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Chapters (45)
  1. Cover
  2. Blame Iton Paris
  3. Copyright Notice
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  5. Book One
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-one
  27. Book Two
  28. Twenty-two
  29. Twenty-three
  30. Twenty-four
  31. Twenty-five
  32. Twenty-six
  33. Twenty-seven
  34. Twenty-eight
  35. Twenty-nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-one
  38. Thirty-two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-four
  41. Thirty-five
  42. Thirty-six
  43. Thirty-seven
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine

The song finally ended, and the curé launched into his sermon. “Marriage,” he said, “should be for love and not just because you’re looking for a retirement pension.” I pressed my lips together hard, feeling bubbles of hilarity start to well up my throat like hiccups. “That first person read so poorly you might not have understood him, but he said that love is not jealous. What this means is that no matter how much the man has his soccer matches, his bars, and his nights out with his friends, the woman should not tell herself that he has his life easy. And no matter how many electrical appliances the woman has in the kitchen, the man should not tell himself that she has her life easy.”

I was trying to kind of flatten out the bubbles of hilarity between my tongue and palate as they came up. This led to an odd twitching of my lips that was making my non-French-speaking sister look at me with great concern. Justine was staring at her toes.

“ ‘Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.’ What beautiful words of St. Paul, that love endures all things. What this means is that just because a woman is getting married isn’t an excuse for her to stop trying to look like Claudia Schiffer. This is something she must strive for all her life, for love of her husband.”

I bit severely into the side of my cheek. I don’t like to put myself down, but holding Claudia Schiffer up as my personal standard in appearance might prove demoralizing. The curé looked up from the yellowed, tightly typed, mimeographed pages he held in his hands, and I tried to guess how many of those pages there were. It looked ominously like at least twenty.

“ ‘Love is patient,’ St. Paul tells us. ‘Love is kind.’ So no matter how much your wife deserves a beating from time to time, young Sébastien, you should try to be generous and restrain yourself.”

Several people choked, and a murmur broke out in the audience behind us. Turning my head slightly, I could see people nudging each other, wondering if they could possibly have heard correctly.

Into his stride now, the priest kept on in this vein for forty-five minutes. Next, despite our having paid him generously for his services, he sent my pretty bridesmaids to take up a collection. He seemed a bit surprised when the baskets came back with some buttons in them. “It was the way he yelled at us when you guys were late,” one of the button-giving guests later explained. “It wasn’t our fault you couldn’t get there on time.” Others were more generous and gave large bills. “It was the most hilarious sermon I’ve heard in my life,” they explained.