Some couples went on foot, others rode on horseback. All were dressed in their best, and the procession must have looked exceedingly picturesque. Every lady was expected to wear some little ornament--generally made of silver--specially devised to indicate either her calling or her station in life: a coronet, or a sickle, or whatever it might be. The streets were lined with people, who freely expended their wit--a pretty ready one--in chaff pointed at the new victims to matrimony, who in their turn were expected to put on a most dejected look, as if seriously repenting the allegiance rashly entered into to Hymen. In the evening the pyre was lighted, and round this huge bonfire people made mildly merry with gambols and dances. Tables were spread, at the Duke's cost, richly laden with viands and native wine. In 1698, at the first revival of the _Brandons_ after a long pause, the file of matrimonial victims was, of course, quite exceptionally long. It was a delightful surprise to the crowd to see at its head the Duke and Duchess themselves, newly married as they were--the Duchess, being slightly _enceinte_ with her first-born, wearing at her girdle a little silver cradle. That was not all. In the evening Leopold mixed freely with the revellers, stopped at table after table, drank here and drank there, proposing a toast or responding to one,--with the result that the people went half-mad with enthusiasm. Not a tumbler had the Duke drunk out of, which was not religiously treasured as a relic. And long after the French had forced their yoke firmly home upon the shrinking neck of unwilling Lorraine, those tumblers were still shown to growing children as memorials of the "good old time." At the carnival, which followed the _Brandons_, Leopold and Elizabeth Charlotte were again to the fore. They did not mind figuring in public--even sometimes on an amateur stage. Leopold once appeared masked as Sultan--his consort, not quite appropriately, as an Odalisk; but the loyal Lorrains saw nothing incongruous in that dress.