him with peacock feathers. She looks back and forth several times between the two boys, and then says, "Ah!" She breaks into a sweat and her blood runs cold. When she asks Armand to look at their child and tell her what it means, he says, "It means ... that the child is not white; it means that you are not white."

One obvious conclusion about what Desiree noticed and what made her exclaim "Ah!" is that she compared the facial features of the quadroon child and her own son's facial features and saw a resemblance between them that suggested her child was partially black.

Another interpretation is that she saw a resemblance between the two and noticed Armand's features in both of them. In this case, the meaning of her question to Armand would be, "Look at our child. He looks like he could be La Blanche's boy's brother. What does this mean?" The voice she said it in "must have stabbed him, if he was human." (It might be noted here that in Armand's case, this is a big "if.") Her tone seems accusatory. There are hints that Armand may have fathered the quadroon boy and that he may have a habit of taking advantage of his female slaves. During the days after the baby's birth, Armand is able to hear the baby's cry "as far away as La Blanche's cabin." One might wonder what need the plantation owner would have to be at a female slave's cabin. In addition, the brutality with which he treats his slaves suggests that he would not hesitate to use his female slaves as concubines.

The quadroon boy is significant in the story because he is the cause of Desiree's revelation. What that revelation was, like so many other details in this story, remains ambiguous.