Flight from Paris and the Girl on the Heath — The Romance of the Forest

Pierre de la Motte steps into a carriage at midnight and leaves Paris, running from his creditors and the law. The narrator is blunt about him: a gentleman of old family, weak and sometimes vicious, whose conduct was suggested by feeling rather than principle, and whose false pride kept him in the city until his money was gone. His friend the Advocate Nemours has arranged the escape and sends him off with a warning about what greed does to the heart. Madame de la Motte looks back at the walls of Paris and weeps, because there was no time to tell their son, serving with his regiment in Germany, where they have gone. Three leagues out, on a dark heath where many roads cross, the servant Peter loses the way. La Motte walks towards a light in a lonely house and asks for directions. He is offered a bed instead, steps inside to see the man who spoke, and is pushed into a bare room, locked in, and left at a barred window to imagine robbery, murder, or betrayal by Nemours himself.

What comes is stranger than any of those. The same man drags in a girl of about eighteen, bathed in tears, points a pistol at La Motte's chest, and tells him to swear he will take her where the man will never see her again, or at least consent to take her. La Motte is silent from surprise, and the man mistakes it for hesitation. When La Motte's own servant is seized in a scuffle in the passage, La Motte admits that he has a carriage nearby. Both captives are blindfolded, ridden away on horseback, and set down beside Madame de la Motte with a warning that returning within the hour will bring bullets. No one says who the girl is or who sent her. La Motte tells his wife what happened, and although he worries about the trouble she may bring, he decides to protect her.

The rest of the chapter turns a burden forced on him by threat into something closer to care. At a breakfast halt the girl, whom the narrator now calls Adeline, begs to be spared an explanation, and Madame La Motte asks nothing and simply comforts her. At Monville Adeline wakes in a high fever. La Motte cannot afford the delay, yet he cannot leave her with strangers, and by the night of the crisis he is hoping for her recovery rather than counting the inconvenience. Adeline tells Madame La Motte that, deserted by those who owed her protection, nothing makes her regret life except the friendship she hoped to form with her. She recovers, and the party leaves the main road for the forest of Fontanville, bound for Lyons and perhaps Geneva. In the soft air of late April her spirits lift, until the track fades at sunset and Peter stops. La Motte sees dark towers above the trees and tells him to drive towards them, in case they belong to a monastery. He steps down at the foot of a green knoll to get a closer, imperfect view of the building.