1: 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.

Under the long tulle veil, which almost covered her, with the symbolical
orange flowers on her bright, light hair, in her white dress, with her
downcast eyes and her graceful figure, Elaine looked to me like a
_Psyche_, whose innocent heart was vowed to love. I felt how vain and
artificial all this form was, how little this show counted before this
_Kiss_, the triumphant, revealing, maddening Kiss, which rivets the
flesh of the wife to the lips and all the flesh of the husband, which
turns the Immaculate youth of the virgin into a woman, and consecrates
it to tender caresses, to dreams and to future ecstacies, through the
sufferings of a rape.

PART VI

Elaine loves me, as much as I adore her.

She left her parental abode, as if she was going to some festivity,
without turning round toward all that she had left behind her in the way
of affection and recollection, and without even a farewell tear, which
the first kiss effaces, on her long turned-up lashes.

She looked like a bird which had escaped from its cage, and does not
know where to settle, which beats its wings in the intoxication of the
light, and which warbles incessantly. She repeated the same words, as if
she had been rather intoxicated, and her laugh sounded like the cooing
of a pigeon, and looking into my eyes, with her eyes full of languor,
and her arms round my neck like a bracelet, and with her burning cheek
against mine, she suddenly exclaimed:

"I say, my darling, would you not give ten years of your life to have
already got to the end of the journey?"

And that passionate question so disconcerted me, that I did not know
what to reply, and my brain reeled, as if I had been at the edge of a
precipice. Did she already know what her mother had not told her? Had
she already learned what she ought to have been ignorant of? And had
that heart, which I used to compare to _the Vessel of Election_, of
which the litanies of Our Lady speak, already been damaged?