My sisters, my sisters, strive to be real; that is the blessing I wish you.

CHAPTER X

MADAME’S IMPRESSIONS

The marriage ceremony at the Town Hall has, no doubt, a tolerable importance; but is it really possible for a well-bred person to regard this importance seriously?  I have been through it; I have undergone like every one else this painful formality, and I can not look back on it without feeling a kind of humiliation.  On alighting from the carriage I descried a muddy staircase; walls placarded with bills of every color, and in front of one of them a man in a snuff-colored coat, bare-headed, a pen behind his ear, and papers under his arm, who was rolling a cigarette between his inky fingers.  To the left a door opened and I caught a glimpse of a low dark room in which a dozen fellows belonging to the National Guard were smoking black pipes.  My first thought on entering this barrack-room was that I had done wisely in not putting on my gray dress.  We ascended the staircase and I saw a long, dirty, dim passage, with a number of half-glass doors, on which I read:  “Burials.  Turn the handle,” “Expropriations,” “Deaths.  Knock loudly,” “Inquiries,” “Births,” “Public Health,” etc., and at length “Marriages.”

We entered in company with a small lad who was carrying a bottle of ink; the atmosphere was thick, heavy, and hot, and made one feel ill.  Happily, an attendant in a blue livery, resembling in appearance the soldiers I had seen below, stepped forward to ask us to excuse him for not having at once ushered us into the Mayor’s drawing-room, which is no other than the first-class waiting-room.  I darted into it as one jumps into a cab when it begins to rain suddenly.  Almost immediately two serious persons, one of whom greatly resembled the old cashier at the Petit-Saint-Thomas, brought in two registers, and, opening them, wrote for some time; only stopping occasionally to ask the name, age, and baptismal names of both of us, then, saying to themselves, “Semi-colon . . . between the aforesaid . . . fresh paragraph, etc., etc.”

When he had done, the one like the man cashier at the Petit-Saint-Thomas read aloud, through his nose, that which he had put down, and of which I could understand nothing, except that my name was several times repeated as well as that of the other “aforesaid.”  A pen was handed to us and we signed.  Voila.

“Is it over?” said I to Georges, who to my great surprise was very pale.

“Not yet, dear,” said he; “we must now go into the hall, where the marriage ceremony takes place.”