Honore de Balzac: Cousin Betty

1. PART I: THE PRODIGAL FATHER (continued)

"War is declared," said Crevel, going up to Madame Marneffe.

She rang the bell.

"Go and find Monsieur Berthier," said she to the man-servant, "and do not return without him. If you had succeeded," said she, embracing Crevel, "we would have postponed our happiness, my dear Daddy, and have given a really splendid entertainment; but when a whole family is set against a match, my dear, decency requires that the wedding shall be a quiet one, especially when the lady is a widow."

"On the contrary, I intend to make a display of magnificence a la Louis XIV.," said Crevel, who of late had held the eighteenth century rather cheap. "I have ordered new carriages; there is one for monsieur and one for madame, two neat coupes; and a chaise, a handsome traveling carriage with a splendid hammercloth, on springs that tremble like Madame Hulot."

"Oh, ho! You intend?--Then you have ceased to be my lamb?--No, no, my friend, you will do what I intend. We will sign the contract quietly--just ourselves--this afternoon. Then, on Wednesday, we will be regularly married, really married, in mufti, as my poor mother would have said. We will walk to church, plainly dressed, and have only a low mass. Our witnesses are Stidmann, Steinbock, Vignon, and Massol, all wide-awake men, who will be at the mairie by chance, and who will so far sacrifice themselves as to attend mass.

"Your colleague will perform the civil marriage, for once in a way, as early as half-past nine. Mass is at ten; we shall be at home to breakfast by half-past eleven.

"I have promised our guests that we will sit at table till the evening. There will be Bixiou, your old official chum du Tillet, Lousteau, Vernisset, Leon de Lora, Vernou, all the wittiest men in Paris, who will not know that we are married. We will play them a little trick, we will get just a little tipsy, and Lisbeth must join us. I want her to study matrimony; Bixiou shall make love to her, and --and enlighten her darkness."