with His paternal hand invited me to seat myself
in His house, on His red drugget, in His gilt armchair. The heavens,
full of joy, made music for me, and on high, through the glittering
stained-glass windows, the archangels, full of kind feeling, whispered
as they watched me. As I advanced, heads were bent as a wheat-field
bends beneath the breeze. My friends, my relatives, my enemies, bowed to
us, and I saw--for one sees everything in spite of one's self on
these solemn occasions--that they did not think that I looked ugly. On
reaching the gilt chair, I bent forward with restrained eagerness--my
chignon was high, revealing my neck, which is passable--and thanked
the Lord. The organ ceased its triumphal song and I could hear my poor
mother bursting into tears beside me. Oh! I understand what a mother's
heart must feel during such a ceremony. While watching with satisfaction
the clergy who were solemnly advancing, I noticed Georges; he seemed
irritated; he was stiff, upright, his nostrils dilated, and his lips
set. I have always been rather vexed at him for not having been a
little more sensible to what I was experiencing that day, but men do not
understand this kind of poetry.

The discourse of his Reverence who married us was a masterpiece, and was
delivered, moreover, with that unction, that dignity, that persuasive
charm peculiar to him. He spoke of our two families "in which pious
belief was hereditary, like honor." You could have heard a pin drop,
such was the attention with which the prelate's voice was listened to.
Then at one point he turned toward me, and gave me to understand with
a thousand delicacies that I was wedding one of the noblest officers in
the army. "Heaven smiles," said he, "on the warrior who places at the
service of his country a sword blessed by God, and who, when he darts
into the fray, can place his hand upon his heart and shout to the
enemy that noble war-cry, 'I believe!'" How well that was turned! What
grandeur in this holy eloquence! A thrill ran through the assembly. But
that was not all. His Lordship then addressed Georges in a voice as soft
and unctuous as it had before been ringing and enthusiastic.

"Monsieur, you are about to take as your companion a young girl"--I
scarcely dare recall the graceful and delicate things that his Reverence
said respecting me--"piously reared by a Christian mother who has been
able to share with her, if I may say so, all the virtues of her heart,
all t