shame and sorrow, and a frequent theme of her discourse 

 to the child was a desire that she had died when he was 

 born 2 . 



1 " Quod nutrix utero gereret." De Propr. Vit. p. 13. 



2 De Consolatione, p. 41. 



