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And Andrew looked and beheld the photograph of a handsome, vast mustachioed, rake-helly officer of Zouaves, labelled as Captain Raoul Marescaux, who had died gloriously for France on the twenty-sixth of March, 1917. For a second or two he groped for some association with a far distant past. "But don't you see?" cried Elodie. "It is my husband. He has been dead for over two years."
This chilly end of it left me with a sense of bleak disappointment. I was not rendered merrier a short while afterwards by an airy letter from Horatio Bakkus enclosing a flourishing announcement in French of his marriage with the Veuve Elodie Marescaux, nee Figasso. "Behold me," said the fellow, "cooing with content in the plenitude of perfect connubiality." I did not desire to behold him at all.
The real discussion between them of the change that the death of Raoul Marescaux might bring about in their relations, did not take place till the next day. Each felt it as a sudden shock which, as in two chemicals hitherto mingling in placid fluidity, might cause crystallization.
As my Shakespearian preincarnation scorned dishonourable designs, so do even I. The marriage of Veuve Elodie Marescaux and Horatio Bakkus will take place at the earliest opportunity allowed by French law. If that delays too long, we shall fly to England where an Archbishop's special licence will induce a family Archdeacon to marry us straight away.
But when you come to the intermediate business of world population, then bureaucracy steps in and plays the very devil. Elodie and Raoul Marescaux desired to be married. In England they would have got a special license, or gone to a registry office, and the thing would have been over.
But in France, Monsieur and Madame Marescaux, and Madame Figasso, and the huissier Boudin, who insisted on coming forward although he was not legally united to Madame, and lawyers representing each family, were set all agog, and there were meetings and quarrels, and delays Elodie had not a cent to her dowry which of course was the stumbling-block with the final result that nothing was done which might not have been done at once, namely, that the pair were doubly married once by Monsieur le Maire and then by Monsieur le Cure.
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