Up to the solemn moment everything has been transacted between men. The young woman appears on this great day for the first time in her life. If she has been brought up according to the old method, many people have scarcely suspected her existence. Unlike her husband, who is taking a step backwards, subsiding from youth into maturity, she is being born into life. There she is, at the door or under the porch of the church, standing beside her husband, involuntarily, with no desires of her own, passive—an offering, as it were, to the race. In this strong light of publicity she alone seems a little ill at ease, blushing at the exhibition, agitated at this unknown something which the rest are so joyfully celebrating. The priest comes down the nave, just as at funerals, receives the young couple’s whispered “I will,” sprinkles them lightly as they stand with a little lustral water, censes them; and then the procession is formed, to wind its way up to the altar where the nuptial benediction mass will be sung—a long, noisy procession, ponderous, gothic, all stiff with velvets, monumental stuffs and gilded draperies; thirty, forty, sometimes three hundred persons, none but members of the family; but in these circumstances of parade and pleasure the family becomes extraordinarily multiplied. At the head of the procession, buried under trappings of superb finery representing a fortune, the little bride is scarcely visible; she is for all the world like the clapper of a bell. And verily under that golden robe there is after all nothing—but a woman. They leave the church, and there is no crush; the sight attracts only a few curious folk, a few halt and blind: in those days there was nothing to draw the overwhelming throng without which no modern marriage is complete. And the procession crawls on, displaying through the town its festal finery drawn from ancestral coffers, with a majesty which may perhaps give the impression of an official pageant, but nowhere indicates the crowning incident in a love-story. All is significant of a serious, authentic, arithmetical fact, a practical and substantial fact, a performance got up for the honour of a family. It is precisely this which sends a thrill through all who take part in the ceremony. Under these huge plumes and massive carcanets there vibrates a delirious but very real joy—the old family joy in pomp and circumstance, this, too, drawn, as it were, out of the ancestral coffers. What man is there who, however poverty-stricken he may be, dispenses with magnificence at his marriage? Perhaps this is the only day—or rather, the only period, for one is not married in a day—when he will know what luxury is. There is a truce to care; life shows a countenance all joy and geniality.