XXI
. . . Traveling as one does in dreams, she arrives in the midst of a tribe of negroes.
And there, following the custom prescribed for the sons of kings, the royal baby is nourished by his mother and by a nurse. But the latter is allowed but a single breast. Her other breast is ablated, leaving her chest as flat as a man’s (except for the knot of the scar).
The lady traveler, seeing this, is astonished.
Whereupon the king: “Like everybody else, you have of course noticed that when the baby is suckling, he constantly touches the other breast and caresses it. Things work out best this way.
“We cut off one of the nurse’s breasts so that the child will learn to speak earlier. As a matter of fact, this absent breast so intrigues him that he is extraordinarily eager to compose words and to try out their meanings on his entourage.
“And the first word to come to his mouth is always: apricot.”