Morvan du cœur et de la mémoire - 1995

 My great-grandmother who had never left her village took on foot, in clogs, road of Avallon some weeks after the birth of my grandfather. There, she embarked on the diligence of Paris to sell her milk to a rich family. The ladies of the upper middle class, if they accepted the maternity, dreaded, the poor, the ordeal of the feeding their bosoms.

Strange era when the breast of the women, if they belonged to the aristocracy of the name or the fortune, became a monstrance more than a source of life!

Without knowing it, my grandmother whom we called the Smart mother - she had backs of the knee of goat and the breath of a mountaineer - participated in this migratory movement which we called the industry of the nursemaids and which peaked under the Second Empire. Even there, it is necessary to evoke the hideous poverty of a social class which fought in Morvan for the survival.

There were the nursemaids « on place », sadly called by the traders of human flesh « dairywomen with wages ». We would believe that it is about cows in transhumance! They left family and village having deprived their child confided to the relations and to the cow's milk, to reach big cities, Paris especially where one of two hundred and forty employment exchanges, for finances, suggested them a baby feeding. So, a woman of Empury breast-fed the crown prince, the son of Napoleon III []

In their return, these women testified in their village of the life in Paris and in big cities. They returned with new ideas on the education, the hygiene, the suit, the food. Even if Morvan closed on them as a screed, it stayed in them as the nostalgia for another universe. Especially they returned of their campaign of food an enormous savings for time, between 1.000 and 1.200 francs, the fortune! Noëlle Renault, in a beautiful number of Camosine, and in a recent book, The nursemaids of the Morvan, told at greater length this story.