ld never end. It had begun at five o'clock in the morning, and
at ten o'clock at night, exactly ten o'clock by Vefour's clock, he was
still dreaming.

How many things had happened during that day, and how vividly he
remembered the most trivial details.

He saw himself, at daybreak, striding up and down his bachelor quarters,
delight mingled with impatience, clean-shaven, his coat on, and
two pairs of white gloves in his pocket. Then there were the
wedding-coaches, and in the foremost one--the one with white horses,
white reins, and a yellow damask lining--the bride, in her finery,
floated by like a cloud. Then the procession into the church, two by
two, the white veil in advance, ethereal, and dazzling to behold. The
organ, the verger, the cure's sermon, the tapers casting their light
upon jewels and spring gowns, and the throng of people in the sacristy,
the tiny white cloud swallowed up, surrounded, embraced, while the
bridegroom distributed hand-shakes among all the leading tradesmen of
Paris, who had assembled to do him honor. And the grand crash from the
organ at the close, made more solemn by the fact that the church door
was thrown wide open, so that the whole street took part in the family
ceremony--the music passing through the vestibule at the same time with
the procession--the exclamations of the crowd, and a burnisher in an
ample lute-string apron remarking in a loud voice, "The groom isn't
handsome, but the bride's as pretty as a picture." That is the kind of
thing that makes you proud when you happen to be the bridegroom.

And then the breakfast at the factory, in a workroom adorned with
hangings and flowers; the drive in the Bois--a concession to the wishes
of his mother-in-law, Madame Chebe, who, being the petty Parisian
bourgeoise that she was, would not have deemed her daughter legally
married without a drive around the lake and a visit to the Cascade.
Then the return for dinner, as the lamps were being lighted along
the boulevard, where people turned to look after the wedding-party, a
typical well-to-do bourgeois wedding-party, as it drove up to the grand
entrance at Vefour's with all the style the livery horses could command.

Risler had reached that point in his dream.

And now the worthy man, dazed with fatigue and well-being, glanced
vaguely about that huge table of twenty-four covers, curved in the shape
of a horseshoe at the ends, and surrounded by smiling, familiar faces,
wherein he seemed