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.

Risle