during the Reign of Terror, and had well-nigh lost his head
on the same scaffold on which your father perished."

"True," replied the marquise, without wincing in the
slightest degree at the tragic remembrance thus called up;
"but bear in mind, if you please, that our respective
parents underwent persecution and proscription from
diametrically opposite principles; in proof of which I may
remark, that while my family remained among the stanchest
adherents of the exiled princes, your father lost no time in
joining the new government; and that while the Citizen
Noirtier was a Girondin, the Count Noirtier became a
senator."

"Dear mother," interposed Renee, "you know very well it was
agreed that all these disagreeable reminiscences should
forever be laid aside."

"Suffer me, also, madame," replied Villefort, "to add my
earnest request to Mademoiselle de Saint-Meran's, that you
will kindly allow the veil of oblivion to cover and conceal
the past. What avails recrimination over matters wholly past
recall? For my own part, I have laid aside even the name of
my father, and altogether disown his political principles.
He was -- nay, probably may still be -- a Bonapartist, and
is called Noirtier; I, on the contrary, am a stanch
royalist, and style myself de Villefort. Let what may remain
of revolutionary sap exhaust itself and die away with the
old trunk, and condescend only to regard the young shoot
which has started up at a distance from the parent tree,