There are some insanely violent wedding ceremonies and traditions out there, to be sure, and some of them haven’t altered with the centuries.
Calling many of them “sacrificial rites” is perhaps a bit of a stretch.
When you think about France, you probably think about rose petals, coffee shops, black turtlenecks, really long bread rolls and all the other things that American movies tell us about France.
You probably don’t immediately picture a group of slavering wedding guests hunched over a table slurping garbage out of a toilet bowl. But that’s exactly what occurs during La Soupe, a wedding tradition seemingly cooked up by cracked-out hobos.
After the wedding reception, the happy couple are sent on their way to their marriage bed while the bridal party stay behind to clean up the mess. They do this by dumping all the leftover punch and cake and hors d’oeuvres and napkins and bits of trash off their shoes into a chamber pot, creating a garbage stew.
While the newlyweds are tangled up in bed preparing to do the nasty, half a dozen or more loud and presumably drunk people barge into the room with a toilet full of slop and don’t leave until the bride and groom drink it.
Nowadays, said trash is generally a combination of chocolate and champagne (or something similarly palatable), and it’s generally served in innocuously elegant vessels, like a dish vaguely decked out to look like a chamber pot. Nevertheless, what’s known cannot be unknown, and once something has been in a toilet, symbolically or otherwise, there’s no going back.
