Staff at the town hall in Pradines, a small commune near Cahors in France's Lot department, were thrown into panic on Saturday, August 29, 2026, after a bride called to say her wedding ceremony was about to start but the mayor had not shown up.
The bride told the municipal technical on-call service that the mayor was badly late and, in a detail she blurted out in her distress, was expected to be wearing grey trousers, according to Denis Marre, the mayor of Pradines, who spoke to French newspaper La Depeche du Midi.
Mayor rushes to get dressed
Marre said he was at home, around 2:30pm, when he got a call from the town hall's technical on-call staff telling him a bride was desperately waiting for him to officiate her wedding. He said he knew nothing about any such ceremony but rushed to his wardrobe to put on a suit before heading straight to the town hall.
As he dressed, Marre said doubts began to creep in. He said he wondered why the call had come from the technical on-call service rather than the administrative one, and said he started to suspect a bad joke, or possibly a mistake, especially since no one among the municipal staff had heard anything about a wedding that day.
Records searched, no wedding found
Back at the town hall, the director general of services was alerted and the administrative on-call team was mobilised immediately. Staff searched files, checked schedules and went through diaries, but found no trace of any wedding planned for that day.
Romain Vezine, the deputy mayor, said the episode is something staff can laugh about now, but that at the time it caused real chaos at the town hall, with employees fearing they had made a huge oversight. Marre said that after 13 years as mayor he could have officiated at short notice if needed, but that he did not even have the text to read from.
Unanswered calls deepen the mystery
To try to clear up the confusion, the team decided to call the bride back. Marre said that, gripped by doubt, they tried to reach her several times by phone but got no answer. Each attempt, he said, went to voicemail.
The truth: a wedding 500 kilometres away
It was only once the ceremony had ended that the bride finally picked up. Marre said she told them the mayor had in fact arrived to officiate, but 500 kilometres away, in the Loire department.
The bride had been telling the truth all along. She was indeed marrying in a town called Pradines, and her mayor was indeed running late, possibly in grey trousers. But her wedding was taking place in a different Pradines, a small commune in the Loire department near the town of Roanne, roughly 500 kilometres from the Pradines in the Lot.
Marre said it was not the first time the Lot's Pradines had been mixed up with a commune of the same name, adding that it also happens fairly often with another Pradines in the Correze department. He said such mix-ups do not usually come with this kind of urgency.
Story becomes a social media hit
Once the tension had died down, the municipality decided to share the story on its Facebook page. Vezine said the funny episode highlighted the professionalism of all the town hall staff. He said the Facebook post went on to draw the best audience the municipal page has ever had, with more than 25,000 views so far.
In the end, the couple in the Loire said their vows with their own mayor present, while the mayor of Pradines in the Lot put away the suit he had pulled out in a hurry and got on with the rest of his weekend.
