‘THE chains of marriage are so heavy that it takes two people to bear them, sometimes three.’ Thus spoke Alexandre Dumas père, who was also father of Les Trois Mousquetaires.

But any Brits joining together in holy deadlock here in France could be forgiven for thinking that the worst must surely be behind them by the time they actually head up the aisle, because they will by then have been tried in the fires of an administrative assault course that will have had them wondering whether it was all worth it.

For a start, you each have to provide a birth certificate that is less than three months old, French certificates being updated all through your life to reflect changing family circumstances. On our two daughters’ BCs, Mme Masstairmann and I appear for the moment as non-deceased, which was pretty much how I felt after the morning after celebrating their respective arrivals. But if yours is British, you’ll also need a sworn translation that’s signed, stamped and dated, though that does neatly solve the three-month problem.

Actually, if your birth cert is a Jersey one, you may have noticed that it already says ‘Translation’ at the top, but they stopped issuing French originals a couple of years ago now – just at the time they were telling us we needed to re-establish closer links with our closest neighbours.

And if you’re a divorcee getting ready for a second go (the triumph of hope over experience, Samuel Johnson called it), you’ll also have to provide a copy, and translations, of the decree absolute and the original marriage certificate as well.

One chap who called me last year had mislaid the said cert while moving over here, and the British authorities wouldn’t issue a new one for a marriage that no longer existed, so as a sworn translator myself, I just added a little note in italics at the bottom to get him round that, too.

Then there’s the obligatory visite médicale prénuptiale, which I initially thought was a gross and needless invasion of privacy until it revealed in our case that the future Mme M’s blood group and mine were mutually incompatible (pity we didn’t have to see a psychiatrist as well) and she did indeed need to be very closely monitored during the subsequent pregnancies to make sure her ‘positive’ body didn’t reject its ‘negative’ foetus.

If they do manage to hack their way through all la paperasse – red-tape – the weary couple then have to tie the knot at the register office. (Madame M once cheerily advised two young Jersey friends to ‘get knotted’.) Church is just an optional extra and of no legal significance.

Actually, it was only while La Patronne and I were struggling through the hoops prior to our own wedding at Dinan’s Mairie that she and her parents discovered to their amazement that her first name wasn’t the double-barrelled Anne-Hélène at all. No, it is in fact Anne, then Hélène. The hyphen was nowhere to be found in the town hall’s register of births that her father had signed.

Mind you, they weren’t half as shocked as Serge Marteil was the other day. He had popped into St Brieuc’s Palais de Justice to sort out some routine formality and they asked the 67-year-old Breton for a copy of his birth certificate and it had to be – you’ve got it – less than three months old. But his home town’s Registre de Naissances revealed that he was in fact Serge Le Buhé.

Yes, he’d been born in Brest in 1941 to unmarried parents – a Monsieur Marteil and a Mademoiselle Le Buhé – but his parents separated while he was still an infant and he was brought up by his father. When, in later life, he got an identity card, national service papers, a driving licence and even a passport, they were all issued in the name of Marteil, Lord only knows how.

So Marteil is simply un nom d’usage – an assumed name – and if he wants it to have full legal status as his real one, he has to apply to the Chancellery in Paris. The advocate will probably charge him about 2,500 euros for that, and it will doubtless take for ever and a day to sort out, too.

Not that the procedure is especially complicated. It isn’t. But the French judicial system is desperately short of manpower and money and some European commission has just ranked it an embarrassing 35th for efficiency.
Forty-eight countries were assessed and it was found that France spends only 0.19% of its Gross Domestic Product on law and order. That’s about half the budget in England and Wales (0.35%) or Germany (0.38%), and far less than table-topping Poland (0.55%). It even lags behind places like Armenia, Moldavia and Romania, for goodness sake.

This under-funding may explain how the Institut de la Gendarmerie Nationale in Paris came to conclude that the naked skeletons of the two young couples found in shallow graves on the tiny Ile de Quéménès a few blustery miles out into the Atlantic off the western coast of Brittany – you may remember me mentioning them – had only been there since around 1970.

Jersey’s historical abuse inquiry has been in our news a lot this past year and the discovery sparked media speculation that the remains might be from the short-sharp-shock work camps for the wayward boys of good families run by an abbot on the nearby islets of Trielen and Banalec – camps that were closed down only two or three years after they opened. But the state prosecutor in Brest sought a second opinion and a top laboratory has now reliably carbon-dated the bones to 1640 at the very latest, and perhaps even as far back as the 15th century.

So the mystery of how the apparently healthy, unharmed, unclothed and jewel-less couples came to be lying there so peacefully in the first place has now been handed over to the historians and archaeologists. Perhaps they were just nude sunbathers grittily waiting for the first decent ray of sunshine in a summer as awful as the one we’ve just been through.

ONE additional source of revenue for the cash-starved justice ministry might be to find some way of getting foreign drivers to cough up the fine when they are flashed by automatic radar speed cameras. A total of 900,000 Germans were snapped last year alone, but most of the tickets were binned because France has no reciprocal agreement with Berlin to collect the money, and it’s the same for the rest of Europe.

The EU’s 27 transport ministers are working on it, though, even if the Brits, the Germans and the Scandinavians are dragging their feet, being very wary of sowing what might be seen as the first seeds of a European code of criminal justice.

Mind you, France’s 2,000 speed cameras still rake in 200,000 euros a year each, and 25 million tickets have hit the nation’s doormats since they were first introduced five years ago, to the red-misted, hyperventilating irritation of many drivers.

But 11,000 lives have also been saved, not to mention 150,000 fewer people injured, and all because the average speed on the nation’s roads has dropped by a mere 10 kph. What’s that – 6 mph?

Actually, I was a multiple fractured victim myself here in Dinan 20-odd years ago, and as there’ll be another 2,500 cameras flashing away by 2012, I’ve only got one bit of advice for all our speedsters: Say Cheeeeese!
Kenavo!