Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

One more legality remained. In that Calvinist canton, where church and state functioned as one, a marriage license merely allowed a couple to "post their banns" -- to attach to the door of their local church a declaration of their intention to marry The banns had to remain in place three weeks, during which time anyone with grounds to oppose the marriage was to come forward. It was November 28 when our banns were put up at the entrance to the church nearest rue Charles Bonnet, a gray stone structure with an elaborate wooden porch.

There the precious document flapped in the snow squalls of Geneva's approaching winter, a small sheet of paper tacked to the church door with a dozen others: our names, birth dates, and other statistics. For "home parish" we'd given the names of our hometowns, but when it came to "date of baptism" we'd been stumped. John was pretty sure he'd been baptized and I was pretty sure I hadn't been; under the impatient eye of the registrar-of-church-documents we'd blurted out random dates in our birth years.

Banns, the registrar assured us, were seldom challenged, certainly not in the case of foreigners nobody in the city knew. At last we could set our wedding date: Saturday, December 20, the day after the university closed for the Christmas holidays.

On the way to the trolley for classes -- there was too much snow now to bike -- I'd step up to the church door and read our names. The name of the church I never learned. Nor did it even once occur to me to open that door and go inside.

December 20 dawned sunny and cold after an all-night snowstorm. We had asked Mme. Brulhart and her counterpart at John's pension, Mme. de Marignac, to serve as our witnesses. After a honeymoon in Switzerland --it was too late to get an Italian visa in my married name -- I'd be moving into John's room at 9 rue Calvin.

We'd moved my steamer trunk there the day before. The de Marignacs were a proud old Geneva family reduced to renting out rooms to paying guests. Their austere townhouse was in the very shadow of somber St. Peter's Church, from whose pulpit in the 1500s John Calvin preached his stringent reforms.