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As the story opens, Désirée’s mother, Madame Valmondé, comes to visit her daughter and new grandson at the L’Abri, a plantation owned by Désirée’s husband Armand Aubigny. As she travels, Madame Valmondé recalls how Désirée came to be her daughter. Unable to have children of her own, Madame was delighted when her husband found a sleeping toddler, lost or perhaps left behind by settlers moving west toward Texas, asleep by the plantation’s stone entrance. Désirée grew into a lovely and sweet young woman, loved by everyone on the plantation. When Désirée turned eighteen, Armand, who grew up alongside her at the nearby L’Abri plantation, realized that he loved her.
Désirée’s father, Monsieur Valmondé, cautions Armand. Family name and reputation matter in their culture, and Désirée, whose origin is unknown, has neither. But Armand considers his own family legacy, “one of the oldest and proudest in Louisiana,” a gift he can give Désirée, and the wedding proceeds.
By that time, Armand owned L’Abri, where he had lived since moving from Paris at age eight after his mother’s death. The childhood friends married, and Armand’s love for Désirée seemed boundless. Her own happiness doubled when their baby son was born.
On the day of her visit to the rundown plantation, Madame Valmondé embraces her daughter and then expresses disbelief over how much the baby has changed. Proudly, Désirée shows off her son’s size and his fingernails, which already need trimming. As she praises the baby’s strong cries, which Armand reports having heard all the way from the cabin of an enslaved woman named La Blanche, Madame Valmondé looks thoughtfully at the child. She carries him to the window to look at him in better light as Zandrine, the baby’s nurse, looks away. Carrying the baby back to her daughter, Madame Valmondé asks about Armand’s opinion of his son, and Désirée excitedly reports Armand’s pride in his son and heir. In a whisper, she tells her mother that since the baby’s birth, Armand has been in a better mood, less prone to anger, and kinder to the enslaved people on the plantation—even to Négrillon, who tried to get out of work but was not punished as would have been the case before the baby was born. Désirée loves her husband greatly, and her own happiness lives or dies with his moods.
