“That’s the worst of you ci-devants,” said the Deputy, in something resembling his former jocular tones. “So suspicious. You won’t trust the People . . . I do not know what oath I can swear to you. And why should an oath be needed; it is to my interest and my cousin’s to get you away. Moreover I am a Theophilanthropist and you, I expect, a Catholic.”
“Then we both believe in a God at least,” said Mme de Trélan. “Swear to me, Monsieur Camain, by the God we both believe in, that you will make no use of my name if I tell it to you, that you will betray it to no one else, that you will give me the paper and not hinder my departure, and I will tell you my secret.”
Camain raised his hand. “I swear all this, by the God in Whom we both believe, and by the white head of my old mother down in Angers, who still prays, I think, to your Catholic Virgin for her son.”
Valentine looked away from him.
“I am the woman who best has a right to be in Mirabel,” she said, with her eyes on the phoenix over the escutcheon where her own arms of Fondragon were quartered with all the rest. “This house—this hearth—knows no name but the name I bear.”
“What the . . . why . . . what in the wide universe do you mean?” ejaculated Camain, open-mouthed and recoiling.
His protégée turned and faced him. “I mean that I am the Duchesse de Trélan,” she said simply.
Barras’ signature, turning upon itself in its descent, fluttered from the Deputy’s paralysed hand to the floor between them.