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, without having the power, any more than the wish, to separate entirely from the stock from which it sprung." "Bravo, Villefort!" cried the marquis; "excellently well said! Come, now, I have hopes of obtaining what I have been for years endeavoring to persuade the marquise to promise; namely, a perfect amnesty and forgetfulness of the past." "With all my heart," replied the marquise; "let the past be forever forgotten.

I promise you it affords me as little pleasure to revive it as it does you.

All I ask is, that Villefort will be firm and inflexible for the future in his political principles.

Remember, also, Villefort, that we have pledged ourselves to his majesty for your fealty and strict loyalty, and that at our recommendation the king consented to forget the past, as I do" (and here she extended to him her hand)--"as I now do at your entreaty.