Most significant is a ruby necklace given by the husband to the bride as a wedding gift; "A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat." Explaining the heirloom’s lineage, Carter writes, "After the Terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who'd escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound. And his grandmother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon made up in rubies; such a gesture of luxurious defiance!" +