Desiree's Baby

“As the day was pleasant, Madame Valmondé drove over to L’Abri to see Désirée and the baby.” 

This is the first sentence of the story. It sets up the story’s third-person point-of-view and locates the reader closest to Madame Valmondé’s perspective, which is critical because it allows the reader to observe Désirée’s baby through the eyes of a visitor. Chopin begins with a “pleasant” day, and since a story rarely ends where it begins, this line foreshadows what kind of ending the reader can expect: an unpleasant one. 

“That was the way all the Aubignys fell in love, as if struck by a pistol shot.” 

This describes the way Armand Aubigny fell in love with Désirée, quickly and intensely. The gunshot imagery lends a sense of danger and instability to their relationship, which foreshadows their tragic dissolution later in the story. This quotation also indicates that Armand’s father fell in love with his mother in the same impulsive way—in his case, with a woman whose race made their union illegal.

“He was reminded that she was nameless. What did it matter about a name when he could give her one of the oldest and proudest in Louisiana?” 

At the beginning of their relationship, Armand disregards Désirée’s “namelessness.” This is ironic because her ancestry becomes the quality he most cares about once he believes her to be mixed-race. The answer to the question, “What did it matter about a name”—posed casually here by a naive Armand—changes dramatically by the end of the story.