And now all the poetry and romance of his youth blossomed again in his heart, in the thick of the political struggle in which he was engaged; he forgot, amid the idyllic scenes of domestic life, the storms of Versailles, the political troubles, forebodings as to the future, all anxieties of the present, the routine life of the Assembly into which he plunged with all his mind, and the excitement of his labors, his debates and his duties.

Sulpice thought again and again of the summer morning when he led his wife to the altar, and compared it to a day’s halt in the course of a journey under the blaze of the sun; he recalled the old house full of noisy stir, the crowd of relatives and friends in festive attire, the stamping of the horses’ feet before the great open gate, the neighbors standing at the windows, and the little street-boys scuffling upon the pavement, all the joyous bustle of that happy day.  It seemed to Sulpice that the sunlight came streaming in with Adrienne’s entrance into the vast salon, from the walls of which her pictured ancestresses in their huge leg-of-mutton sleeves seemed to smile at her.

Beneath the orange wreath sent from Paris, her face expressed the happy, surprised, and sweetly anxious look of a young communicant wrapped in her veil.

Sulpice had never seen her look more beautiful.  How prettily she came towards him, blushing vividly, and holding out her two little white gloved hands!  He, somewhat bored by the company that surrounded them, cast an involuntary glance at a mirror hanging opposite and decided that he looked awkward and formal with his hair too carefully arranged.  How they had laughed since then and always with new pleasure at these recollections, so sweet even now.

His happiness on that joyous day would have been complete had his mother been present, when in the presence of the old priest who had instructed Adrienne in her catechism, Sulpice stood forward and took by its velvet shield the taper that seemed so light to him, and awkwardly held the wafer that the priest extended to him.  It was a great event in Grenoble when the leader of the Liberal Party, who headed the list at the last election, was seen being married like a believing bourgeois.  The organ pealed forth its tender vibrations, some Christmas anthem, mysterious and tremulous, like an alleluia sounding through the aisles of centuries; the light streamed through the windows in floods and rested upon Adrienne, who was kneeling with her childlike head leaning on her gloved hands, kissing her fair locks with sunlight and illumining the gleaming satin of her dress with its long train spreading out over the carpet.

Sulpice took away from this ceremony in the presence of a crowded congregation an impression at once perfumed and dazzling:  the perfumes of flowers, the play of light, the greetings of the organ, and within and about him, all the intoxication of love, singing a song of happiness.