The chapter opens with the Marquis, who has seen La Motte jailed and gone back to his villa by the forest to wait for news of Adeline. His servants tell him they traced her to Lyons and no further, an escape she probably owed, the narrator suggests, to taking a boat on the Rhone, where nobody thought to look. Furious, he goes to the court-martial at Vaceau and gets Theodore condemned. The regiment mourns the sentence, because Theodore is loved there. Louis de la Motte, stationed in the same town, visits the prisoner out of pity and the hope of news of his parents, and the two become friends. When Theodore explains what troubles him, Louis learns that Adeline is the girl the Marquis has persecuted and that Theodore is his own favoured rival. He swallows his jealousy and agrees to ride to Savoy for La Luc. Theodore suspects his unanswered letters were intercepted, and they were: the Marquis opened and destroyed them, hoping to learn where Adeline was hiding.
The story then returns to La Luc's party. He grows visibly worse as they near Vaceau, has to lean on Louis to leave the carriage, and weeps for the first time. Louis goes ahead to prepare Theodore, who dreads the meeting until he hears that Adeline is safe and close by, and then cannot decide whether to rejoice. Adeline is given a softened account of how he is bearing it, and Clara, weeping on Adeline's shoulder, says she will lose her father and her brother together.
That night La Luc walks to the prison on Louis's arm, twice stopping because he is close to fainting. In the cell, lit by a single lamp, he and Theodore hold each other in silence until La Luc's cold and faintness frighten his son. La Luc tells him that God judges the heart, and Theodore breaks down and says he has not deserved this. Before they part, Theodore says he cannot bear to leave the world without seeing Adeline once more, and La Luc promises it. Back at the inn La Luc decides to petition the king in Paris, though Louis privately thinks the journey will kill him, and Clara fears the same. In the morning he leaves, followed by their tears, while Adeline is too ill to leave her room. That evening Clara goes with Louis to tell her brother that their father has gone.
Coming Up in Chapter 21
Next the story follows Pierre de la Motte, now held in the Chatelet in Paris while the Marquis presses his charge. A flashback shows how La Motte, short of money at the abbey, held up a rider in the forest, shot him, and took his jewels, only to find that he had attacked the Marquis himself.
