Frank González-Crussí
Chicago, Illinois, United States

The indelicate and seemingly insulting phrase that I have chosen as a title for this piece comes from Shakespeare. The great bard, in Cymbeline (II, iv), makes Posthumus say:

… We are all bastards.
And that most venerable man, which I
Did call my father, was I know not where
When I was stamp’d. Some coiner with his tools
Made me a counterfeit…

What I find most striking is the phrase “I was stamped.” Mother and inchoate offspring are represented as sharing the plastic quality of wax: soft enough to be molded by outside forces, yet soon hardening into the given form. To come into being is to be pressed into shape, or, in Shakespeare’s words, “stamped.” Accordingly, the “stamping” allegory implies that the maternofetal unit is exceedingly susceptible to extraneous molding forces. A tradition holds that woman is by nature hypersensitive; a mere fancy may affect her profoundly. Therefore, imagination was thought to be the stamping seal of the pregnant woman. Physicians of the past believed that the parents’ contribution was not the only one in the process of begetting, but that a myriad of undefined events, incidents, or occurrences are potentially capable of stirring the mother’s imagination, thereby modifying the fetus’ bodily structure. This was a way of saying that, in a sense, we are all liable to myriad imputations of bastardy.

In our day, the theory of “maternal impressions” and their effects upon the fetus is largely discredited. Formerly, however, pertinent examples abounded. A pregnant woman sleeping under a mulberry tree was startled when a gust of wind caused many berries to fall upon her lap. She delivered an infant whose body, especially in an area mirroring the anatomic site where the berries had hit the mother, was covered with numerous mulberry-like cutaneous warts. Another pregnant woman was frightened when a lizard unexpectedly jumped on her chest. When her child was born, wondrous to recount, it bore on its chest a fleshy tumor shaped very much like a lizard. Father Feijóo (1676–1764), the Spanish Benedictine monk who vigorously promoted the rationalist ideas of the Enlightenment in his country,¹ described a remarkable case. In the village of Marchena, close to Seville, a gentleman of the nobility, Don Francisco de Ahumada, although his parents were both white, had dark skin and physiognomical features like those of black African men (“Ethiopians,” as was customarily said at the time). This gentleman had two brothers, Don Antonio and Don Isidro, both of them white. This peculiarity was explained saying that the mother had gazed vehemently, at the moment of conception, on a painting that hung in her bedroom and represented the three wise kings—one of whom, Balthazar, is usually depicted as black—who came from the Orient on the occasion of Our Savior’s Nativity. (At least that is what the mother said!)

French history furnished another example of cutaneous color bewilderment in the life of a woman who became known as la Mauresse de Moret (“the [female] Moore of Moret”), as I describe next.

During the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth, a French nun, who chose the name of Sister Louise-Marie de Saint Therese, lived in the Benedictine convent at Moret-sur-Loing, not far from the chateau of Fontainebleau, where the royal court used to reside during the hunting season. The said nun was an enigmatic personage. She looked like a woman of black race, but no one knew who she was, or where she had come from.

Nevertheless, she had a rich endowment for her support and the convent, where no high-rank aristocratic lady had ever lived as a nun, received copious sums of money from the royal court. Three known portraits of her are remarkable in that she is depicted as dark-skinned with features suggestive of African origin (see image). To add to the mystery, persons of the highest aristocracy came to visit her, among them Madame de Maintenon, the Duke of Saint-Simon, the Princess Palatine, Louis de France (the “Grand Dauphin”), eldest of the six children of King Louis XIV with Queen Maria Theresa of Austria, and the Queen herself, to mention only some of the nun’s high and mighty visitors.

 It is noteworthy that France was then expanding colonial dominion to Africa and to the Antilles. Unfortunately, slavery came along with French rule there, wherefore increasing numbers of black people began to be seen in France; many of them servants who had been brought by their masters. It became fashionable for every lady of wealth and power to have her own little black servant boy, her “negrillon,” as such a menial was called. But, alas, little boys are in the habit of growing into adult men, and since the number of métis was also notably growing in France, we may safely surmise that the nature of their domestic chores was, in some instances, greatly diversified with time.

A hypothesis to explain the mystery of the “black nun” was that Queen Maria Theresa of Austria, spouse of Louis XIV, had an illicit affair with a black servant, thereafter giving birth to an infant girl who was immediately and most expeditiously removed from the court and who eventually became the black nun. This version is really a disgraceful slander, yet it received some impulse from none other than Victor Hugo, who, with a measure of unkind cynicism, wrote that in those times “women, and especially the beautiful women,” showed a partiality for the unusual or exotic, including a sickly preference for deformed, ugly, and ill-built men. Wrote Hugo:

Marie Stuart had “kindnesses” for a cron [Northern French nickname for a hunchback, from Old Picard cron,“curved, bent”], Rizzio. Maria Therèsa of Spain had been “a little too familiar” with a black man. Hence the black abbess. In the alcoves of the golden century a hunch was well carried…²

The identity of the “Moorish Abbess” tickled the curiosity of chroniclers, raconteurs, historians, scholars, and novelists alike. Once their fantasy had been aroused, there was no limit to the proposed schemes pretending to explain who she was. It was even suggested that the Mauresse de Moret was really the mysterious and heretofore undisclosed “Man in the Iron Mask.” Recently, more credible documentary investigations seem to establish that the Moorish Abbess was a daughter that Louis XIV had with a woman of African descent.³ If so, the black nun was a princess relegated to bastardy for political reasons.

Case reports of astounding maternal impressions on the fetus could take on a veryserious character. Thus, when executions and acts of torture and dismemberment took place in public, pregnant women who witnessed such horrible scenes were said to produce babies with amputated hands, absent limbs, or broken bones, according to the kind of legally-sanctioned savagery they had watched. The Moorish Abbess of Moret stands as a remarkable example of belief in the extraordinary power of the maternal imagination. A seemingly trivial event could trigger the full force of its “stamping” power, which Father Feijoo referred to as its “sigillative virtue” (virtud sigilativa), from the Latin sigillum, a seal. Many believed that, if a pregnant woman looked with intent at a simple object, like a vivid color, this sufficed to stamp the seal of a maternal impression upon the soft, wax-like flesh of her unborn baby.

An astonishing explanation! Could it be that the dark-skinned abbess had a white mother who, in a moment of distraction, had fixed her gaze on an ink bottle which happened to be full of black ink?

End notes

1. Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro:  Two works of this author discuss the old theories on maternal impressions. One is a letter titled “Influjo de la Imaginación Materna Respecto al Feto” in Obras Escogidas del Padre Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro. Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 56. Madrid: Ryvadeneyra, 1863, pp. 472–6. The second writing is his essay “On the Ethiopian Color” (in Spanish). Volume 7, chapter 3, of his opus magnus: Theatro Crítico Universal. Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, 1736.
2. Victor Hugo. L’Homme Qui Rit. Illustrations de Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse et D. Vierge. Paris: Editions Hugues, 1886. p. 214. In the quoted passage, Hugo calls Maria Theresa “of Spain.” She belonged to the royal families of both Austria and Spain. She was Archduchess of Austria, but also Infanta of Spain by birth, as she was daughter of King Philip IV of Spain.
3. Serge Aroles: Archives secrètes du Vatican et archives de douze pays: Homme au masque de fer et mauresse de Moret, enfants métis de Louis XIV. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2021.