It is not often that the bride dances at her own wedding, but there is no reason why she should not.
"'Tis custom that makes cowards of us all." One brave girl was married on a Saturday in May, thus violating all the old saws and superstitions. She has been happy ever afterwards. Marriages in May used to be said to lead to poverty. It is the month of Mary, the Virgin, therefore Catholics object.
One still braver bride chose Friday; this is hangman's day, and also the day of the crucifixion, therefore considered unlucky by the larger portion of the human race.
However, marriage is lucky or unlucky as the blind goddess pleases; no foresight of ours can make it a certainty. Sometimes two very doubtful characters make each other better, and live happily; again two very fine characters but help to sublimate each other's misery. Perhaps no more hopeless picture of this failure was ever painted than the misery of Caroline and Robert Elsmere, in that masterly novel which led you nowhere.
There is a capital description of a French bourgeoise wedding in one of Daudet's novels:—
"The least details of this important day were forever engraved on Risler's mind.
"He saw himself at daybreak pacing his bachelor chamber, already shaved and dressed, with two pairs of white gloves in his pocket. Then came the gala carriages, and in the first one, the one with white horses, white reins, and a lining of yellow satin, his bride's veil floated like a cloud.
"Then the entrance to the church, two by two, with this white cloud always at their head, floating, light, gleaming; the organ, the verger, the sermon of the curé, the tapers twinkling like jewels, the spring toilets, and all the world in the sacristie—the little white cloud lost, engulfed, surrounded, embraced, while the groom shook hands with the representatives of the great Parisian firms assembled in his honour; and the grand swell of the organ at the end, more solemn because the doors of the church were wide open so that the whole quarter took part in the family ceremony; the noises of the street as the cortège passed out, the exclamations of the lookers-on,—a burnisher in a lustring apron crying aloud, 'The groom is not handsome, but the bride is stunning,'—all this is what makes one proud when he is a bridegroom.
"Then the breakfast at the works, in a room ornamented with hangings and flowers; the stroll in the Bois, a concession to the bride's mother, Madame Chèbe, who in her position as a Parisian bourgeoise would not have considered her daughter married without the round of the lake and a visit to the cascade; then the return for dinner just as the lights were appearing on the Boulevard, where every one turned to see the wedding party, a true, well-appointed party, as it passed in a procession of liveried carriages to the very steps of the Café Vefour.
"It was all like a dream.