Page:The Count of Monte-Cristo (1887 Volume 1).djvu/86

66 the 4th of April, 1814, were lucky days for France, worthy of being equally remembered by every friend to monarchy and order; and that explains how, fallen as I trust he is forever, Napoleon has still preserved a train of fanatical adherents. Still, marquise, it has been so with other usurpers: Cromwell, who was not half of a Napoleon, had his."

"Do you know, Villefort, that you are talking in a revolutionary strain? But I excuse it; it is impossible to be the son of a Girondin and be free from a spice of the old leaven."

A deep crimson suffused the ountenance of Villefort.

"'Tis true, madame," answered he, "that my father was a Girondin, but he did not vote for the king's death; he was an equal sufferer with yourself during the Reign of Terror, and had well-nigh lost his head on the same scaffold as your own father."

"True," replied the marquise, without the tragical remembrance producing the slightest change in her features; "only our respective parents underwent proscription from diametrically opposite principles; in proof of which I may remark, that while my family remained adherents of the exiled princes, your father lost no time in joining the new government; and that after the Citizen Noirtier had been a Girondin, the Count Noirtier became a senator."

"Dear mother," interposed Renée, "you know very well it was agreed that all these disagreeable reminiscences should be spoken of no more."

"Suffer me, also, madame," rejoined Villefort, "to add my earnest request that you will kindly forget the past. What avails recrimination touching circumstances before which even the will of God himself is powerless? God can change the future; he cannot modify the past. What we human beings can do is not to deny, but to cast a veil over it. For my own part, I have laid aside the name of my father, as well as his principles. He was—nay, probably may still be—a Bonapartist, and is called Noirtier; I, on the contrary, am a royalist, and style myself de Villefort. Let what may remain of revolutionary sap die away with the old trunk, and only regard the young shoot which has started up from this trunk, without having the power, any more than the wish, to separate itself entirely."

"Bravo, Villefort!" cried the marquis; "excellently well said! I, too, have always preached to the marquise oblivion of the past without ever obtaining it. You, I hope, will be more fortunate."

"With all my heart," replied the marquise; "let the past be forever forgotten! I ask no more. All I ask is, that Villefort will be inflexible for the future. Remember, also, Villefort, that we have pledged our selves to his majesty for you, and that at our recommendation the king