FROM THE CURVE in the road, the children can already see their mother, doubled over and heaving, exiting from the doorway backside first. She moves with the narrow, shuffling steps of a person towing a much larger and more lifeless body. Why hasn't she called Father for help? And all at once they turn pale, for having arrived unannounced they have done it at last: caught Mother in the midst of her private activities.
It's not Madeleine? Lucie asks, in a quavering voice.
No, says Jean-Luc, who is taller and proportionately less dramatic: It is only Mother's chest.
Only! The girls rise up on their toes, straining to see for themselves. The chest is forbidden to them, never opened, frequently polished, smelling faintly of candles when they press their furtive noses against its seams. Inside, they are told, they will one day find their mother's most beautiful things. And so Beatrice imagines a spill of silk underclothes, light as froth, and Mimi, who believes her mother's tastes to be in perfect accord with her own, pictures the glistening brown eyes of the tame monkey she longs for, while Lucie imagines a mirror, brimming at the edge of the chest like a pool: when the lid is finally raised, she will gaze down at its clear surface, seeing her own face, and those of her sisters.
No one imagines a veil.
A veil! Beatrice gasps, as Mother lifts it from the open chest, its sheer white length floating out from her fingers. A thousand tiny stitches hang aloft in the morning air. They have heard of this veil; how many times has their mother described the putting on of it, the splendid wearing of it, the lifting of it to disclose her husband's gentle, nervous face, peering down at her? How lightly it must have rested upon her hair! Up, up it rises, curling like smoke, until at last it dissolves into a great cloud of goosedown, peculiar goosedown, which, rather than slowly tumbling to the ground, darts off merrily in all directions, the thousand stitches revealing themselves as moths.