Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo, as translated by Norman Denny.  An excerpt.

Wedding Customs

Wedding customs in 1833 were not what they are today.  France had not yet borrowed from England the supreme refinement of abducting the bride, carrying her off from the church as though ashamed of her happiness like an escaping bankrupt or like a rape in the manner of the Song of Songs.  The chastity and propriety of whisking one’s paradise into a post-chaise to consummate it in a tavern-bed at so much a night, mingling the most sacred of life’s memories with a hired driver and tavern serving maids, was not yet understood in France.

[...]

There was a strange belief in those days that a wedding was a quiet family affair, that a patriarchal banquet in no way marred its solemnity, that even an excess of gaiety, provided it was honest, did no harm to happiness, and finally that it was right and proper that the linking of two lives from which a family was to ensue should take place in the domestic nuptial chamber.  In short, people were so shameless as to get married at home.

Page 1129 (Part Five, Book Six, Section I).

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