My hotel at Carrière St.-Denis was above a shop where pig meat in different forms was sold. M. Perdrielle, _charcutier_, was a genial host, and his wife’s cooking did ample justice to his artistry as a butcher. We often went out there for a few days, and once I spent a month with these people who lived the life of the France of a hundred years ago. I was always called “M. Edouard le Dessineur,” which is not French, but peasant argot, and they did not see anything at all generous in including cigarettes, billiards, and drinks in the two hundred and fifty francs a month they charged for board. Berthe, the daughter of the household, was married while I was in Carrière St.-Denis, and I had the extreme pleasure of assisting at a true rural marriage. Her husband-to-be was a wine merchant and, wishing to do him great honor, she begged me to wear my evening clothes. A merchant _de vin_ is on about the same social level with that of the owner of a corner saloon in America; but I was perfectly willing to show off for Berthe’s sake. The banquet began in the evening and was enlivened by many old customs. At a certain time a small boy came in with a giggle and ran away with the bride’s garter, which was twenty yards long, and was immediately pulled this way and that by all the men, who fought for the pieces. One ceremony, which must have been a survival of the Rabelaisian period, was carried out by the bridesmaids, who came in singing an old French song (one of those delightful things whose meaning could be taken either of two ways) and holding aloft a _pot de chambre_ filled with _dragees_, or sugar almonds, which they distributed to the company. The procession of young men followed with a pair of candy horns for the groom. At the end of many toasts they all were sufficiently tipsy to begin their long pilgrimage, for it is the custom for the bridal pair to spend the first week of their married life visiting all their friends, taking all the bridesmaids and groomsmen with them. At each home they eat and drink, and on the seventh day an exhausted pair of lovers return home, dirty and forlorn, with their clothes—and their nerves—in tatters.