It is mamma who is speaking; she is busying herself with the drawers of the chiffonier which every day, for many years, she had asked me to bring to her,--sometimes she pretends to need them merely for the purpose of pleasing me by requiring my services. It was one of the things that I was able to do for her when I was very little: to carry to her one or another of those tiny drawers. It was an honored custom in our household for a long time. At the time of my life of which I am now writing it was in the evening, at dusk, after my return from school, that I busied myself carrying the little chiffonier drawers. I usually found mamma seated in her accustomed place near the window chatting or embroidering, her work basket was before her, and the bureau, whose different compartments she required from time to time, was situated some distance away, in an anteroom. The Louis XVth chiffonier was very much revered, for it had belonged to great-grandmothers. In it there were some very old and very tiny painted boxes which had doubtless been handled every day by one or another of our ancestresses. It goes without saying that I knew all the secrets of these compartments that were kept in such exquisite order; there was a special place for silks that was classified by being put into ribbon bags; one for needles, another for braid, and still another for little hooks. And these things were still arranged, I have no doubt, as they had been in our grandmother's days, whose saintly activity my mother imitated. To bring the drawers of the chiffonier to mamma was the joy and pride of my childhood, and there has been no change in my feelings for those little compartments since that time. They have always inspired me with the most tender respect; they are blended with the image of my mother and they recall to me her beautiful, skillful hands, ever busy manufacturing some pretty, useful article,--even to her last piece of embroidery which was a handkerchief for me. In my seventeenth year, when we met great reverses--at that troubled time of which I will not speak here, but only mention because I have already, in preceding chapters, touched upon the matter--we had to face, for several months, the dreadful possibility of being obliged to part with our old home and all the precious things that it contained. At that time when I passed in review all the beloved memories and habits and mementoes that I would need to break with, one of my most agonizing thoughts was: “Never more will I be able to come and go in the ante-chamber where the chiffonier stands, nor never again be able to carry its precious little drawers to mamma.”