XIIWEDDING CUSTOMS THEN AND NOW
We were lingering about the breakfast table having such a comfortable, chatty review of the last night’s party, when a familiar voice was heard. “Oh! congratulate me; we have captured him; they are engaged.” That was the first time I had ever heard an “announcement” from headquarters. It was made to Mrs. Slocomb, in her library. There followed many amusing particulars, audible to us, in the adjoining room, but we were discreet young girls; perhaps that was one reason we were among the very few invited to the wedding, which so quickly followed the engagement that it was a complete surprise to the whole community.
Sixty years ago only Catholics went to the sanctuary for a wedding ceremony. Protestant weddings were home affairs, necessarily confined to family and nearest friends. Houses being limited in space, company was limited in number. No city house could boast of a ballroom; few had “double parlors.”
At the wedding whose “announcement” was such a surprise to us, I think our family and the Slocombs were the only guests, except the families of the groom’s business associates. The idea of having a grand reception to announce a marriage engagement, to which everybody who is anybody is invited, was unheard of. The anxiety, too, of the parties interested to get the news in a suitable form in the daily papers, for the butcher boy and the sewing girl, out of the social swim, to read, accompanied by the genealogies of the engaged people, the wealth of the girl and how she came by it, and the numbers of clubs of which the young man is a member, as though the money and the clubs were “the chief end of man”, was unheard of, too. We did things on a very different scale sixty years ago!
I recall my astonishment when Elèna Longer told me her sister Héda was married the night before, for Elèna and I (we were ten years old at the time) had played together all that day of the wedding, and not a hint was imparted to me of the impending event. I had not even heard the name of Mr. Charles Kock, the fiancé, mentioned. There were already six married daughters, with hosts of children, at that time in the Longer family, so there could have been little room on such an occasion for outsiders, even if their presence had been desired.
Wedding presents were not made, either. The first time we saw a display of wedding gifts, how surprised we were, and how we wondered as to how it happened! There were not many, nor were they expensive, so for ever so long I could have given the list and the names of the donors. Dear Maria Shute, who, as I remember, was the bridesmaid, presented a pearl-handled paper cutter! That article might have escaped my memory, along with the others, but years after that wedding I met Maria, then Mrs. Babcock, and we talked of it all, and had a merry laugh over the paper cutter.
Fifty-eight years ago, when I married, I was surprised by a solitary wedding present, a napkin ring! From the most unexpected source it came. The giver is long since dead and gone; dead and gone also is the napkin ring.
At the wedding of Caroline Hennen to Mr. Muir, the first I ever attended, there were not a dozen guests, but the rooms were filled, indeed the Hennen family easily filled one of them. At this wedding we met Mr. William Babcock from New York, a forty-niner en route to California (this was in 1849). The following day I went with him to call on and introduce him to his young cousin, an intimate friend of mine he was desirous of meeting. She was of that handsome family of Smiths, a nieceof Mrs. Labouisse. I never saw either him or her afterwards, for within the following fortnight they quietly married and started “round the Horn” to San Francisco. More than fifty years after I saw their children and grandchildren in California.
Some of us must remember genial, gossipy Mrs. Garnet Duncant, thebon vivant, so bright, so fat and so entertaining? She it was who called one day (sixty years ago) to tell us Amelia Zacharie had married her invalid cousin, and sailed away with him. Those two are the only cases I recall of wedding trips, and both were permanent trips, for there was no intention of a return to New Orleans of either couple. It was the fashion for the newly-mated to remain quietly in the home nest, until one of their very own be made ready for their reception.
James Pollock, I recall to mind, made a late appearance (in 1850) at a dance given by the Lanfears, on Julia street, that old “13 Buildings.” The Lanfears were the last to leave that once fashionable row. Pollock swept in late, full of apologies. His sister Mana had married that evening and he was detained.
The only other wedding trip I can chronicle was one where the bridegroom went alone. Do you remember what an excitement there was, years ago, when a wealthy young man disappeared from theside of his bride the morning after the wedding? There were no wires or wireless then to facilitate the hunt, undertaken with frantic haste, and continuing two mortally anxious weeks. He was eventually discovered, in a semi-conscious, dazed condition, on a wharfboat at Baton Rouge, or some such river town. He recovered from that attack, to be blown away by another “brain storm” a few years later. It was twenty years after this second disappearance that the courts pronounced him dead, and the widow permitted to administer on the estate.
In those days old maids were rare. Every girl, so to say, married. The few exceptions served to emphasize the rarity of an unmated female.
Divorces were so rare when I was young that they were practically unknown in polite circles. I know of cases, and you would know of them, too, if I mentioned names, where men sent their erring or cast-off wives, not to Coventry, but to Paris, and made them stay there. One such died in Paris lately at the age of ninety-five, who was packed off, under a cloud of suspicion. There was no divorce, no open scandal. She simply went and stayed! He simply stayed!
Last winter I was invited to a view (sounds like a picture exhibit!) of the trousseau and wedding gifts of a fashionable young lady. I was stunnedwith amazement! A large room filled to overflowing with glass, china, silver, mirrors, everything a body could require, and a vast array of utterly useless articles! and the trousseau which the tired mother, who has had nervous prostration ever since, spent months accumulating in Paris. My gracious! the bestblanchisseusein the land could not cope successfully with all that flimsy finery, laces and ribbons. I could only look and wonder, “What can all this lead to?” (I add here, anticipating events: It led to an apartment and one maid servant.) The young man was a salaried clerk, and the young girl utterly unfit to care for even the superabundance of china and silver, so much more than they could possibly find use for in a three-story house, not to mention a six-room apartment and “light housekeeping.” I wonder if the whirligig of time won’t bring back some of the simplicity of my day?
Already it is the style to “fire out of sight” the useless bric-a-brac ornaments that twenty years ago cluttered up drawing rooms till one had to pick her way carefully lest she stumble over a blue china cat, or tilt over a bandy-leg table covered with ivory idols and Chinese mandarins with bobbing heads. Some of the most fashionable drawing rooms to-day are already so stripped of furniture one has to wander around quite a bit to find a chair to sit on; noteven a pier mirror to prink before, nor a parlor clock, flanked by “side pieces,” on the mantel. All that banished for stunning simplicity. Not so, however, the costumes and entertainments, which are becoming, so it seems to a near-sighted old lady, more and more luxurious. Perhaps this extreme (we all dote on extremes) of simplicity will come to take the place of many other equally absurd extremes of the present day.Qui vivra verra.