A Hospitalic Romance

Happily Ever After

In a large ceremony at the Church of Our Lady of Loreto yesterday, Harry James Potter and Gabrielle Vedaste Delacour got married. It was a very short ceremony for the large number of people there, but many of those present expressed delight at the happenings.

"Gabrielle has loved [Potter] since she was nine," Dorothea d'Alexandre, a childhood friend of the bride, confided. "I'm glad she finally was able to do something about it, because if she hadn't, I'd have had to force her to start going out with other people."

Cho Chang, seeker for the Cannons and a school friend of Harry Potter, said, "It was a lovely wedding. I hope mine turns out so well." (At the reception, Miss Chang, who caught the bouquet, announced her own engagement to Roger Davies, currently professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts.)

The wedding was almost picture perfect. The couple exchanged vows, rings, and affectionate glances in all the right places, and according to Amalia Swoon, fashion editor of Witch Weekly and a friend of the bride, they were stylishly dressed. "I'm so glad the girl decided not to do white. That's one modern style that's just absolutely worse than the old one. That dress," she said, referring to the low-cut silver and blue confection the bride was wearing, "is so much lovelier than a white version would have been. Although she could make pretty much anything look good," Swoon admitted. The groom was in black and green, which Swoon called "a wonderful choice. Not only is green a very traditional color for a wedding, but it looks absolutely smashing. You know, James Potter wore green too, but it didn't look half so good," she added. "I think that's a lovely omen."

And what about the church itself? "It's a wonderful place to have a wedding," opined Valentine Egidius, who officiated at the ceremony. "The woodwork in here is so lovely, and the balconies make it easy for everyone to see. The photographer liked them, too--he said that he could mount his lights more easily because they run all the way around. The actually ceremony [took] place on that raised platform, there, so even the people in the back should get a good view. It's really a lovely little church. I think it's nice that it's so small, too, although obviously for [this] wedding it's restricted the guest list some."

Indeed it did. In fact, only one hundred thirteen people were invited. By comparison, the Weasley-Granger wedding had almost eight hundred people invited, and Oliver Wood and Susan Bones were actually married in a Quidditch stadium.

Still, though the wedding itself was small, the reception more than made up for it. Over a thousand people crammed into the Ball Room, many of them high-ranking ministry officials. Although the Potters left early on in the celebration, (Harry Potter saying as he left that "If one more person stares at my scar I'm going to go insane and throw them across the room,") the party went on into the small hours of the night.

"I'm actually a little worried," confessed one ministry official who wished to remain nameless. "I know I didn't get home until three because that's how much time the sitter charged us for, but I don't remember much of anything past midnight."

"It was wonderful. I got to see many friends that I haven't seen in ages again, and we all had a good laugh about the things we all remembered," said Ginny Weasley-Malfoy. "And it's wonderful that [Harry] is even able to do it at all. I mean, this time last year we were all being overjoyed that [he wasn't] in a coma, and now look. I'm just so--happy!"