“I know,” Sébastien said angelically. “Maybe my wife will lead me down the right path. . . .”

I returned to the primary subject before this perjury could go farther. “What we’d like is just a short ceremony, no Mass. We want to do it as a reaffirmation of our vows, with the actual vows, please. Would you mind if we went over the ceremony?”

“Oh, it will be just like any normal ceremony.” The curé waved his hand. “You know, you walk in, I talk, everyone sings, you all say your vows.”

That certainly summed it up, but I felt I could use more details. “If we could just go over it briefly together, I would find that very reassuring.”

Claudine intervened. “Ma pauvre petite belle fille,” she said. “She’s so nervous. You can understand that, I’m sure. Maybe you could just tell her how things will go and show her the vows they’ll have to speak?”

“Well, fine, the vows, I guess.” He disappeared into the depths of the sacristy and came back with a ratty old book he must have received sixty years ago in the seminary. “In fact, she should make a copy of this so she can read from it during the ceremony.”

I looked up. “Read our vows? Don’t you normally say them, and then we repeat them?” Thus avoiding the tacky spectacle of the bride and groom bent over a photocopy instead of holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes. I was not confident of my ability to memorize vows in French ahead of time and say them correctly under pressure.

“No, no, you read it,” he assured me firmly.

I looked at Sébastien and Claudine. Neither seemed inclined to help me on this point. “But in the U.S. ceremony the deacon read it, and then we repeated it. It worked so prettily, you don’t think . . . ?”

He shook his head adamantly. “It will work much better this way; you’ll see.” He turned to Claudine. “Explain to her that she should read it.”

“Maybe we could look at the churches now,” she suggested, hoping to stop me massaging my neck that way.

Besides the disdained church on our invitations, we had our choice of three others, all ancient, weathered, and crumbling, all beautiful. At my questions, the curé finally suspended his disbelief in my French-speaking ability long enough to recount their history.

The oldest had been built in the eleventh century. The curé showed me the distinctive zigzag pattern of the stone masonry and how the entrance had been butchered in renovations some centuries ago. Outside it, the stone buildings and red tiled roofs of the town fell away in folds below us into a green valley that stretched out into golden farmland. Inside, it was dark and narrow.