He would put in his poem, a loquacious old fellow, like me, and he would call him Nestor.
My friends, in bygone days, in those amiable days of yore, people married wisely; they had a good contract, and then they had a good carouse.
As soon as Cujas had taken his departure, Gamacho entered.
But, in sooth! the stomach is an agreeable beast which demands its due, and which wants to have its wedding also.
People supped well, and had at table a beautiful neighbor without a guimpe so that her throat was only moderately concealed.
Oh! the large laughing mouths, and how gay we were in those days! youth was a bouquet; every young man terminated in a branch of lilacs or a tuft of roses; whether he was a shepherd or a warrior; and if, by chance, one was a captain of dragoons, one found means to call oneself Florian.
People thought much of looking well.
They embroidered and tinted themselves.
A bourgeois had the air of a flower, a Marquis had the air of a precious stone.
People had no straps to their boots, they had no boots.
They were spruce, shining, waved, lustrous, fluttering, dainty, coquettish, which did not at all prevent their wearing swords by their sides.
The humming-bird has beak and claws.
That was the day of the Galland Indies.
One of the sides of that century was delicate, the other was magnificent; and by the green cabbages! people amused themselves.
To-day, people are serious.
The bourgeois is avaricious, the bourgeoise is a prude; your century is unfortunate.
People would drive away the Graces as being too low in the neck.
Alas! beauty is concealed as though it were ugliness.
Since the revolution, everything, including the ballet-dancers, has had its trousers; a mountebank dancer must be grave; your rigadoons are doctrinarian.
It is necessary to be majestic.
People would be greatly annoyed if they did not carry their chins in their cravats.
The ideal of an urchin of twenty when he marries, is to resemble M. Royer-Collard.
And do you know what one arrives at with that majesty? at being petty.
Learn this: joy is not only joyous; it is great.
But be in love gayly then, what the deuce! marry, when you marry, with fever and giddiness, and tumult, and the uproar of happiness!
Be grave in church, well and good.
But, as soon as the mass is finished, sarpejou! you must make a dream whirl around the bride.
A marriage should be royal and chimerical; it should promenade its ceremony from the cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup.
I have a horror of a paltry wedding.
Ventregoulette! be in Olympus for that one day, at least.
Be one of the gods. Ah! people might be sylphs.
Games and Laughter, argiraspides; they are stupids.
My friends, every recently made bridegroom ought to be Prince Aldobrandini.
Profit by that unique minute in life to soar away to the empyrean with the swans and the eagles, even if you do have to fall back on the morrow into the bourgeoisie of the frogs.
Don’t economize on the nuptials, do not prune them of their splendors; don’t scrimp on the day when you beam.
The wedding is not the housekeeping.
Oh! if I were to carry out my fancy, it would be gallant, violins would be heard under the trees.
Here is my programme: sky-blue and silver.
I would mingle with the festival the rural divinities, I would convoke the Dryads and the Nereids.
The nuptials of Amphitrite, a rosy cloud, nymphs with well dressed locks and entirely naked, an Academician offering quatrains to the goddess, a chariot drawn by marine monsters.
“Triton trottait devant, et tirait de sa conque
Des sons si ravissants qu’il ravissait quiconque!”65
—there’s a festive programme, there’s a good one, or else I know nothing of such matters, deuce take it!”
While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, was listening to himself, Cosette and Marius grew intoxicated as they gazed freely at each other.
Aunt Gillenormand surveyed all this with her imperturbable placidity. Within the last five or six months she had experienced a certain amount of emotions.
Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding, Marius brought back from a barricade, Marius dead, then living, Marius reconciled, Marius betrothed, Marius wedding a poor girl, Marius wedding a millionairess.
The six hundred thousand francs had been her last surprise.
Then, her indifference of a girl taking her first communion returned to her.
She went regularly to service, told her beads, read her euchology, mumbled Aves in one corner of the house, while I love you was being whispered in the other, and she beheld Marius and Cosette in a vague way, like two shadows.
The shadow was herself.