The Price of Survival — The Romance of the Forest

Adeline spends the night in a chaise with the Marquis's valet, too numb with grief to think, and at dawn she sees that she is on the edge of a forest. Every place seems less dreadful than the villa, until an opening in the trees shows the towers of the abbey and she says she is lost. La Motte meets her at the door and offers his arm. She begs him to pity and save her, and he answers that he is not master of himself or his conduct, that he pities her, and that he can do no more. He leads her up to her old chamber, says her confinement is almost as involuntary on his part as on hers, and sends books. Then he locks her in and secures the windows. Annette brings food, and Madame La Motte keeps away. Adeline finds a little comfort in the thought that he pities her, and in the shame that keeps his wife from her door.

The narrator then turns to La Motte, whose conscience is not yet dead. He sees himself as the pander of a villain, yet he chooses more guilt over flight and consents to barter Adeline's honour and his own peace "for a few years of existence". The irony is that he could escape. The Marquis, lying wounded at an inn at Caux, has told his servants to hide his illness, so La Motte does not know how weak his master is and never thinks of running. Madame La Motte gathers the plot from her husband's mutterings in his sleep and then by listening at a door when the Marquis stays at the abbey. When she presses him, La Motte tells her his life is in the Marquis's power, says "You see the alternative", and invites her to warn Adeline at the cost of his life. She chooses to yield and keep silent. The chapter also explains how Peter, threatened with the Marquis's vengeance, confessed, which let La Motte send Adeline to the tomb where the Marquis's servant waited in Peter's place.

At Caux, the Marquis's physician and surgeon work against each other while the Marquis swings between believing himself dying and wanting to ride after Adeline. His servant returns with a note she dropped in the chaise, written to Theodore during his illness. It stings him, but after looking at the seal he puts it carefully into his pocket-book. When he is well enough he writes ahead to La Motte, falsely giving the day of his arrival. About a week later he rides up with his attendants, asks about Adeline, declines to see her, and orders that nobody attend her unwatched. Adeline, braced for a summons, watches him ride away with a surprise and thankfulness that almost overcome her. The relief is short. When she finally asks La Motte about Theodore, he mocks "this young hero" and says he has been carried to his regiment and will be confined until the Marquis can appear against him. She had not known she was still hoping. Now she pictures him in a dark damp dungeon and sinks into torpor.

In the last quarter the Marquis comes for La Motte himself. After several days away he arrives one evening, draws La Motte into a glade in the forest, and begins gently. He says La Motte is unhappy and that he might be restored to the world. He coaxes out the story: a fortune wasted, a night of ruinous losses, the discovery that he had been cheated, and an offer from the cheats to make him one of them, which led to a swindle that forced him to leave Paris. The Marquis answers with pity, then with a lecture. Prejudices of education, he says, keep Europeans from the natural wisdom of the Indian, the Asiatic and the Turk, who kill without calling it murder, and self-preservation is the great law of nature. He never says what he wants. He says only that some services can never be repaid, that the abbey is shut away from observation, that midnight may witness the deed, and that "these woods tell no tales". He puts off the plain request until tomorrow evening and leaves with the reminder that "freedom and affluence are now before you". La Motte walks slowly home, musing on what he has heard.