ng and I could hear my poor mother bursting
into tears beside me. Oh! I understand what a mother's heart must feel
during such a ceremony. While watching with satisfaction the clergy who
were solemnly advancing, I noticed Georges; he seemed irritated; he was
stiff, upright, his nostrils dilated, and his lips set. I have always
been rather vexed at him for not having been a little more sensible to
what I was experiencing that day, but men do not understand this kind of
poetry.

The discourse of his Reverence who married us was a masterpiece, and was
delivered, moreover, with that unction, that dignity, that persuasive
charm peculiar to him. He spoke of our two families "in which pious
belief was hereditary, like honor." You could have heard a pin drop, such
was the attention with which the prelate's voice was listened to. Then at
one point he turned toward me, and gave me to understand with a thousand
delicacies that I was wedding one of the noblest officers in the army.
"Heaven smiles," said he, "on the warrior who places at the service of
his country a sword blessed by God, and who, when he darts into the fray,
can place his hand upon his heart and shout to the enemy that noble
war-cry, 'I believe!'" How well that was turned! What grandeur in this
holy eloquence! A thrill ran through the assembly. But that was not all.
His Lordship then addressed Georges in a voice as soft and unctuous as it
had before been ringing and enthusiastic.

"Monsieur, you are about to take as your companion a young girl"--I
scarcely dare recall the graceful and delicate things that his Reverence
said respecting me--"piously reared by a Christian mother who has been
able to share with her, if I may say so, all the virtues of her heart,
all the charms of her mind." (Mamma was sobbing.) "She will love her
husband as she has loved her father, that father full of kindness, who,
from the cradle, implanted in her the sentiments of nobility and
disinterestedness which--" (Papa smiled despite himself.) "Her father,
whose name is known to the poor, and who in the house of God has his
place marked among the elect." (Since his retirement, papa has become
churchwarden.) "And you, Monsieur, will respect, I feel certain, so much
purity, such ineffable candor"--I felt my eyes grow moist--"and without
forgetting the physical and perishable charms of this angel whom God
bestows upon you, you will thank Heaven for those qualities a thousand
times more preciou