It was arranged that the marriage should take place just prior to Van Zandt's departure from New Orleans. Van Zandt himself undertook to make Marie understand the necessity for the marriage service that would make her his wife. She acquiesced readily, and asked that Father Quentin, the old priest at Le Bon Berger, be permitted to perform the ceremony.
Her romantic fancy immediately invested the affair with a halo of romance.
"I shall be a bride," she said, naïvely. "In madame's fashion books there are brides all in white, with veils on their heads. I shall be dressed like that, and the marriage shall be out in madame's garden by moonlight. All the Jockey Club shall come to see, and the nuns from the convent, too, if they choose."
Van Zandt said it should be just as she liked. He employed Marie's good nurse to buy the simple white India muslin dress and tulle veil. Also a pretty gray serge dress and straw hat for traveling.
Carmontelle presented her with a full set of large, lustrous pearls to be worn at the ceremony, and the rest of the Jockey Club, who had, since the day of Marie's splendid riding, felt almost a proud proprietorship in her, contributed a great box full of costly wedding-gifts—jewels, costly dressing-cases, perfume sets, glove-boxes full of tiny kid gloves—everything, in short, that they could think of on the spur of the moment, even adding a big photograph-album in ivory and silver containing fac-similes of their familiar faces.
Father Quentin, only too glad to be forgiven for his treachery to Carmontelle, came to perform the ceremony and bless the wedded pair. But before this auspicious event a difficulty had arisen.
A marriage license must be procured; but what name should be written in it for the nameless girl, Mme. Lorraine's Little Nobody?
Pierre Carmontelle came quickly to the rescue.
"I adopt Marie as my daughter. I am quite old enough to be her father. Let the name be written Marie Carmontelle," he said.
And so as Marie Carmontelle she was given into the keeping of her handsome young husband.