unlike a griffin) and Philippe took me to my rooms.

The suite is the one which belonged to my beloved grandmother, the
Princess de Vauremont, to whom I owe some sort of a fortune which no
one has ever told me about. As you read this, you will understand the
sadness which came over me as I entered a place sacred to so many
memories, and found the rooms just as she had left them! I was to
sleep in the bed where she died.

Sitting down on the edge of the sofa, I burst into tears, forgetting I
was not alone, and remembering only how often I had stood there by her
knees, the better to hear her words. There I had gazed upon her face,
buried in its brown laces, and worn as much by age as by the pangs of
approaching death. The room seemed to me still warm with the heat
which she kept up there. How comes it that Armande-Louise-Marie de
Chaulieu must be like some peasant girl, who sleeps in her mother's
bed the very morrow of her death? For to me it was as though the
Princess, who died in 1817, had passed away but yesterday.

I saw many things in the room which ought to have been removed. Their
presence showed the carelessness with which people, busy with the
affairs of state, may treat their own, and also the little thought
which had been given since her death to this grand old lady, who will
always remain one of the striking figures of the eighteenth century.
Philippe seemed to divine something of the cause of my tears. He told
me that the furniture of the Princess had been left to me in her will
and that my father had allowed all the larger suites to remain
dismantled, as the Revolution had left them. On hearing this I rose,
and Philippe opened the door of the small drawing-room which leads
into the reception-rooms.