Sancho and the marriage arranging harpies saw that Valmorain and Hortense were invited to soirees, as the dinner and dancing events were called, of family and friends in the intimacy of the home, where they could exchange a few words, though never alone. Protocol forced Valmorain to announce his intentions promptly. Sancho went with him to speak with Monsieur Guizot, and in private they worked out the financial terms of the union, cordially but with absolute clarity. Shortly after, the agreement was celebrated with a dejeuner de fiancailles, a luncheon at which Valmorain handed a fashionable ring to his fiancee, a ruby surrounded with diamonds set in gold.
Pere Antoine, the most notable priest in Louisiana, married them on a Tuesday afternoon in the cathedral, the only witnesses the close Guizot relatives, a total of ninety-two persons. The bride wanted a private wedding. They entered the church escorted by the Gouverneur's guards, as was de rigueur, and Hortense shone in a pearl embroidered silk gown that had been worn by her grandmother, her mother, and several of her sisters. It was a little snug, even after the work of seamstresses. Following the ceremony, the bouquet of orange blossom and jasmine was sent to the nuns to place at the feet of the Virgin in the chapel. The reception took place in the Guizots' house, with an array of sumptuous dishes prepared by the same caterer Valmorain had hired for the festival at his plantation: pheasant stuffed with chestnuts, duck in marinade, crab blazing in liqueur, fresh oysters, fish of various kinds, turtle soup, cheeses brought from France, and more than forty desserts in addition to a wedding cake of French inspiration: an indestructible edifice of marzipan and dried fruit.
After the guests bid them good-bye, Hortense awaited her husband arrayed in a muslin gown, her blond hair loose across her shoulders, in her virginal chamber; her parents had replaced her bed with one with a canopy. In those years a great fuss was made over the bride's canopy: blue silk imitating a clear sky with a cloudless horizon and a profusion of plump cupids with bows and arrows, bunches of artificial flowers, and lace bows.
The newlyweds spent three days enclosed in that room, as custom demanded, attended by a pair of slaves who brought them food and removed chamber pots. It would have been disgraceful for the bride to appear in public, even in front of her family, as she was being initiated into the secrets of love. Suffocating with heat, bored in the closed space, with a headache from so many youthful capers at his age, and aware that outside the room a dozen relatives had their ears glued to the wall, Valmorain realized that he had married not only Hortense but the entire Guizot tribe. Finally on the fourth day he could emerge from that prison and escape with his wife to the plantation, where they would learn to know each other with more space and air. Just that week the summer season was beginning and everyone was fleeing the city.
Hortense never doubted that she would trap Valmorain. Even before the relentless procuresses swung into action she had ordered the nuns to embroider sheets with her and Valmorain's initials intertwined. The ones with the initials of the previous fiance, perfumed with lavender and kept for years in a hope chest, were not wasted; she simply had flowers embroidered over the letters and destined those sheets to guest rooms. As part of her dowry, she brought Denise, the slave who had served her since she was fifteen, the only one who knew how to dress her hair and iron her gowns to her pleasure, and another house slave her father gave her as a wedding present when she mentioned doubts about the majordomo on the Valmorain plantation. She wanted someone she could trust absolutely.
Sancho again asked Valmorain what he planned to do with Tete and Rosette, since the situation could not be hidden. Many whites kept their women of color, but always separate from the legal family. The case of a slave concubine was different. When the master married, the relationship was ended, and he had to give up the woman, who was sold or sent to the fields where the wife would not see her; having a lover and her daughter in the same house, as Valmorain intended to do, was unacceptable. The Guizot family, and Hortense herself, would understand that he had consoled himself with a slave during his years as a widower, but now the problem had to be resolved.
Hortense had seen Rosette dancing with Maurice at the country party and perhaps had suspicions, though Valmorain believed that in all the boisterous confusion she had not noticed much. "Don't be naive, brother-in-law, women have an instinct for these things," Sancho told him. On the day Hortense, accompanied by her court of sisters, came to inspect the house, Valmorain ordered Tete to disappear with Rosette until the end of the visit. He did not want to do anything hurried, he explained to Sancho. Faithful to his character, he preferred to postpone the decision and hope that things would work out on their own. He did not broach the subject with Hortense.
For a while the master continued to sleep with Tete when they were beneath the same roof, but he had not thought it necessary to tell her he was planning to marry; she found that out through the gossip circulating like a windstorm. During the plantation festival she had talked with Denise, a woman of loose tongue, whom she saw again from time to time in the Marche Francais, and through her learned that her future mistress was of a fiery and jealous nature. Tete knew that any change would be unfavorable, and that she would not be able to protect Rosette. Once again, crushed by anger and fear, she realized how profoundly powerless she was. If her master had given her an opening, she would have prostrated herself at his feet, she would have gratefully submitted to all his caprices, whatever he wished, as long as he kept the situation as it was, but as soon as he announced his courtship with Hortense Guizot he had stopped calling her to his bed. Erzulie, mother loa, at least protect Rosette. Pressured by Sancho, Valmorain came up with the temporary solution that from June to November Tete would stay with the little girl and look after the house in the city while he went with the family to the plantation; in that way he would have time to prepare Hortense. That meant six months more of uncertainty for Tete.
Hortense installed herself in a chamber decorated in imperial blue, in which she slept alone; neither she nor her husband had the custom of sleeping with someone, and after their suffocating honeymoon they needed their own space. Her childhood toys, horrid dolls with glass eyes and human hair, adorned her room, and her curly-haired little dogs slept on her bed, a piece of furniture three meters wide, with carved pillars, a canopy, cushions, curtains, fringe, and pompons, plus a petit-point head-board she had embroidered in the Ursulines' school. Above the bed hung the same silk sky and butterball angels her parents had given her for the wedding.
The recent bride arose after lunch and spent two-thirds of her life in bed, from which she managed the destinies of others. Their first night as a married couple, while still in the paternal house, she welcomed her husband in a negligee with swan plumes around the neckline, very becoming, but deadly for him because the feathers produced an uncontrollable attack of sneezing. Such a bad beginning did not prevent the marriage from being consummated, and Valmorain had the agreeable surprise that his wife responded to his desires with more generosity than either Eugenia or Tete had ever demonstrated.
Hortense was a virgin, but barely. In some way she had succeeded in escaping family vigilance and learned things that maidens had no knowledge of. The deceased fiance had gone to the grave without knowing she had surrendered to him with great ardor in her imagination, and would continue to do so in all the following years in the privacy of her bed, martyrized by unsatisfied desire and frustrated love. Her married sisters had provided basic information. They were not expert, but at least they knew that any man appreciates a certain show of enthusiasm, though not enough to arouse suspicion. Hortense decided on her own that neither she nor her husband were at an age for prudery. Her sisters told her that the best ways to dominate a husband were to play the fool and to please him in bed. The first would prove to be much more difficult than the second, for there was not one ounce of fool in her.