GRASSE, France — When Sophie Serrano finally held her daughter, Manon, in her arms after the newborn, suffering from jaundice, had been placed under artificial light, she was taken aback by the baby’s thick tufts of hair.
“I hadn’t noticed it before and it surprised me,” Mrs. Serrano said in an interview at her home here in southern France, not far from the Côte d’Azur.
Mrs. Serrano, now 39, was baffled again a year later, when she noticed that her baby’s hair had grown frizzy and that her skin color was darker than hers or her husband’s.
But her love for the child trumped any doubts, and she painstakingly looked after the baby until a paternity test more than 10 years later showed that neither she nor her husband could have been a biological parent to Manon. Mrs. Serrano later found out that a nurse had accidentally switched babies and given them to the wrong mothers.
The story made headlines in France for the first time this month, when a southern court ordered the clinic in Cannes where the babies were switched, as well as their insurer, to pay a total of 1.88 million euros, or $2.13 million, to the families. The money, Mrs. Serrano said, would repair “an invaluable damage” and put an end to a 12-year ordeal.
Tales of swapped newborns tend to crop up in popular culture, most recently in the ABC Family television series “Switched at Birth,” in which two teenage girls learn that they were mistakenly swapped in a hospital and their families try to live together for the girls’ well-being.
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Mrs. Serrano said she was recovering from years of depression. She is unemployed and has two other children from another relationship since her divorce. Her frail physique and reserved manners contrasted with Manon’s outspokenness and athletic build.
Neither of the two women said how they would spend the money from the trial, but Manon said she dreamed of settling in Britain and pursuing a career in management.
“The story of my birth has made me stronger,” Manon said as she ate French fries out of an orange fast food container. She found balance, she said, through therapy, her mother’s love and her own “deeply ingrained” pragmatism.
“I tend to never leave anything to chance,” she said with a smile. “Now I even try to anticipate the unthinkable.”
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