I very nearly burst out laughing in her face, for such a theatrical phrase appeared to me both ridiculous and doubtful.  So that respectable woman had always been a passive, pliable, inert object, who never had one moment of vibration, of tender emotion in her husband’s arms, and I understood why, as I wasted at the clubs, he escaped from her as soon as possible and made other connections which cost him dear, but in which he found at least some appearance of love.

Oh! to call that supreme bliss of possession, which makes human beings divine and which transports them far from everything, that despotic pain of virginity, which guesses, which waits, which longs for those mysterious, unknown, brief sufferings that contain the germs of future pleasure, the only happiness of which one never tires, a duty!

And that piece of advice, at the last moment, which was as common-place and natural, and which I ought to have expected, enervated me, and, in spite of myself, plunged me into a state of perplexity, from which I could not extricate myself.  I remembered those absurd stories which we hear among friends, after a good dinner.  What would be that last trial of our love for her and for me, and could that love which then was my whole life, come out of the ordeal lessened or increased tenfold?  And when I looked at the couch on which Elaine, my adored Elaine, was sitting, with her head half-hidden behind the feathers of her fan, she whispered in a rather vexed voice: 

“How cross you look, my dear Jacques?  Is the fact of your getting married the cause of it?  And you have such a mocking look on your face.  If the thought of it terrifies you too much, there is still time to say no!”

And delighted, bewitched by her caressing looks, I said in a low voice, almost into her small ear: 

“I adore you; and these last moments that still separate us from each other, seem centuries to me, my dear Elaine!”

PART V

There were tiresome ceremonies yesterday, and to-day, which I went through almost mechanically.

First, there is the yes before the mayor at the civil ceremony,[11] like some everyday response in church, which one is in a hurry to get over, and which has almost the suggestion of an imperious law, to which one is bound to submit, and of a state of bondage, which will, perhaps, be very irksome, since the whole of existence is made up of chances.

[Footnote 11:  Civil marriages are obligatory in France, though usually followed by the religious rite.—­TRANSLATOR.]

And then the service in church, with the decorated altar, the voices of the choir, the solemn music of the organ, the unctuous address of the old priest who marks his periods, who seemed quite proud of having prepared Elaine for confirmation, and then the procession to the vestry, the shaking hands, and the greetings of people whom you scarcely see, and whom you do, or do not recognize.