Madame de La Motte's letter tells Adeline that La Motte's life, and perhaps Theodore's, depends on the testimony she can give in Paris. Hope lifts her from her sickbed, and she answers Theodore's plea to wait a few days by saying she is now too happy to be ill. At the moment of leaving her nerve fails. She walks out of his room and comes back for a last look, pictures him at the place of execution, and even decides to put the journey off until morning, though that would cost her the protection of Louis. Reason wins, and she sets out with Louis and Peter, gazing back at the prison walls until a turn in the street hides them. La Luc, too weak to travel, answers her last plea about his health with a languid smile that suggests he thinks it past recovery.
In Paris the officers cannot find Jean D'Aunoy, and the Marquis, who has time to reflect in his cell but no wish to repent, dreads him most and sends secret emissaries to find and bribe him. They fail too. Adeline arrives, forgives Madame La Motte's embarrassment because she believes Madame acted in terror, and learns that when La Motte sent her out of the forest he saved her from death. Her thanks at the Chatelet only deepen his guilt. In court Du Bosse swears to her identity, she tells her story clearly and Peter backs her, yet the Marquis's last two witnesses swear to the robbery and La Motte is sentenced to death. He faints.
Then D'Aunoy walks in, found at last in a provincial prison where his creditors had thrown him, too late to help La Motte. Ordered to confess or face torture, he stays silent until the question is actually put, then admits something nobody suspected. In 1642 he and two accomplices seized Henri, Marquis de Montalt, robbed him, bound his servant to a tree and carried him to the abbey of St. Clair, where he was killed on the orders of his half-brother Philippe, the present Marquis. D'Aunoy then took the dead man's infant daughter and raised her as his own, paid by Philippe for his silence. Adeline, who remembers the manuscript she found at the abbey, hears that she is that daughter, and faints. Philippe is committed for trial for his brother's murder.
The narrator looks back at the two brothers. Henri was mild and benevolent; Philippe, driven by ambition and love of pleasure, killed once and would have killed again when he learned who Adeline was. What gave her away was a seal bearing her mother's family arms, stamped on a note his servant found. D'Aunoy had stolen that seal from the Marquis along with a gold watch, and his wife kept it as a trinket until it went with Adeline to the convent, where Adeline kept it out of love for the woman she believed was her mother.
Coming Up in Chapter 24
Carried from the court to Madame La Motte's lodging, Adeline finds that the orphan is now an heiress of immense wealth and the daughter of a murdered man. She remembers the manuscript she found at the abbey and realises her tears were for her own father, while Madame sits with her condemned husband at the Chatelet.
