The girl bride was Jeanne Francoise Julie Adelaide Bernard, daughter of no less a dignitary than the Paris' receiver of taxes--a mild-mannered and handsome man, weak and stupid, with a handsome and steel-eyed wife, who was neither dull, weak, nor good. The groom was Jacques Recamier--by profession a powerful banker, by choice a middle-class Lothario. His father had sold hats at Lyons. Recamier had been an intimate friend of the Bernards, forever at their house, since a year or so before Jeanne had been born. As the wedding party stood on the steps of the Hotel de Ville, after the "civil ceremony"--so runs the story--a passing man halted and gazed long and closely at Jeanne, in dumb admiration, studying every line of her face and form. The gazer was a painter, Greuze by name. And from Jeanne Recamier, as he saw her that day, he drew the inspiration for the wonderful "~Jeune fille~" picture that made him immortal. The wedding party filed into a line of waiting carriages. But scarce had the joyous cavalcade set out on its short journey when it was halted by the passage of a truly horrible procession that just then emerged from a cross street; a procession made up of scarecrow men and women, hideous of visage, clad in rags, blood from the guillotine--around which they had lately gathered, gloating--spattered on their clothes and unwashed faces. In the midst of the howling and huzzaing throng was a chair, carried by supports on the shoulders of eight half-naked ~sans-culottes~. And in this lofty chair crouched the most hideous figure in all that vile gathering--a dwarfish, weirdly dressed man, his face disgustingly marred by disease, his eyes glaring with the light of madness. Around him gamboled the mob, screaming blessings and adulations, strewing his bearers' way with masses of wilted flowers, filched from the ~halls~. Thus did Doctor Jean Paul Marat make his triumphal return home that April day from the Convention, escorted by his worshipers--and fellow beasts. Thus did his obscene retinue block the wedding procession of dainty little Jeanne Recamier. Jean Paul Marat--for whose shrunken chest, at that very moment, poor, politics-crazed Charlotte Corday was sharpening the twenty-eight-cent case knife she had just bought. An odd omen for the outset of married life; and vitally so to the little new-wed Recamier girl, who had been brought up amid superstitions. Shall we glance at a short word picture of Jeanne, limned by a contemporary? "She has orange-tinted eyes, but they are without fire; pretty and transparent teeth, but incapable of snapping; an ungainly waist; coarse hands and feet; and complexion that is a bowl of milk wherein float rose leaves."