We entered a large, empty hall with bare walls; a bust of the Emperor was at the farther end over a raised platform, some armchairs, and some benches behind them, and dust upon everything.  I must have been in a wrong mood, for it seemed to me I was entering the waiting-room at a railway-station; nor could I help looking at my aunts, who were very merry, over the empty chairs.  The gentlemen, who no doubt affected not to think as we did, were, on the contrary, all very serious, and I could discern very well that Georges was actually trembling.  At length the Mayor came in by a little door and appeared before us, awkward and podgy in his dress-coat, which was too large for him, and which his scarf caused to rise up.  He was a very respectable man who had amassed a decent fortune from the sale of iron bedsteads; yet how could I bring myself to think that this embarrassed-looking, ill-dressed, timid little creature could, with a word hesitatingly uttered, unite me in eternal bonds?  Moreover, he had a fatal likeness to my piano-tuner.

The Mayor, after bowing to us, as a man bows when without his hat, and in a white cravat, that is to say, clumsily, blew his nose, to the great relief of his two arms which he did not know what to do with, and briskly began the little ceremony.  He hurriedly mumbled over several passages of the Code, giving the numbers of the paragraphs; and I was given confusedly to understand that I was threatened with the police if I did not blindly obey all the orders and crotchets of my husband, and if I did not follow wherever he might choose to take me, even if it should be to a sixth floor in the Rue-Saint-Victor.  A score of times I was on the point of interrupting the Mayor, and saying, “Excuse me, Monsieur, but those remarks are hardly polite as regards myself, and you yourself must know that they are devoid of meaning.”

But I restrained myself for fear I might frighten the magistrate, who seemed to me to be in a hurry to finish.  He added, however, a few words on the mutual duties of husband and wife—­copartnership—­paternity, etc., etc.; but all these things, which would perhaps have made me weep anywhere else, seemed grotesque to me, and I could not forget that dozen of soldiers playing piquet round the stove, and that row of doors on which I had read “Public Health,” “Burials,” “Deaths,” “Expropriations,” etc.  I should have been aggrieved at this dealer in iron bedsteads touching on my cherished dreams if the comic side of the situation had not absorbed my whole attention, and if a mad wish to laugh outright had not seized me.

“Monsieur Georges--------, do you swear to take for your wife
Mademoiselle-----------,” said the Mayor, bending forward.

My husband bowed and answered “Yes” in a very low voice.  He has since acknowledged to me that he never felt more emotion in his life than in uttering that “Yes.”

“Mademoiselle Berthe--------,” continued the magistrate, turning to me,
“do you swear to take for your husband-----------”

I bowed, with a smile, and said to myself:  “Certainly; that is plain enough; I came here for that express purpose.”