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The wonder was that he had not loved her before; for he had known her since his father brought him home from Paris, a boy of eight, after his mother died there. The passion that awoke in him that day, when he saw her at the gate, swept along like an avalanche, or a like prairie fire, or like anything that drives headlong over all obstacles.
Subtle foreshadowing in these sentences, which describe the moment Armand falls in love with Désirée, hints at two truths about his character. First, the fact that his family lived in Paris suggests, in hindsight, that in a more liberal city, Armand’s parents could live respectably as a mixed-race couple, which they certainly could not do in the southern United States. Only after his mother died did his father return to the place where his beloved wife could have been enslaved. Second, and more broadly, the way Armand experiences love foreshadows his tempestuous response to later story events. While his passion sounds romantic, the similes Chopin uses invoke destruction, not creation. Armand’s emotions may sweep Désirée along, or they may sweep her away.
Madame Valmondé had never removed her eyes from the child. She lifted it and walked with it over to the window that was lightest. She scanned the baby narrowly, then looked as searchingly at Zandrine, whose face was turned to gaze across the fields.
“Yes, the child has grown, has changed;” said Madame Valmondé, slowly, as she replaced it beside its mother. “What does Armand say?”
This scene, in which Désirée’s mother visits her new grandson, evokes a sense of foreboding; readers may not know what is happening, but they certainly know something is off. In her joy, Désirée cannot see what her mother and, it seems, Zandrine can see—traits that suggest mixed racial heritage in the baby. Zandrine remains silent, if she suspects, though the whispers that later happen among the enslaved workers may begin with her. More ominous, however, is Madame Valmondé’s question, which suggests that she is already thinking ahead to how her proud son-in-law will react if he suspects that his son and heir is not completely white.
A quick conception of all that this accusation meant for her nerved her with unwonted courage to deny it. “It is a lie; it is not true, I am white! Look at my hair, it is brown; and my eyes are gray, Armand, you know they are gray. And my skin is fair,” seizing his wrist. “Look at my hand; whiter than yours, Armand,” she laughed hysterically.
“As white as La Blanche’s,” he returned cruelly; and went away leaving her alone with their child.
In this exchange, Désirée’s reaction reveals that she understands fully and immediately what the accusation that she is of mixed parentage means for her and the baby. She desperately tries to point to evidence of her whiteness, but ironically, this evidence works against her because an enslaved woman on the plantation has equally white skin. La Blanche is of mixed heritage as well, and it is the resemblance between her son and Désirée’s that brings on the revelation that the baby’s parentage is also mixed. Yet as Désirée notes, her skin is paler than Armand’s, a comparison that, on a second reading, is also ironic and foreshadows the truth Armand learns about his mother when he retrieves Désirée’s letters to burn them.
That Désirée and La Blanche appear physically similar contradicts the significance of so-called purity of blood, a commonly held belief in the South in Chopin’s time. La Blanche and her sons are enslaved by Armand and Désirée, despite appearing no less white than them; that the latter’s ancestry is called into question, and the former’s is confirmed to be mixed, is ironic given their positions as master and mistress of a plantation, and underscores the idea that race is merely a construct, though one with very real consequences in a society that values whiteness.
“But above all,” she wrote, “night and day, I thank the good God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.”
The excerpt from Armand’s mother’s letter to his father ends the story on a deeply ironic note. It reveals that Armand’s assumption that fate and Désirée have betrayed him is wholly incorrect and that there is an added wrinkle to his complicity in the death of his wife and child—not only has his cruelty contributed to their deaths, but the driving force behind said cruelty is the result of his ancestry, not Désirée’s. The final lines are ironic because readers know that, even now that he knows the truth, Armand persists in his prideful ignorance.
