the white dress of their first
communion lengthened for the occasion were some big girls of fourteen or
sixteen, cousins or elder sisters no doubt, rubicund, bewildered, their
hair greasy with rose pomade, and very much afraid of dirtying their
gloves. As there were not enough stable-boys to unharness all the
carriages, the gentlemen turned up their sleeves and set about it
themselves. According to their different social positions they wore
tail-coats, overcoats, shooting jackets, cutaway-coats; fine tail-coats,
redolent of family respectability, that only came out of the wardrobe
on state occasions; overcoats with long tails flapping in the wind and
round capes and pockets like sacks; shooting jackets of coarse
cloth, generally worn with a cap with a brass-bound peak; very short
cutaway-coats with two small buttons in the back, close together like
a pair of eyes, and the tails of which seemed cut out of one piece by a
carpenter's hatchet. Some, too (but these, you may be sure, would sit at
the bottom of the table), wore their best blouses--that is to say,
with collars turned down to the shoulders, the back gathered into small
plaits and the waist fastened very low down with a worked belt.

And the shirts stood out from the chests like cuirasses! Everyone had
just had his hair cut; ears stood out from the heads; they had been
close-shaved; a few, even, who had had to get up before daybreak, and
not been able to see to shave, had diagonal gashes under their noses or
cuts the size of a three-franc piece along the jaws, which the fresh
air en route had enflamed, so that the great white beaming faces were
mottled here and there with red dabs.

The mairie was a mile and a half from the farm, and they went thither
on foot, returning in the same way after the ceremony in the church.
The procession, first united like one long coloured scarf that undulated
across the fields, along the narrow path winding amid the green corn,
soon lengthened out, and broke up into different groups that loitered to
talk. The fiddler walked in front with his violin, gay with ribbons at
its pegs. Then came the married pair, the relations, the friends, all
following pell-mell; the children stayed behind amusing themselves
plucking the bell-flowers from oat-ears, or playing amongst themselves
unseen. Emma's dress, too long, trailed a little on the ground; from
time to time she stopped to pull it up, and then delicately, with her
gloved hands, she pi