This was the twentieth time that day that the good Risler had said that he was happy, and always with the same emotional and contented manner, in the same low, deep voice-the voice that is held in check by emotion and does not speak too loud for fear of suddenly breaking into violent tears.

Not for the world would Risler have wept at that moment—­imagine a newly-made husband giving way to tears in the midst of the wedding-festival!  And yet he had a strong inclination to do so.  His happiness stifled him, held him by the throat, prevented the words from coming forth.  All that he could do was to murmur from time to time, with a slight trembling of the lips, “I am happy; I am happy!”

Indeed, he had reason to be happy.

Since early morning the poor man had fancied that he was being whirled along in one of those magnificent dreams from which one fears lest he may awake suddenly with blinded eyes; but it seemed to him as if this dream would never end.  It had begun at five o’clock in the morning, and at ten o’clock at night, exactly ten o’clock by Vefour’s clock, he was still dreaming.

How many things had happened during that day, and how vividly he remembered the most trivial details.

He saw himself, at daybreak, striding up and down his bachelor quarters, delight mingled with impatience, clean-shaven, his coat on, and two pairs of white gloves in his pocket.  Then there were the wedding-coaches, and in the foremost one—­the one with white horses, white reins, and a yellow damask lining—­the bride, in her finery, floated by like a cloud.  Then the procession into the church, two by two, the white veil in advance, ethereal, and dazzling to behold.  The organ, the verger, the cure’s sermon, the tapers casting their light upon jewels and spring gowns, and the throng of people in the sacristy, the tiny white cloud swallowed up, surrounded, embraced, while the bridegroom distributed hand-shakes among all the leading tradesmen of Paris, who had assembled to do him honor.  And the grand crash from the organ at the close, made more solemn by the fact that the church door was thrown wide open, so that the whole street took part in the family ceremony—­the music passing through the vestibule at the same time with the procession—­the exclamations of the crowd, and a burnisher in an ample lute-string apron remarking in a loud voice, “The groom isn’t handsome, but the bride’s as pretty as a picture.”  That is the kind of thing that makes you proud when you happen to be the bridegroom.

And then the breakfast at the factory, in a workroom adorned with hangings and flowers; the drive in the Bois—­a concession to the wishes of his mother-in-law, Madame Chebe, who, being the petty Parisian bourgeoise that she was, would not have deemed her daughter legally married without a drive around the lake and a visit to the Cascade.  Then the return for dinner, as the lamps were being lighted along the boulevard, where people turned to look after the wedding-party, a typical well-to-do bourgeois wedding-party, as it drove up to the grand entrance at Vefour’s with all the style the livery horses could command.