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One morning Désirée awakes feeling anxious for no apparent reason. Her son is about three months old, and she has become vaguely aware that something isn’t right. The enslaved people who work in the house seem to be keeping something secret, and visitors have been dropping by L’Abri to see the baby in unexpected numbers. Worse, Désirée perceives that Armand’s kinder, more lenient manner, toward her and others, has changed. He avoids Désirée, seldom meets her gaze, and uses any excuse to stay away from the house and from his son. Désirée, whose enthusiastic sweetness is childlike, cannot understand these changes or Armand’s return to his earlier cruel treatment of the enslaved workers. She is bewildered and wretched.
One afternoon she sits by her enormous bed, still not dressed for the day, wondering over the changes and twisting her hair nervously. One of the house servants, the son of La Blanche, fans the baby as he sleeps on the bed. Looking at La Blanche’s child and then at her baby repeatedly, Désirée feels her body chill with the realization that her child, like La Blanche’s, has mixed racial heritage. La Blanche herself is light-skinned, as her name (French for “the white lady”) suggests, and her son possesses one-quarter African heritage and three-quarters Acadian heritage. Now Désirée understands what led to Armand’s change of heart: he has realized the son of whom he had been so proud is not white.
Frantic, Désirée sends La Blanche’s son away and stares at her baby. Armand enters to find some notes, ignoring her demands that he look closely at their son. She pulls him by the arm toward the bed and asks, “What does it mean?” Freeing himself from her grasp, he points out what to him is obvious: neither his son nor his wife is white. Desperately, Désirée points to her pale skin and eyes and her fair hair, denying his statement, but he coldly replies as he leaves the room that La Blanche is also pale-skinned and yet enslaved.
Désirée writes to her mother in a panic to ask if Armand’s claim is true, claiming that if it is, she will die of misery. Her mother’s quick reply advises her only to come home, with the baby, to Valmondé to stay. Accustomed to submitting to her husband’s commands, Désirée shows him the letter and asks if she should go. He tells her that he does indeed want her to go and, stung by what he sees as life’s unfairness and his wife’s failure, turns away and refuses to say goodbye.
Désirée finds Zandrine with the baby and takes him from her. Wearing a thin gown and house slippers unfit for outdoors, her hair unbound in an immodest fashion, Désirée walks across fields toward the bayou till her gown and slippers are torn and her feet are bruised, and she and her baby are not seen again. The implication is that she drowned herself and the child out of shame.
