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Title: A Tale of Two Cities

Author: Charles Dickens

Release date: January 1, 1994 [eBook #98]
Most recently updated: February 26, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/98

Credits: Judith Boss and David Widger

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A TALE OF TWO
CITIES ***

A TALE OF TWO CITIES
A STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

By Charles Dickens

Original

Original

Contents
Book the First—Recalled to Life
CHAPTER I. The Period
CHAPTER II. The Mail
CHAPTER III. The Night Shadows
CHAPTER IV. The Preparation
CHAPTER V. The Wine-shop
CHAPTER VI. The Shoemaker

Book the Second—the Golden Thread
CHAPTER I. Five Years Later
CHAPTER II. A Sight
CHAPTER III. A Disappointment
CHAPTER IV. Congratulatory
CHAPTER V. The Jackal
CHAPTER VI. Hundreds of People
CHAPTER VII. Monseigneur in Town
CHAPTER VIII. Monseigneur in the Country
CHAPTER IX. The Gorgon’s Head
CHAPTER X. Two Promises
CHAPTER XI. A Companion Picture
CHAPTER XII. The Fellow of Delicacy
CHAPTER XIII. The Fellow of No Delicacy
CHAPTER XIV. The Honest Tradesman
CHAPTER XV. Knitting
CHAPTER XVI. Still Knitting
CHAPTER XVII. One Night
CHAPTER XVIII. Nine Days
CHAPTER XIX. An Opinion

CHAPTER XX. A Plea
CHAPTER XXI. Echoing Footsteps
CHAPTER XXII. The Sea Still Rises
CHAPTER XXIII. Fire Rises
CHAPTER XXIV. Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

Book the Third—the Track of a Storm
CHAPTER I. In Secret
CHAPTER II. The Grindstone
CHAPTER III. The Shadow
CHAPTER IV. Calm in Storm
CHAPTER V. The Wood-Sawyer
CHAPTER VI. Triumph
CHAPTER VII. A Knock at the Door
CHAPTER VIII. A Hand at Cards
CHAPTER IX. The Game Made
CHAPTER X. The Substance of the Shadow
CHAPTER XI. Dusk
CHAPTER XII. Darkness
CHAPTER XIII. Fifty-two
CHAPTER XIV. The Knitting Done
CHAPTER XV. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever

Book the First—Recalled to Life

CHAPTER I.
The Period
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the
epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of
Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had
everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to
Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so
far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its
being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison
only.
There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the
throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a
fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than
crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in
general were settled for ever.
It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-
five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured
period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-
twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards
had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were
made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-
lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its
messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient
in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of
events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress
of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more
important to the human race than any communications yet received through
any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.
France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister
of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill,
making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian

pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as
sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with
pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the
rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his
view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that,
rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when
that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to
come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework
with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the
rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there
were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with
rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the
Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution.
But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work
silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the
rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to
be atheistical and traitorous.
In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to
justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and
highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were
publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to
upholsterers’ warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a
City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his
fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of “the Captain,”
gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was waylaid by
seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself
by the other four, “in consequence of the failure of his ammunition:” after
which the mail was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord
Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by
one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his
retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and
the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with
rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks
of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles’s, to
search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the
musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences
much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy

and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up
long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on
Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand
at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of
Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-
morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence.
All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close
upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded,
those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair
faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with a high hand.
Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct
their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures—the creatures of this
chronicle among the rest—along the roads that lay before them.

CHAPTER II.
The Mail

I
t was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November,
before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The
Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up
Shooter’s Hill. He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the
rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking
exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and
the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses had three times
already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road,
with the mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip
and coachman and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of
war which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument,
that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had
capitulated and returned to their duty.
With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through
the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were
falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and
brought them to a stand, with a wary “Wo-ho! so-ho-then!” the near leader
violently shook his head and everything upon it—like an unusually
emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever
the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a nervous passenger
might, and was disturbed in mind.
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its
forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A
clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in
ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an
unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything
from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few

yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they
had made it all.
Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the
side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the
ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from
anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden
under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes
of the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy
of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road might be a
robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter, when every posting-house
and ale-house could produce somebody in “the Captain’s” pay, ranging
from the landlord to the lowest stable non-descript, it was the likeliest thing
upon the cards. So the guard of the Dover mail thought to himself, that
Friday night in November, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five,
lumbering up Shooter’s Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch behind
the mail, beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest
before him, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded
horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.
The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected
the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all
suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the
horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have taken his
oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the journey.
“Wo-ho!” said the coachman. “So, then! One more pull and you’re at the
top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to it!—
Joe!”
“Halloa!” the guard replied.
“What o’clock do you make it, Joe?”
“Ten minutes, good, past eleven.”
“My blood!” ejaculated the vexed coachman, “and not atop of Shooter’s
yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!”
The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative,
made a decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed suit.
Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its
passengers squashing along by its side. They had stopped when the coach

stopped, and they kept close company with it. If any one of the three had
had the hardihood to propose to another to walk on a little ahead into the
mist and darkness, he would have put himself in a fair way of getting shot
instantly as a highwayman.
The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses
stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for the
descent, and open the coach-door to let the passengers in.
“Tst! Joe!” cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from
his box.
“What do you say, Tom?”
They both listened.
“I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe.”
“I say a horse at a gallop, Tom,” returned the guard, leaving his hold of
the door, and mounting nimbly to his place. “Gentlemen! In the king’s
name, all of you!”
With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on the
offensive.
The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, getting in;
the two other passengers were close behind him, and about to follow. He
remained on the step, half in the coach and half out of; they remained in the
road below him. They all looked from the coachman to the guard, and from
the guard to the coachman, and listened. The coachman looked back and the
guard looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up his ears and
looked back, without contradicting.
The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and labouring
of the coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it very quiet indeed.
The panting of the horses communicated a tremulous motion to the coach,
as if it were in a state of agitation. The hearts of the passengers beat loud
enough perhaps to be heard; but at any rate, the quiet pause was audibly
expressive of people out of breath, and holding the breath, and having the
pulses quickened by expectation.
The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.
“So-ho!” the guard sang out, as loud as he could roar. “Yo there! Stand! I
shall fire!”

The pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and
floundering, a man’s voice called from the mist, “Is that the Dover mail?”
“Never you mind what it is!” the guard retorted. “What are you?”
“Is that the Dover mail?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I want a passenger, if it is.”
“What passenger?”
“Mr. Jarvis Lorry.”
Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. The
guard, the coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him distrustfully.
“Keep where you are,” the guard called to the voice in the mist,
“because, if I should make a mistake, it could never be set right in your
lifetime. Gentleman of the name of Lorry answer straight.”
“What is the matter?” asked the passenger, then, with mildly quavering
speech. “Who wants me? Is it Jerry?”
(“I don’t like Jerry’s voice, if it is Jerry,” growled the guard to himself.
“He’s hoarser than suits me, is Jerry.”)
“Yes, Mr. Lorry.”
“What is the matter?”
“A despatch sent after you from over yonder. T. and Co.”
“I know this messenger, guard,” said Mr. Lorry, getting down into the
road—assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the other two
passengers, who immediately scrambled into the coach, shut the door, and
pulled up the window. “He may come close; there’s nothing wrong.”
“I hope there ain’t, but I can’t make so ’Nation sure of that,” said the
guard, in gruff soliloquy. “Hallo you!”
“Well! And hallo you!” said Jerry, more hoarsely than before.

Original
“Come on at a footpace! d’ye mind me? And if you’ve got holsters to that
saddle o’ yourn, don’t let me see your hand go nigh ’em. For I’m a devil at
a quick mistake, and when I make one it takes the form of Lead. So now
let’s look at you.”
The figures of a horse and rider came slowly through the eddying mist,
and came to the side of the mail, where the passenger stood. The rider
stooped, and, casting up his eyes at the guard, handed the passenger a small
folded paper. The rider’s horse was blown, and both horse and rider were
covered with mud, from the hoofs of the horse to the hat of the man.
“Guard!” said the passenger, in a tone of quiet business confidence.
The watchful guard, with his right hand at the stock of his raised
blunderbuss, his left at the barrel, and his eye on the horseman, answered
curtly, “Sir.”
“There is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson’s Bank. You must
know Tellson’s Bank in London. I am going to Paris on business. A crown
to drink. I may read this?”
“If so be as you’re quick, sir.”
He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and read—first
to himself and then aloud: “‘Wait at Dover for Mam’selle.’ It’s not long, you
see, guard. Jerry, say that my answer was, Recalled to life.”
Jerry started in his saddle. “That’s a Blazing strange answer, too,” said
he, at his hoarsest.

“Take that message back, and they will know that I received this, as well
as if I wrote. Make the best of your way. Good night.”
With those words the passenger opened the coach-door and got in; not at
all assisted by his fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted their
watches and purses in their boots, and were now making a general pretence
of being asleep. With no more definite purpose than to escape the hazard of
originating any other kind of action.
The coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist closing round
it as it began the descent. The guard soon replaced his blunderbuss in his
arm-chest, and, having looked to the rest of its contents, and having looked
to the supplementary pistols that he wore in his belt, looked to a smaller
chest beneath his seat, in which there were a few smith’s tools, a couple of
torches, and a tinder-box. For he was furnished with that completeness that
if the coach-lamps had been blown and stormed out, which did occasionally
happen, he had only to shut himself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks
well off the straw, and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he were
lucky) in five minutes.
“Tom!” softly over the coach roof.
“Hallo, Joe.”
“Did you hear the message?”
“I did, Joe.”
“What did you make of it, Tom?”
“Nothing at all, Joe.”
“That’s a coincidence, too,” the guard mused, “for I made the same of it
myself.”
Jerry, left alone in the mist and darkness, dismounted meanwhile, not
only to ease his spent horse, but to wipe the mud from his face, and shake
the wet out of his hat-brim, which might be capable of holding about half a
gallon. After standing with the bridle over his heavily-splashed arm, until
the wheels of the mail were no longer within hearing and the night was
quite still again, he turned to walk down the hill.
“After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won’t trust your
fore-legs till I get you on the level,” said this hoarse messenger, glancing at
his mare. “‘Recalled to life.’ That’s a Blazing strange message. Much of

that wouldn’t do for you, Jerry! I say, Jerry! You’d be in a Blazing bad way,
if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!”

CHAPTER III.
The Night Shadows

A
wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is
constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A
solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every
one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every
room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart
in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings,
a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death
itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book
that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into
the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights
glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things
submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for
ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the
water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its
surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my
neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the
inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in
that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any of
the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more
inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to
me, or than I am to them?
As to this, his natural and not to be alienated inheritance, the messenger
on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the first
Minister of State, or the richest merchant in London. So with the three
passengers shut up in the narrow compass of one lumbering old mail coach;
they were mysteries to one another, as complete as if each had been in his
own coach and six, or his own coach and sixty, with the breadth of a county
between him and the next.

The messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often at ale-
houses by the way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep his own
counsel, and to keep his hat cocked over his eyes. He had eyes that assorted
very well with that decoration, being of a surface black, with no depth in
the colour or form, and much too near together—as if they were afraid of
being found out in something, singly, if they kept too far apart. They had a
sinister expression, under an old cocked-hat like a three-cornered spittoon,
and over a great muffler for the chin and throat, which descended nearly to
the wearer’s knees. When he stopped for drink, he moved this muffler with
his left hand, only while he poured his liquor in with his right; as soon as
that was done, he muffled again.
“No, Jerry, no!” said the messenger, harping on one theme as he rode. “It
wouldn’t do for you, Jerry. Jerry, you honest tradesman, it wouldn’t suit
your line of business! Recalled—! Bust me if I don’t think he’d been a
drinking!”
His message perplexed his mind to that degree that he was fain, several
times, to take off his hat to scratch his head. Except on the crown, which
was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and
growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like Smith’s
work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of
hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the
most dangerous man in the world to go over.
While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night
watchman in his box at the door of Tellson’s Bank, by Temple Bar, who was
to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the night took such
shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such shapes to the mare
as arose out of her private topics of uneasiness. They seemed to be
numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.
What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its
tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom, likewise,
the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing eyes
and wandering thoughts suggested.
Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank passenger—
with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what lay in it to
keep him from pounding against the next passenger, and driving him into
his corner, whenever the coach got a special jolt—nodded in his place, with

half-shut eyes, the little coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly
gleaming through them, and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger,
became the bank, and did a great stroke of business. The rattle of the
harness was the chink of money, and more drafts were honoured in five
minutes than even Tellson’s, with all its foreign and home connection, ever
paid in thrice the time. Then the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson’s,
with such of their valuable stores and secrets as were known to the
passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about them), opened before
him, and he went in among them with the great keys and the feebly-burning
candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had
last seen them.
But, though the bank was almost always with him, and though the coach
(in a confused way, like the presence of pain under an opiate) was always
with him, there was another current of impression that never ceased to run,
all through the night. He was on his way to dig some one out of a grave.
Now, which of the multitude of faces that showed themselves before him
was the true face of the buried person, the shadows of the night did not
indicate; but they were all the faces of a man of five-and-forty by years, and
they differed principally in the passions they expressed, and in the
ghastliness of their worn and wasted state. Pride, contempt, defiance,
stubbornness, submission, lamentation, succeeded one another; so did
varieties of sunken cheek, cadaverous colour, emaciated hands and figures.
But the face was in the main one face, and every head was prematurely
white. A hundred times the dozing passenger inquired of this spectre:
“Buried how long?”
The answer was always the same: “Almost eighteen years.”
“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?”
“Long ago.”
“You know that you are recalled to life?”
“They tell me so.”
“I hope you care to live?”
“I can’t say.”
“Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?”

The answers to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes
the broken reply was, “Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon.”
Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was, “Take me
to her.” Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it was, “I don’t
know her. I don’t understand.”
After such imaginary discourse, the passenger in his fancy would dig,
and dig, dig—now with a spade, now with a great key, now with his hands
—to dig this wretched creature out. Got out at last, with earth hanging about
his face and hair, he would suddenly fan away to dust. The passenger would
then start to himself, and lower the window, to get the reality of mist and
rain on his cheek.
Yet even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on the moving
patch of light from the lamps, and the hedge at the roadside retreating by
jerks, the night shadows outside the coach would fall into the train of the
night shadows within. The real Banking-house by Temple Bar, the real
business of the past day, the real strong rooms, the real express sent after
him, and the real message returned, would all be there. Out of the midst of
them, the ghostly face would rise, and he would accost it again.
“Buried how long?”
“Almost eighteen years.”
“I hope you care to live?”
“I can’t say.”
Dig—dig—dig—until an impatient movement from one of the two
passengers would admonish him to pull up the window, draw his arm
securely through the leathern strap, and speculate upon the two slumbering
forms, until his mind lost its hold of them, and they again slid away into the
bank and the grave.
“Buried how long?”
“Almost eighteen years.”
“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?”
“Long ago.”
The words were still in his hearing as just spoken—distinctly in his
hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life—when the weary

passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and found that the
shadows of the night were gone.
He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a
ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left last
night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood, in
which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained upon
the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear, and the sun
rose bright, placid, and beautiful.
“Eighteen years!” said the passenger, looking at the sun. “Gracious
Creator of day! To be buried alive for eighteen years!”

CHAPTER IV.
The Preparation

W
hen the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the
forenoon, the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the
coach-door as his custom was. He did it with some flourish of
ceremony, for a mail journey from London in winter was an achievement to
congratulate an adventurous traveller upon.
By that time, there was only one adventurous traveller left be
congratulated: for the two others had been set down at their respective
roadside destinations. The mildewy inside of the coach, with its damp and
dirty straw, its disagreeable smell, and its obscurity, was rather like a larger
dog-kennel. Mr. Lorry, the passenger, shaking himself out of it in chains of
straw, a tangle of shaggy wrapper, flapping hat, and muddy legs, was rather
like a larger sort of dog.
“There will be a packet to Calais, tomorrow, drawer?”
“Yes, sir, if the weather holds and the wind sets tolerable fair. The tide
will serve pretty nicely at about two in the afternoon, sir. Bed, sir?”
“I shall not go to bed till night; but I want a bedroom, and a barber.”
“And then breakfast, sir? Yes, sir. That way, sir, if you please. Show
Concord! Gentleman’s valise and hot water to Concord. Pull off
gentleman’s boots in Concord. (You will find a fine sea-coal fire, sir.) Fetch
barber to Concord. Stir about there, now, for Concord!”
The Concord bed-chamber being always assigned to a passenger by the
mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up from
head to foot, the room had the odd interest for the establishment of the
Royal George, that although but one kind of man was seen to go into it, all
kinds and varieties of men came out of it. Consequently, another drawer,
and two porters, and several maids and the landlady, were all loitering by
accident at various points of the road between the Concord and the coffee-

room, when a gentleman of sixty, formally dressed in a brown suit of
clothes, pretty well worn, but very well kept, with large square cuffs and
large flaps to the pockets, passed along on his way to his breakfast.
The coffee-room had no other occupant, that forenoon, than the
gentleman in brown. His breakfast-table was drawn before the fire, and as
he sat, with its light shining on him, waiting for the meal, he sat so still, that
he might have been sitting for his portrait.
Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each knee, and a
loud watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped waist-coat, as
though it pitted its gravity and longevity against the levity and evanescence
of the brisk fire. He had a good leg, and was a little vain of it, for his brown
stockings fitted sleek and close, and were of a fine texture; his shoes and
buckles, too, though plain, were trim. He wore an odd little sleek crisp
flaxen wig, setting very close to his head: which wig, it is to be presumed,
was made of hair, but which looked far more as though it were spun from
filaments of silk or glass. His linen, though not of a fineness in accordance
with his stockings, was as white as the tops of the waves that broke upon
the neighbouring beach, or the specks of sail that glinted in the sunlight far
at sea. A face habitually suppressed and quieted, was still lighted up under
the quaint wig by a pair of moist bright eyes that it must have cost their
owner, in years gone by, some pains to drill to the composed and reserved
expression of Tellson’s Bank. He had a healthy colour in his cheeks, and his
face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety. But, perhaps the confidential
bachelor clerks in Tellson’s Bank were principally occupied with the cares
of other people; and perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes,
come easily off and on.
Completing his resemblance to a man who was sitting for his portrait,
Mr. Lorry dropped off to sleep. The arrival of his breakfast roused him, and
he said to the drawer, as he moved his chair to it:
“I wish accommodation prepared for a young lady who may come here at
any time to-day. She may ask for Mr. Jarvis Lorry, or she may only ask for a
gentleman from Tellson’s Bank. Please to let me know.”
“Yes, sir. Tellson’s Bank in London, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, sir. We have oftentimes the honour to entertain your gentlemen in
their travelling backwards and forwards betwixt London and Paris, sir. A

vast deal of travelling, sir, in Tellson and Company’s House.”
“Yes. We are quite a French House, as well as an English one.”
“Yes, sir. Not much in the habit of such travelling yourself, I think, sir?”
“Not of late years. It is fifteen years since we—since I—came last from
France.”
“Indeed, sir? That was before my time here, sir. Before our people’s time
here, sir. The George was in other hands at that time, sir.”
“I believe so.”
“But I would hold a pretty wager, sir, that a House like Tellson and
Company was flourishing, a matter of fifty, not to speak of fifteen years
ago?”
“You might treble that, and say a hundred and fifty, yet not be far from
the truth.”
“Indeed, sir!”
Rounding his mouth and both his eyes, as he stepped backward from the
table, the waiter shifted his napkin from his right arm to his left, dropped
into a comfortable attitude, and stood surveying the guest while he ate and
drank, as from an observatory or watchtower. According to the immemorial
usage of waiters in all ages.
When Mr. Lorry had finished his breakfast, he went out for a stroll on the
beach. The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the
beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine ostrich. The beach
was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea
did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town,
and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly. The air
among the houses was of so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have
supposed sick fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to
be dipped in the sea. A little fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of
strolling about by night, and looking seaward: particularly at those times
when the tide made, and was near flood. Small tradesmen, who did no
business whatever, sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it
was remarkable that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a
lamplighter.
As the day declined into the afternoon, and the air, which had been at
intervals clear enough to allow the French coast to be seen, became again

charged with mist and vapour, Mr. Lorry’s thoughts seemed to cloud too.
When it was dark, and he sat before the coffee-room fire, awaiting his
dinner as he had awaited his breakfast, his mind was busily digging,
digging, digging, in the live red coals.
A bottle of good claret after dinner does a digger in the red coals no
harm, otherwise than as it has a tendency to throw him out of work. Mr.
Lorry had been idle a long time, and had just poured out his last glassful of
wine with as complete an appearance of satisfaction as is ever to be found
in an elderly gentleman of a fresh complexion who has got to the end of a
bottle, when a rattling of wheels came up the narrow street, and rumbled
into the inn-yard.
He set down his glass untouched. “This is Mam’selle!” said he.
In a very few minutes the waiter came in to announce that Miss Manette
had arrived from London, and would be happy to see the gentleman from
Tellson’s.
“So soon?”
Miss Manette had taken some refreshment on the road, and required none
then, and was extremely anxious to see the gentleman from Tellson’s
immediately, if it suited his pleasure and convenience.
The gentleman from Tellson’s had nothing left for it but to empty his
glass with an air of stolid desperation, settle his odd little flaxen wig at the
ears, and follow the waiter to Miss Manette’s apartment. It was a large, dark
room, furnished in a funereal manner with black horsehair, and loaded with
heavy dark tables. These had been oiled and oiled, until the two tall candles
on the table in the middle of the room were gloomily reflected on every
leaf; as if they were buried, in deep graves of black mahogany, and no light
to speak of could be expected from them until they were dug out.
The obscurity was so difficult to penetrate that Mr. Lorry, picking his
way over the well-worn Turkey carpet, supposed Miss Manette to be, for
the moment, in some adjacent room, until, having got past the two tall
candles, he saw standing to receive him by the table between them and the
fire, a young lady of not more than seventeen, in a riding-cloak, and still
holding her straw travelling-hat by its ribbon in her hand. As his eyes rested
on a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden hair, a pair of blue eyes
that met his own with an inquiring look, and a forehead with a singular
capacity (remembering how young and smooth it was), of rifting and

knitting itself into an expression that was not quite one of perplexity, or
wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright fixed attention, though it included
all the four expressions—as his eyes rested on these things, a sudden vivid
likeness passed before him, of a child whom he had held in his arms on the
passage across that very Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted
heavily and the sea ran high. The likeness passed away, like a breath along
the surface of the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a
hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were
offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the feminine
gender—and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette.
“Pray take a seat, sir.” In a very clear and pleasant young voice; a little
foreign in its accent, but a very little indeed.
“I kiss your hand, miss,” said Mr. Lorry, with the manners of an earlier
date, as he made his formal bow again, and took his seat.
“I received a letter from the Bank, sir, yesterday, informing me that some
intelligence—or discovery—”
“The word is not material, miss; either word will do.”
“—respecting the small property of my poor father, whom I never saw—
so long dead—”
Mr. Lorry moved in his chair, and cast a troubled look towards the
hospital procession of negro cupids. As if they had any help for anybody in
their absurd baskets!
“—rendered it necessary that I should go to Paris, there to communicate
with a gentleman of the Bank, so good as to be despatched to Paris for the
purpose.”
“Myself.”
“As I was prepared to hear, sir.”
She curtseyed to him (young ladies made curtseys in those days), with a
pretty desire to convey to him that she felt how much older and wiser he
was than she. He made her another bow.
“I replied to the Bank, sir, that as it was considered necessary, by those
who know, and who are so kind as to advise me, that I should go to France,
and that as I am an orphan and have no friend who could go with me, I
should esteem it highly if I might be permitted to place myself, during the
journey, under that worthy gentleman’s protection. The gentleman had left

London, but I think a messenger was sent after him to beg the favour of his
waiting for me here.”
“I was happy,” said Mr. Lorry, “to be entrusted with the charge. I shall be
more happy to execute it.”
“Sir, I thank you indeed. I thank you very gratefully. It was told me by
the Bank that the gentleman would explain to me the details of the business,
and that I must prepare myself to find them of a surprising nature. I have
done my best to prepare myself, and I naturally have a strong and eager
interest to know what they are.”
“Naturally,” said Mr. Lorry. “Yes—I—”
After a pause, he added, again settling the crisp flaxen wig at the ears, “It
is very difficult to begin.”
He did not begin, but, in his indecision, met her glance. The young
forehead lifted itself into that singular expression—but it was pretty and
characteristic, besides being singular—and she raised her hand, as if with an
involuntary action she caught at, or stayed some passing shadow.
“Are you quite a stranger to me, sir?”
“Am I not?” Mr. Lorry opened his hands, and extended them outwards
with an argumentative smile.
Between the eyebrows and just over the little feminine nose, the line of
which was as delicate and fine as it was possible to be, the expression
deepened itself as she took her seat thoughtfully in the chair by which she
had hitherto remained standing. He watched her as she mused, and the
moment she raised her eyes again, went on:
“In your adopted country, I presume, I cannot do better than address you
as a young English lady, Miss Manette?”
“If you please, sir.”
“Miss Manette, I am a man of business. I have a business charge to acquit
myself of. In your reception of it, don’t heed me any more than if I was a
speaking machine—truly, I am not much else. I will, with your leave, relate
to you, miss, the story of one of our customers.”
“Story!”
He seemed wilfully to mistake the word she had repeated, when he
added, in a hurry, “Yes, customers; in the banking business we usually call

our connection our customers. He was a French gentleman; a scientific
gentleman; a man of great acquirements—a Doctor.”
“Not of Beauvais?”
“Why, yes, of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, the
gentleman was of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, the
gentleman was of repute in Paris. I had the honour of knowing him there.
Our relations were business relations, but confidential. I was at that time in
our French House, and had been—oh! twenty years.”
“At that time—I may ask, at what time, sir?”
“I speak, miss, of twenty years ago. He married—an English lady—and I
was one of the trustees. His affairs, like the affairs of many other French
gentlemen and French families, were entirely in Tellson’s hands. In a
similar way I am, or I have been, trustee of one kind or other for scores of
our customers. These are mere business relations, miss; there is no
friendship in them, no particular interest, nothing like sentiment. I have
passed from one to another, in the course of my business life, just as I pass
from one of our customers to another in the course of my business day; in
short, I have no feelings; I am a mere machine. To go on—”
“But this is my father’s story, sir; and I begin to think”—the curiously
roughened forehead was very intent upon him—“that when I was left an
orphan through my mother’s surviving my father only two years, it was you
who brought me to England. I am almost sure it was you.”
Mr. Lorry took the hesitating little hand that confidingly advanced to take
his, and he put it with some ceremony to his lips. He then conducted the
young lady straightway to her chair again, and, holding the chair-back with
his left hand, and using his right by turns to rub his chin, pull his wig at the
ears, or point what he said, stood looking down into her face while she sat
looking up into his.
“Miss Manette, it was I. And you will see how truly I spoke of myself
just now, in saying I had no feelings, and that all the relations I hold with
my fellow-creatures are mere business relations, when you reflect that I
have never seen you since. No; you have been the ward of Tellson’s House
since, and I have been busy with the other business of Tellson’s House
since. Feelings! I have no time for them, no chance of them. I pass my
whole life, miss, in turning an immense pecuniary Mangle.”

After this odd description of his daily routine of employment, Mr. Lorry
flattened his flaxen wig upon his head with both hands (which was most
unnecessary, for nothing could be flatter than its shining surface was
before), and resumed his former attitude.
“So far, miss (as you have remarked), this is the story of your regretted
father. Now comes the difference. If your father had not died when he did—
Don’t be frightened! How you start!”
She did, indeed, start. And she caught his wrist with both her hands.
“Pray,” said Mr. Lorry, in a soothing tone, bringing his left hand from the
back of the chair to lay it on the supplicatory fingers that clasped him in so
violent a tremble: “pray control your agitation—a matter of business. As I
was saying—”
Her look so discomposed him that he stopped, wandered, and began
anew:
“As I was saying; if Monsieur Manette had not died; if he had suddenly
and silently disappeared; if he had been spirited away; if it had not been
difficult to guess to what dreadful place, though no art could trace him; if he
had an enemy in some compatriot who could exercise a privilege that I in
my own time have known the boldest people afraid to speak of in a whisper,
across the water there; for instance, the privilege of filling up blank forms
for the consignment of any one to the oblivion of a prison for any length of
time; if his wife had implored the king, the queen, the court, the clergy, for
any tidings of him, and all quite in vain;—then the history of your father
would have been the history of this unfortunate gentleman, the Doctor of
Beauvais.”
“I entreat you to tell me more, sir.”
“I will. I am going to. You can bear it?”
“I can bear anything but the uncertainty you leave me in at this moment.”
“You speak collectedly, and you—are collected. That’s good!” (Though
his manner was less satisfied than his words.) “A matter of business. Regard
it as a matter of business—business that must be done. Now if this doctor’s
wife, though a lady of great courage and spirit, had suffered so intensely
from this cause before her little child was born—”
“The little child was a daughter, sir.”

“A daughter. A-a-matter of business—don’t be distressed. Miss, if the
poor lady had suffered so intensely before her little child was born, that she
came to the determination of sparing the poor child the inheritance of any
part of the agony she had known the pains of, by rearing her in the belief
that her father was dead—No, don’t kneel! In Heaven’s name why should
you kneel to me!”
“For the truth. O dear, good, compassionate sir, for the truth!”
“A—a matter of business. You confuse me, and how can I transact
business if I am confused? Let us be clear-headed. If you could kindly
mention now, for instance, what nine times ninepence are, or how many
shillings in twenty guineas, it would be so encouraging. I should be so
much more at my ease about your state of mind.”
Without directly answering to this appeal, she sat so still when he had
very gently raised her, and the hands that had not ceased to clasp his wrists
were so much more steady than they had been, that she communicated some
reassurance to Mr. Jarvis Lorry.
“That’s right, that’s right. Courage! Business! You have business before
you; useful business. Miss Manette, your mother took this course with you.
And when she died—I believe broken-hearted—having never slackened her
unavailing search for your father, she left you, at two years old, to grow to
be blooming, beautiful, and happy, without the dark cloud upon you of
living in uncertainty whether your father soon wore his heart out in prison,
or wasted there through many lingering years.”
As he said the words he looked down, with an admiring pity, on the
flowing golden hair; as if he pictured to himself that it might have been
already tinged with grey.
“You know that your parents had no great possession, and that what they
had was secured to your mother and to you. There has been no new
discovery, of money, or of any other property; but—”
He felt his wrist held closer, and he stopped. The expression in the
forehead, which had so particularly attracted his notice, and which was now
immovable, had deepened into one of pain and horror.
“But he has been—been found. He is alive. Greatly changed, it is too
probable; almost a wreck, it is possible; though we will hope the best. Still,
alive. Your father has been taken to the house of an old servant in Paris, and

we are going there: I, to identify him if I can: you, to restore him to life,
love, duty, rest, comfort.”
A shiver ran through her frame, and from it through his. She said, in a
low, distinct, awe-stricken voice, as if she were saying it in a dream,
“I am going to see his Ghost! It will be his Ghost—not him!”
Mr. Lorry quietly chafed the hands that held his arm. “There, there, there!
See now, see now! The best and the worst are known to you, now. You are
well on your way to the poor wronged gentleman, and, with a fair sea
voyage, and a fair land journey, you will be soon at his dear side.”
She repeated in the same tone, sunk to a whisper, “I have been free, I
have been happy, yet his Ghost has never haunted me!”
“Only one thing more,” said Mr. Lorry, laying stress upon it as a
wholesome means of enforcing her attention: “he has been found under
another name; his own, long forgotten or long concealed. It would be worse
than useless now to inquire which; worse than useless to seek to know
whether he has been for years overlooked, or always designedly held
prisoner. It would be worse than useless now to make any inquiries, because
it would be dangerous. Better not to mention the subject, anywhere or in
any way, and to remove him—for a while at all events—out of France.
Even I, safe as an Englishman, and even Tellson’s, important as they are to
French credit, avoid all naming of the matter. I carry about me, not a scrap
of writing openly referring to it. This is a secret service altogether. My
credentials, entries, and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line,
‘Recalled to Life;’ which may mean anything. But what is the matter! She
doesn’t notice a word! Miss Manette!”
Perfectly still and silent, and not even fallen back in her chair, she sat
under his hand, utterly insensible; with her eyes open and fixed upon him,
and with that last expression looking as if it were carved or branded into her
forehead. So close was her hold upon his arm, that he feared to detach
himself lest he should hurt her; therefore he called out loudly for assistance
without moving.
A wild-looking woman, whom even in his agitation, Mr. Lorry observed
to be all of a red colour, and to have red hair, and to be dressed in some
extraordinary tight-fitting fashion, and to have on her head a most
wonderful bonnet like a Grenadier wooden measure, and good measure too,
or a great Stilton cheese, came running into the room in advance of the inn

servants, and soon settled the question of his detachment from the poor
young lady, by laying a brawny hand upon his chest, and sending him flying
back against the nearest wall.
(“I really think this must be a man!” was Mr. Lorry’s breathless
reflection, simultaneously with his coming against the wall.)
“Why, look at you all!” bawled this figure, addressing the inn servants.
“Why don’t you go and fetch things, instead of standing there staring at me?
I am not so much to look at, am I? Why don’t you go and fetch things? I’ll
let you know, if you don’t bring smelling-salts, cold water, and vinegar,
quick, I will.”
There was an immediate dispersal for these restoratives, and she softly
laid the patient on a sofa, and tended her with great skill and gentleness:
calling her “my precious!” and “my bird!” and spreading her golden hair
aside over her shoulders with great pride and care.
“And you in brown!” she said, indignantly turning to Mr. Lorry;
“couldn’t you tell her what you had to tell her, without frightening her to
death? Look at her, with her pretty pale face and her cold hands. Do you
call that being a Banker?”
Mr. Lorry was so exceedingly disconcerted by a question so hard to
answer, that he could only look on, at a distance, with much feebler
sympathy and humility, while the strong woman, having banished the inn
servants under the mysterious penalty of “letting them know” something
not mentioned if they stayed there, staring, recovered her charge by a
regular series of gradations, and coaxed her to lay her drooping head upon
her shoulder.
“I hope she will do well now,” said Mr. Lorry.
“No thanks to you in brown, if she does. My darling pretty!”
“I hope,” said Mr. Lorry, after another pause of feeble sympathy and
humility, “that you accompany Miss Manette to France?”
“A likely thing, too!” replied the strong woman. “If it was ever intended
that I should go across salt water, do you suppose Providence would have
cast my lot in an island?”
This being another question hard to answer, Mr. Jarvis Lorry withdrew to
consider it.

CHAPTER V.
The Wine-shop

A
large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The
accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had
tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones
just outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.
All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their
idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones
of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought,
expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it
into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or
crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their
two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their
shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers.
Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated
earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were
squeezed dry into infants’ mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to
stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows,
darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in
new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed
pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted
fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine,
and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along
with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody
acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence.
A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices—voices of men, women,
and children—resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There
was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a special
companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one to
join some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-

hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and
even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the wine was
gone, and the places where it had been most abundant were raked into a
gridiron-pattern by fingers, these demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as
they had broken out. The man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood
he was cutting, set it in motion again; the women who had left on a door-
step the little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the
pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to
it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had
emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend again;
and a gloom gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than
sunshine.
The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street
in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained
many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden
shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the
billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained
with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who
had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear
about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a
long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his
finger dipped in muddy wine-lees—blood.
The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-
stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.
And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary
gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was heavy
—cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on the
saintly presence—nobles of great power all of them; but, most especially
the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and
regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground
old people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every
doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garment
that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them down, was the mill
that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave
voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every
furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent

everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched
clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with
straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment
of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared
down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from the filthy street
that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the
inscription on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty
stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that
was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting
chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every
farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops
of oil.
Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding street,
full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets diverging, all
peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, and
all visible things with a brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the
hunted air of the people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the
possibility of turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes
of fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with what
they suppressed; nor foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows-rope
they mused about enduring, or inflicting. The trade signs (and they were
almost as many as the shops) were, all, grim illustrations of Want. The
butcher and the porkman painted up, only the leanest scrags of meat; the
baker, the coarsest of meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking
in the wine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and
beer, and were gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was represented
in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but, the cutler’s knives
and axes were sharp and bright, the smith’s hammers were heavy, and the
gunmaker’s stock was murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement,
with their many little reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but
broke off abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down the
middle of the street—when it ran at all: which was only after heavy rains,
and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses. Across the streets, at
wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and pulley; at night,
when the lamplighter had let these down, and lighted, and hoisted them
again, a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in a sickly manner overhead, as if

they were at sea. Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and crew were in
peril of tempest.
For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region
should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long,
as to conceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling up men by
those ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their condition. But,
the time was not come yet; and every wind that blew over France shook the
rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took
no warning.
The wine-shop was a corner shop, better than most others in its
appearance and degree, and the master of the wine-shop had stood outside
it, in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking on at the struggle for
the lost wine. “It’s not my affair,” said he, with a final shrug of the
shoulders. “The people from the market did it. Let them bring another.”
There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke, he
called to him across the way:
“Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?”
The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as is often the
way with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely failed, as is often the
way with his tribe too.
“What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?” said the wine-shop
keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with a handful of mud,
picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it. “Why do you write in the
public streets? Is there—tell me thou—is there no other place to write such
words in?”
In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally,
perhaps not) upon the joker’s heart. The joker rapped it with his own, took a
nimble spring upward, and came down in a fantastic dancing attitude, with
one of his stained shoes jerked off his foot into his hand, and held out. A
joker of an extremely, not to say wolfishly practical character, he looked,
under those circumstances.
“Put it on, put it on,” said the other. “Call wine, wine; and finish there.”
With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon the joker’s dress, such as it
was—quite deliberately, as having dirtied the hand on his account; and then
recrossed the road and entered the wine-shop.

This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty,
and he should have been of a hot temperament, for, although it was a bitter
day, he wore no coat, but carried one slung over his shoulder. His shirt-
sleeves were rolled up, too, and his brown arms were bare to the elbows.
Neither did he wear anything more on his head than his own crisply-curling
short dark hair. He was a dark man altogether, with good eyes and a good
bold breadth between them. Good-humoured looking on the whole, but
implacable-looking, too; evidently a man of a strong resolution and a set
purpose; a man not desirable to be met, rushing down a narrow pass with a
gulf on either side, for nothing would turn the man.
Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter as he came
in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with a
watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily
ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of manner.
There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might have
predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the
reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being sensitive to
cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright shawl twined about
her head, though not to the concealment of her large earrings. Her knitting
was before her, but she had laid it down to pick her teeth with a toothpick.
Thus engaged, with her right elbow supported by her left hand, Madame
Defarge said nothing when her lord came in, but coughed just one grain of
cough. This, in combination with the lifting of her darkly defined eyebrows
over her toothpick by the breadth of a line, suggested to her husband that he
would do well to look round the shop among the customers, for any new
customer who had dropped in while he stepped over the way.
The wine-shop keeper accordingly rolled his eyes about, until they rested
upon an elderly gentleman and a young lady, who were seated in a corner.
Other company were there: two playing cards, two playing dominoes, three
standing by the counter lengthening out a short supply of wine. As he
passed behind the counter, he took notice that the elderly gentleman said in
a look to the young lady, “This is our man.”
“What the devil do you do in that galley there?” said Monsieur Defarge
to himself; “I don’t know you.”
But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discourse
with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter.

“How goes it, Jacques?” said one of these three to Monsieur Defarge. “Is
all the spilt wine swallowed?”
“Every drop, Jacques,” answered Monsieur Defarge.
When this interchange of Christian name was effected, Madame Defarge,
picking her teeth with her toothpick, coughed another grain of cough, and
raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.
“It is not often,” said the second of the three, addressing Monsieur
Defarge, “that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or of
anything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?”
“It is so, Jacques,” Monsieur Defarge returned.
At this second interchange of the Christian name, Madame Defarge, still
using her toothpick with profound composure, coughed another grain of
cough, and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.
The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his empty drinking
vessel and smacked his lips.
“Ah! So much the worse! A bitter taste it is that such poor cattle always
have in their mouths, and hard lives they live, Jacques. Am I right,
Jacques?”
“You are right, Jacques,” was the response of Monsieur Defarge.
This third interchange of the Christian name was completed at the
moment when Madame Defarge put her toothpick by, kept her eyebrows up,
and slightly rustled in her seat.
“Hold then! True!” muttered her husband. “Gentlemen—my wife!”
The three customers pulled off their hats to Madame Defarge, with three
flourishes. She acknowledged their homage by bending her head, and
giving them a quick look. Then she glanced in a casual manner round the
wine-shop, took up her knitting with great apparent calmness and repose of
spirit, and became absorbed in it.
“Gentlemen,” said her husband, who had kept his bright eye observantly
upon her, “good day. The chamber, furnished bachelor-fashion, that you
wished to see, and were inquiring for when I stepped out, is on the fifth
floor. The doorway of the staircase gives on the little courtyard close to the
left here,” pointing with his hand, “near to the window of my establishment.

But, now that I remember, one of you has already been there, and can show
the way. Gentlemen, adieu!”
They paid for their wine, and left the place. The eyes of Monsieur
Defarge were studying his wife at her knitting when the elderly gentleman
advanced from his corner, and begged the favour of a word.
“Willingly, sir,” said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped with him to
the door.
Their conference was very short, but very decided. Almost at the first
word, Monsieur Defarge started and became deeply attentive. It had not
lasted a minute, when he nodded and went out. The gentleman then
beckoned to the young lady, and they, too, went out. Madame Defarge
knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.
Mr. Jarvis Lorry and Miss Manette, emerging from the wine-shop thus,
joined Monsieur Defarge in the doorway to which he had directed his own
company just before. It opened from a stinking little black courtyard, and
was the general public entrance to a great pile of houses, inhabited by a
great number of people. In the gloomy tile-paved entry to the gloomy tile-
paved staircase, Monsieur Defarge bent down on one knee to the child of
his old master, and put her hand to his lips. It was a gentle action, but not at
all gently done; a very remarkable transformation had come over him in a
few seconds. He had no good-humour in his face, nor any openness of
aspect left, but had become a secret, angry, dangerous man.
“It is very high; it is a little difficult. Better to begin slowly.” Thus,
Monsieur Defarge, in a stern voice, to Mr. Lorry, as they began ascending
the stairs.
“Is he alone?” the latter whispered.
“Alone! God help him, who should be with him!” said the other, in the
same low voice.
“Is he always alone, then?”
“Yes.”
“Of his own desire?”
“Of his own necessity. As he was, when I first saw him after they found
me and demanded to know if I would take him, and, at my peril be discreet
—as he was then, so he is now.”

“He is greatly changed?”
“Changed!”
The keeper of the wine-shop stopped to strike the wall with his hand, and
mutter a tremendous curse. No direct answer could have been half so
forcible. Mr. Lorry’s spirits grew heavier and heavier, as he and his two
companions ascended higher and higher.
Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more crowded
parts of Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that time, it was vile
indeed to unaccustomed and unhardened senses. Every little habitation
within the great foul nest of one high building—that is to say, the room or
rooms within every door that opened on the general staircase—left its own
heap of refuse on its own landing, besides flinging other refuse from its
own windows. The uncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so
engendered, would have polluted the air, even if poverty and deprivation
had not loaded it with their intangible impurities; the two bad sources
combined made it almost insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a
steep dark shaft of dirt and poison, the way lay. Yielding to his own
disturbance of mind, and to his young companion’s agitation, which became
greater every instant, Mr. Jarvis Lorry twice stopped to rest. Each of these
stoppages was made at a doleful grating, by which any languishing good
airs that were left uncorrupted, seemed to escape, and all spoilt and sickly
vapours seemed to crawl in. Through the rusted bars, tastes, rather than
glimpses, were caught of the jumbled neighbourhood; and nothing within
range, nearer or lower than the summits of the two great towers of Notre-
Dame, had any promise on it of healthy life or wholesome aspirations.
At last, the top of the staircase was gained, and they stopped for the third
time. There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper inclination and of
contracted dimensions, to be ascended, before the garret story was reached.
The keeper of the wine-shop, always going a little in advance, and always
going on the side which Mr. Lorry took, as though he dreaded to be asked
any question by the young lady, turned himself about here, and, carefully
feeling in the pockets of the coat he carried over his shoulder, took out a
key.
“The door is locked then, my friend?” said Mr. Lorry, surprised.
“Ay. Yes,” was the grim reply of Monsieur Defarge.
“You think it necessary to keep the unfortunate gentleman so retired?”

“I think it necessary to turn the key.” Monsieur Defarge whispered it
closer in his ear, and frowned heavily.
“Why?”
“Why! Because he has lived so long, locked up, that he would be
frightened—rave—tear himself to pieces—die—come to I know not what
harm—if his door was left open.”
“Is it possible!” exclaimed Mr. Lorry.
“Is it possible!” repeated Defarge, bitterly. “Yes. And a beautiful world
we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are
possible, and not only possible, but done—done, see you!—under that sky
there, every day. Long live the Devil. Let us go on.”
This dialogue had been held in so very low a whisper, that not a word of
it had reached the young lady’s ears. But, by this time she trembled under
such strong emotion, and her face expressed such deep anxiety, and, above
all, such dread and terror, that Mr. Lorry felt it incumbent on him to speak a
word or two of reassurance.
“Courage, dear miss! Courage! Business! The worst will be over in a
moment; it is but passing the room-door, and the worst is over. Then, all the
good you bring to him, all the relief, all the happiness you bring to him,
begin. Let our good friend here, assist you on that side. That’s well, friend
Defarge. Come, now. Business, business!”
They went up slowly and softly. The staircase was short, and they were
soon at the top. There, as it had an abrupt turn in it, they came all at once in
sight of three men, whose heads were bent down close together at the side
of a door, and who were intently looking into the room to which the door
belonged, through some chinks or holes in the wall. On hearing footsteps
close at hand, these three turned, and rose, and showed themselves to be the
three of one name who had been drinking in the wine-shop.
“I forgot them in the surprise of your visit,” explained Monsieur Defarge.
“Leave us, good boys; we have business here.”
The three glided by, and went silently down.
There appearing to be no other door on that floor, and the keeper of the
wine-shop going straight to this one when they were left alone, Mr. Lorry
asked him in a whisper, with a little anger:
“Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette?”

“I show him, in the way you have seen, to a chosen few.”
“Is that well?”
“I think it is well.”
“Who are the few? How do you choose them?”
“I choose them as real men, of my name—Jacques is my name—to
whom the sight is likely to do good. Enough; you are English; that is
another thing. Stay there, if you please, a little moment.”
With an admonitory gesture to keep them back, he stooped, and looked in
through the crevice in the wall. Soon raising his head again, he struck twice
or thrice upon the door—evidently with no other object than to make a
noise there. With the same intention, he drew the key across it, three or four
times, before he put it clumsily into the lock, and turned it as heavily as he
could.
The door slowly opened inward under his hand, and he looked into the
room and said something. A faint voice answered something. Little more
than a single syllable could have been spoken on either side.
He looked back over his shoulder, and beckoned them to enter. Mr. Lorry
got his arm securely round the daughter’s waist, and held her; for he felt
that she was sinking.
“A-a-a-business, business!” he urged, with a moisture that was not of
business shining on his cheek. “Come in, come in!”
“I am afraid of it,” she answered, shuddering.
“Of it? What?”
“I mean of him. Of my father.”
Rendered in a manner desperate, by her state and by the beckoning of
their conductor, he drew over his neck the arm that shook upon his
shoulder, lifted her a little, and hurried her into the room. He sat her down
just within the door, and held her, clinging to him.
Defarge drew out the key, closed the door, locked it on the inside, took
out the key again, and held it in his hand. All this he did, methodically, and
with as loud and harsh an accompaniment of noise as he could make.
Finally, he walked across the room with a measured tread to where the
window was. He stopped there, and faced round.

The garret, built to be a depository for firewood and the like, was dim
and dark: for, the window of dormer shape, was in truth a door in the roof,
with a little crane over it for the hoisting up of stores from the street:
unglazed, and closing up the middle in two pieces, like any other door of
French construction. To exclude the cold, one half of this door was fast
closed, and the other was opened but a very little way. Such a scanty
portion of light was admitted through these means, that it was difficult, on
first coming in, to see anything; and long habit alone could have slowly
formed in any one, the ability to do any work requiring nicety in such
obscurity. Yet, work of that kind was being done in the garret; for, with his
back towards the door, and his face towards the window where the keeper
of the wine-shop stood looking at him, a white-haired man sat on a low
bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes.

CHAPTER VI.
The Shoemaker

G
ood day!” said Monsieur Defarge, looking down at the white head
that bent low over the shoemaking.
It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded to
the salutation, as if it were at a distance:
“Good day!”
“You are still hard at work, I see?”
After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, and the
voice replied, “Yes—I am working.” This time, a pair of haggard eyes had
looked at the questioner, before the face had dropped again.
The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the
faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt
had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of
solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long
and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human
voice, that it affected the senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into
a poor weak stain. So sunken and suppressed it was, that it was like a voice
underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a
famished traveller, wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would
have remembered home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.
Some minutes of silent work had passed: and the haggard eyes had
looked up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull
mechanical perception, beforehand, that the spot where the only visitor they
were aware of had stood, was not yet empty.
“I want,” said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the
shoemaker, “to let in a little more light here. You can bear a little more?”
The shoemaker stopped his work; looked with a vacant air of listening, at
the floor on one side of him; then similarly, at the floor on the other side of

him; then, upward at the speaker.
“What did you say?”
“You can bear a little more light?”
“I must bear it, if you let it in.” (Laying the palest shadow of a stress
upon the second word.)
The opened half-door was opened a little further, and secured at that
angle for the time. A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and showed the
workman with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his labour. His
few common tools and various scraps of leather were at his feet and on his
bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long, a hollow face,
and exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and thinness of his face would
have caused them to look large, under his yet dark eyebrows and his
confused white hair, though they had been really otherwise; but, they were
naturally large, and looked unnaturally so. His yellow rags of shirt lay open
at the throat, and showed his body to be withered and worn. He, and his old
canvas frock, and his loose stockings, and all his poor tatters of clothes,
had, in a long seclusion from direct light and air, faded down to such a dull
uniformity of parchment-yellow, that it would have been hard to say which
was which.
He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the very bones
of it seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant gaze, pausing
in his work. He never looked at the figure before him, without first looking
down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he had lost the habit of
associating place with sound; he never spoke, without first wandering in
this manner, and forgetting to speak.
“Are you going to finish that pair of shoes to-day?” asked Defarge,
motioning to Mr. Lorry to come forward.
“What did you say?”
“Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes to-day?”
“I can’t say that I mean to. I suppose so. I don’t know.”
But, the question reminded him of his work, and he bent over it again.
Mr. Lorry came silently forward, leaving the daughter by the door. When
he had stood, for a minute or two, by the side of Defarge, the shoemaker
looked up. He showed no surprise at seeing another figure, but the unsteady
fingers of one of his hands strayed to his lips as he looked at it (his lips and

his nails were of the same pale lead-colour), and then the hand dropped to
his work, and he once more bent over the shoe. The look and the action had
occupied but an instant.
“You have a visitor, you see,” said Monsieur Defarge.
“What did you say?”
“Here is a visitor.”
The shoemaker looked up as before, but without removing a hand from
his work.
“Come!” said Defarge. “Here is monsieur, who knows a well-made shoe
when he sees one. Show him that shoe you are working at. Take it,
monsieur.”
Mr. Lorry took it in his hand.
“Tell monsieur what kind of shoe it is, and the maker’s name.”
There was a longer pause than usual, before the shoemaker replied:
“I forget what it was you asked me. What did you say?”
“I said, couldn’t you describe the kind of shoe, for monsieur’s
information?”
“It is a lady’s shoe. It is a young lady’s walking-shoe. It is in the present
mode. I never saw the mode. I have had a pattern in my hand.” He glanced
at the shoe with some little passing touch of pride.
“And the maker’s name?” said Defarge.
Now that he had no work to hold, he laid the knuckles of the right hand
in the hollow of the left, and then the knuckles of the left hand in the hollow
of the right, and then passed a hand across his bearded chin, and so on in
regular changes, without a moment’s intermission. The task of recalling him
from the vagrancy into which he always sank when he had spoken, was like
recalling some very weak person from a swoon, or endeavouring, in the
hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a fast-dying man.
“Did you ask me for my name?”
“Assuredly I did.”
“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.”
“Is that all?”
“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.”

With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to work
again, until the silence was again broken.
“You are not a shoemaker by trade?” said Mr. Lorry, looking steadfastly
at him.
His haggard eyes turned to Defarge as if he would have transferred the
question to him: but as no help came from that quarter, they turned back on
the questioner when they had sought the ground.
“I am not a shoemaker by trade? No, I was not a shoemaker by trade. I-I
learnt it here. I taught myself. I asked leave to—”
He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured changes on his
hands the whole time. His eyes came slowly back, at last, to the face from
which they had wandered; when they rested on it, he started, and resumed,
in the manner of a sleeper that moment awake, reverting to a subject of last
night.
“I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much difficulty after a
long while, and I have made shoes ever since.”
As he held out his hand for the shoe that had been taken from him, Mr.
Lorry said, still looking steadfastly in his face:
“Monsieur Manette, do you remember nothing of me?”
The shoe dropped to the ground, and he sat looking fixedly at the
questioner.
“Monsieur Manette”; Mr. Lorry laid his hand upon Defarge’s arm; “do
you remember nothing of this man? Look at him. Look at me. Is there no
old banker, no old business, no old servant, no old time, rising in your
mind, Monsieur Manette?”
As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by turns, at Mr. Lorry
and at Defarge, some long obliterated marks of an actively intent
intelligence in the middle of the forehead, gradually forced themselves
through the black mist that had fallen on him. They were overclouded
again, they were fainter, they were gone; but they had been there. And so
exactly was the expression repeated on the fair young face of her who had
crept along the wall to a point where she could see him, and where she now
stood looking at him, with hands which at first had been only raised in
frightened compassion, if not even to keep him off and shut out the sight of
him, but which were now extending towards him, trembling with eagerness

to lay the spectral face upon her warm young breast, and love it back to life
and hope—so exactly was the expression repeated (though in stronger
characters) on her fair young face, that it looked as though it had passed like
a moving light, from him to her.
Darkness had fallen on him in its place. He looked at the two, less and
less attentively, and his eyes in gloomy abstraction sought the ground and
looked about him in the old way. Finally, with a deep long sigh, he took the
shoe up, and resumed his work.
“Have you recognised him, monsieur?” asked Defarge in a whisper.
“Yes; for a moment. At first I thought it quite hopeless, but I have
unquestionably seen, for a single moment, the face that I once knew so
well. Hush! Let us draw further back. Hush!”
She had moved from the wall of the garret, very near to the bench on
which he sat. There was something awful in his unconsciousness of the
figure that could have put out its hand and touched him as he stooped over
his labour.
Not a word was spoken, not a sound was made. She stood, like a spirit,
beside him, and he bent over his work.
It happened, at length, that he had occasion to change the instrument in
his hand, for his shoemaker’s knife. It lay on that side of him which was not
the side on which she stood. He had taken it up, and was stooping to work
again, when his eyes caught the skirt of her dress. He raised them, and saw
her face. The two spectators started forward, but she stayed them with a
motion of her hand. She had no fear of his striking at her with the knife,
though they had.
He stared at her with a fearful look, and after a while his lips began to
form some words, though no sound proceeded from them. By degrees, in
the pauses of his quick and laboured breathing, he was heard to say:
“What is this?”
With the tears streaming down her face, she put her two hands to her lips,
and kissed them to him; then clasped them on her breast, as if she laid his
ruined head there.
“You are not the gaoler’s daughter?”
She sighed “No.”

“Who are you?”
Not yet trusting the tones of her voice, she sat down on the bench beside
him. He recoiled, but she laid her hand upon his arm. A strange thrill struck
him when she did so, and visibly passed over his frame; he laid the knife
down softly, as he sat staring at her.
Her golden hair, which she wore in long curls, had been hurriedly pushed
aside, and fell down over her neck. Advancing his hand by little and little,
he took it up and looked at it. In the midst of the action he went astray, and,
with another deep sigh, fell to work at his shoemaking.

Original

But not for long. Releasing his arm, she laid her hand upon his shoulder.
After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if to be sure that it was
really there, he laid down his work, put his hand to his neck, and took off a
blackened string with a scrap of folded rag attached to it. He opened this,
carefully, on his knee, and it contained a very little quantity of hair: not
more than one or two long golden hairs, which he had, in some old day,
wound off upon his finger.
He took her hair into his hand again, and looked closely at it. “It is the
same. How can it be! When was it! How was it!”
As the concentrated expression returned to his forehead, he seemed to
become conscious that it was in hers too. He turned her full to the light, and

looked at her.
“She had laid her head upon my shoulder, that night when I was
summoned out—she had a fear of my going, though I had none—and when
I was brought to the North Tower they found these upon my sleeve. ‘You
will leave me them? They can never help me to escape in the body, though
they may in the spirit.’ Those were the words I said. I remember them very
well.”
He formed this speech with his lips many times before he could utter it.
But when he did find spoken words for it, they came to him coherently,
though slowly.
“How was this?—Was it you?”
Once more, the two spectators started, as he turned upon her with a
frightful suddenness. But she sat perfectly still in his grasp, and only said,
in a low voice, “I entreat you, good gentlemen, do not come near us, do not
speak, do not move!”
“Hark!” he exclaimed. “Whose voice was that?”
His hands released her as he uttered this cry, and went up to his white
hair, which they tore in a frenzy. It died out, as everything but his
shoemaking did die out of him, and he refolded his little packet and tried to
secure it in his breast; but he still looked at her, and gloomily shook his
head.
“No, no, no; you are too young, too blooming. It can’t be. See what the
prisoner is. These are not the hands she knew, this is not the face she knew,
this is not a voice she ever heard. No, no. She was—and He was—before
the slow years of the North Tower—ages ago. What is your name, my
gentle angel?”
Hailing his softened tone and manner, his daughter fell upon her knees
before him, with her appealing hands upon his breast.
“O, sir, at another time you shall know my name, and who my mother
was, and who my father, and how I never knew their hard, hard history. But
I cannot tell you at this time, and I cannot tell you here. All that I may tell
you, here and now, is, that I pray to you to touch me and to bless me. Kiss
me, kiss me! O my dear, my dear!”
His cold white head mingled with her radiant hair, which warmed and
lighted it as though it were the light of Freedom shining on him.

“If you hear in my voice—I don’t know that it is so, but I hope it is—if
you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once was sweet music
in your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch, in touching my hair,
anything that recalls a beloved head that lay on your breast when you were
young and free, weep for it, weep for it! If, when I hint to you of a Home
that is before us, where I will be true to you with all my duty and with all
my faithful service, I bring back the remembrance of a Home long desolate,
while your poor heart pined away, weep for it, weep for it!”
She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him on her breast like a
child.
“If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is over, and that I have
come here to take you from it, and that we go to England to be at peace and
at rest, I cause you to think of your useful life laid waste, and of our native
France so wicked to you, weep for it, weep for it! And if, when I shall tell
you of my name, and of my father who is living, and of my mother who is
dead, you learn that I have to kneel to my honoured father, and implore his
pardon for having never for his sake striven all day and lain awake and
wept all night, because the love of my poor mother hid his torture from me,
weep for it, weep for it! Weep for her, then, and for me! Good gentlemen,
thank God! I feel his sacred tears upon my face, and his sobs strike against
my heart. O, see! Thank God for us, thank God!”
He had sunk in her arms, and his face dropped on her breast: a sight so
touching, yet so terrible in the tremendous wrong and suffering which had
gone before it, that the two beholders covered their faces.
When the quiet of the garret had been long undisturbed, and his heaving
breast and shaken form had long yielded to the calm that must follow all
storms—emblem to humanity, of the rest and silence into which the storm
called Life must hush at last—they came forward to raise the father and
daughter from the ground. He had gradually dropped to the floor, and lay
there in a lethargy, worn out. She had nestled down with him, that his head
might lie upon her arm; and her hair drooping over him curtained him from
the light.
“If, without disturbing him,” she said, raising her hand to Mr. Lorry as he
stooped over them, after repeated blowings of his nose, “all could be
arranged for our leaving Paris at once, so that, from the very door, he could
be taken away—”

“But, consider. Is he fit for the journey?” asked Mr. Lorry.
“More fit for that, I think, than to remain in this city, so dreadful to him.”
“It is true,” said Defarge, who was kneeling to look on and hear. “More
than that; Monsieur Manette is, for all reasons, best out of France. Say, shall
I hire a carriage and post-horses?”
“That’s business,” said Mr. Lorry, resuming on the shortest notice his
methodical manners; “and if business is to be done, I had better do it.”
“Then be so kind,” urged Miss Manette, “as to leave us here. You see
how composed he has become, and you cannot be afraid to leave him with
me now. Why should you be? If you will lock the door to secure us from
interruption, I do not doubt that you will find him, when you come back, as
quiet as you leave him. In any case, I will take care of him until you return,
and then we will remove him straight.”
Both Mr. Lorry and Defarge were rather disinclined to this course, and in
favour of one of them remaining. But, as there were not only carriage and
horses to be seen to, but travelling papers; and as time pressed, for the day
was drawing to an end, it came at last to their hastily dividing the business
that was necessary to be done, and hurrying away to do it.
Then, as the darkness closed in, the daughter laid her head down on the
hard ground close at the father’s side, and watched him. The darkness
deepened and deepened, and they both lay quiet, until a light gleamed
through the chinks in the wall.
Mr. Lorry and Monsieur Defarge had made all ready for the journey, and
had brought with them, besides travelling cloaks and wrappers, bread and
meat, wine, and hot coffee. Monsieur Defarge put this provender, and the
lamp he carried, on the shoemaker’s bench (there was nothing else in the
garret but a pallet bed), and he and Mr. Lorry roused the captive, and
assisted him to his feet.
No human intelligence could have read the mysteries of his mind, in the
scared blank wonder of his face. Whether he knew what had happened,
whether he recollected what they had said to him, whether he knew that he
was free, were questions which no sagacity could have solved. They tried
speaking to him; but, he was so confused, and so very slow to answer, that
they took fright at his bewilderment, and agreed for the time to tamper with
him no more. He had a wild, lost manner of occasionally clasping his head

in his hands, that had not been seen in him before; yet, he had some
pleasure in the mere sound of his daughter’s voice, and invariably turned to
it when she spoke.
In the submissive way of one long accustomed to obey under coercion,
he ate and drank what they gave him to eat and drink, and put on the cloak
and other wrappings, that they gave him to wear. He readily responded to
his daughter’s drawing her arm through his, and took—and kept—her hand
in both his own.
They began to descend; Monsieur Defarge going first with the lamp, Mr.
Lorry closing the little procession. They had not traversed many steps of the
long main staircase when he stopped, and stared at the roof and round at the
walls.
“You remember the place, my father? You remember coming up here?”
“What did you say?”
But, before she could repeat the question, he murmured an answer as if
she had repeated it.
“Remember? No, I don’t remember. It was so very long ago.”
That he had no recollection whatever of his having been brought from his
prison to that house, was apparent to them. They heard him mutter, “One
Hundred and Five, North Tower;” and when he looked about him, it
evidently was for the strong fortress-walls which had long encompassed
him. On their reaching the courtyard he instinctively altered his tread, as
being in expectation of a drawbridge; and when there was no drawbridge,
and he saw the carriage waiting in the open street, he dropped his
daughter’s hand and clasped his head again.
No crowd was about the door; no people were discernible at any of the
many windows; not even a chance passerby was in the street. An unnatural
silence and desertion reigned there. Only one soul was to be seen, and that
was Madame Defarge—who leaned against the door-post, knitting, and saw
nothing.
The prisoner had got into a coach, and his daughter had followed him,
when Mr. Lorry’s feet were arrested on the step by his asking, miserably,
for his shoemaking tools and the unfinished shoes. Madame Defarge
immediately called to her husband that she would get them, and went,
knitting, out of the lamplight, through the courtyard. She quickly brought

them down and handed them in;—and immediately afterwards leaned
against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.
Defarge got upon the box, and gave the word “To the Barrier!” The
postilion cracked his whip, and they clattered away under the feeble over-
swinging lamps.
Under the over-swinging lamps—swinging ever brighter in the better
streets, and ever dimmer in the worse—and by lighted shops, gay crowds,
illuminated coffee-houses, and theatre-doors, to one of the city gates.
Soldiers with lanterns, at the guard-house there. “Your papers, travellers!”
“See here then, Monsieur the Officer,” said Defarge, getting down, and
taking him gravely apart, “these are the papers of monsieur inside, with the
white head. They were consigned to me, with him, at the—” He dropped his
voice, there was a flutter among the military lanterns, and one of them
being handed into the coach by an arm in uniform, the eyes connected with
the arm looked, not an every day or an every night look, at monsieur with
the white head. “It is well. Forward!” from the uniform. “Adieu!” from
Defarge. And so, under a short grove of feebler and feebler over-swinging
lamps, out under the great grove of stars.
Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights; some, so remote from
this little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful whether their rays have
even yet discovered it, as a point in space where anything is suffered or
done: the shadows of the night were broad and black. All through the cold
and restless interval, until dawn, they once more whispered in the ears of
Mr. Jarvis Lorry—sitting opposite the buried man who had been dug out,
and wondering what subtle powers were for ever lost to him, and what were
capable of restoration—the old inquiry:
“I hope you care to be recalled to life?”
And the old answer:
“I can’t say.”
The end of the first book.

Book the Second—the Golden Thread

CHAPTER I.
Five Years Later

T
ellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the
year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very
dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place,
moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were proud
of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness, proud of its
incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence in those
particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if it were less
objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was no passive belief, but
an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business.
Tellson’s (they said) wanted no elbow-room, Tellson’s wanted no light,
Tellson’s wanted no embellishment. Noakes and Co.’s might, or Snooks
Brothers’ might; but Tellson’s, thank Heaven—!
Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the
question of rebuilding Tellson’s. In this respect the House was much on a
par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting
improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable,
but were only the more respectable.
Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson’s was the triumphant perfection of
inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak
rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came to your
senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters, where the oldest of
men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined
the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a
shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier by
their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your
business necessitated your seeing “the House,” you were put into a species
of Condemned Hold at the back, where you meditated on a misspent life,
until the House came with its hands in its pockets, and you could hardly
blink at it in the dismal twilight. Your money came out of, or went into,
wormy old wooden drawers, particles of which flew up your nose and down

your throat when they were opened and shut. Your bank-notes had a musty
odour, as if they were fast decomposing into rags again. Your plate was
stowed away among the neighbouring cesspools, and evil communications
corrupted its good polish in a day or two. Your deeds got into extemporised
strong-rooms made of kitchens and sculleries, and fretted all the fat out of
their parchments into the banking-house air. Your lighter boxes of family
papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room, that always had a great
dining-table in it and never had a dinner, and where, even in the year one
thousand seven hundred and eighty, the first letters written to you by your
old love, or by your little children, were but newly released from the horror
of being ogled through the windows, by the heads exposed on Temple Bar
with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee.
But indeed, at that time, putting to death was a recipe much in vogue
with all trades and professions, and not least of all with Tellson’s. Death is
Nature’s remedy for all things, and why not Legislation’s? Accordingly, the
forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note was put to Death; the
unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death; the purloiner of forty shillings
and sixpence was put to Death; the holder of a horse at Tellson’s door, who
made off with it, was put to Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to
Death; the sounders of three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of
Crime, were put to Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of
prevention—it might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was
exactly the reverse—but, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each
particular case, and left nothing else connected with it to be looked after.
Thus, Tellson’s, in its day, like greater places of business, its
contemporaries, had taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid low before it
had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately disposed of, they
would probably have excluded what little light the ground floor had, in a
rather significant manner.
Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson’s, the
oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young man
into Tellson’s London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They
kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour
and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen,
spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters
into the general weight of the establishment.

Outside Tellson’s—never by any means in it, unless called in—was an
odd-job-man, an occasional porter and messenger, who served as the live
sign of the house. He was never absent during business hours, unless upon
an errand, and then he was represented by his son: a grisly urchin of twelve,
who was his express image. People understood that Tellson’s, in a stately
way, tolerated the odd-job-man. The house had always tolerated some
person in that capacity, and time and tide had drifted this person to the post.
His surname was Cruncher, and on the youthful occasion of his renouncing
by proxy the works of darkness, in the easterly parish church of
Hounsditch, he had received the added appellation of Jerry.
The scene was Mr. Cruncher’s private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley,
Whitefriars: the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March
morning, Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty. (Mr. Cruncher
himself always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes:
apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the
invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon
it.)
Mr. Cruncher’s apartments were not in a savoury neighbourhood, and
were but two in number, even if a closet with a single pane of glass in it
might be counted as one. But they were very decently kept. Early as it was,
on the windy March morning, the room in which he lay abed was already
scrubbed throughout; and between the cups and saucers arranged for
breakfast, and the lumbering deal table, a very clean white cloth was spread.
Mr. Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane, like a Harlequin at
home. At first, he slept heavily, but, by degrees, began to roll and surge in
bed, until he rose above the surface, with his spiky hair looking as if it must
tear the sheets to ribbons. At which juncture, he exclaimed, in a voice of
dire exasperation:
“Bust me, if she ain’t at it agin!”
A woman of orderly and industrious appearance rose from her knees in a
corner, with sufficient haste and trepidation to show that she was the person
referred to.
“What!” said Mr. Cruncher, looking out of bed for a boot. “You’re at it
agin, are you?”
After hailing the morn with this second salutation, he threw a boot at the
woman as a third. It was a very muddy boot, and may introduce the odd

circumstance connected with Mr. Cruncher’s domestic economy, that,
whereas he often came home after banking hours with clean boots, he often
got up next morning to find the same boots covered with clay.
“What,” said Mr. Cruncher, varying his apostrophe after missing his
mark—“what are you up to, Aggerawayter?”
“I was only saying my prayers.”
“Saying your prayers! You’re a nice woman! What do you mean by
flopping yourself down and praying agin me?”
“I was not praying against you; I was praying for you.”
“You weren’t. And if you were, I won’t be took the liberty with. Here!
your mother’s a nice woman, young Jerry, going a praying agin your
father’s prosperity. You’ve got a dutiful mother, you have, my son. You’ve
got a religious mother, you have, my boy: going and flopping herself down,
and praying that the bread-and-butter may be snatched out of the mouth of
her only child.”
Master Cruncher (who was in his shirt) took this very ill, and, turning to
his mother, strongly deprecated any praying away of his personal board.
“And what do you suppose, you conceited female,” said Mr. Cruncher,
with unconscious inconsistency, “that the worth of your prayers may be?
Name the price that you put your prayers at!”
“They only come from the heart, Jerry. They are worth no more than
that.”
“Worth no more than that,” repeated Mr. Cruncher. “They ain’t worth
much, then. Whether or no, I won’t be prayed agin, I tell you. I can’t afford
it. I’m not a going to be made unlucky by your sneaking. If you must go
flopping yourself down, flop in favour of your husband and child, and not
in opposition to ’em. If I had had any but a unnat’ral wife, and this poor boy
had had any but a unnat’ral mother, I might have made some money last
week instead of being counter-prayed and countermined and religiously
circumwented into the worst of luck. B-u-u-ust me!” said Mr. Cruncher,
who all this time had been putting on his clothes, “if I ain’t, what with piety
and one blowed thing and another, been choused this last week into as bad
luck as ever a poor devil of a honest tradesman met with! Young Jerry, dress
yourself, my boy, and while I clean my boots keep a eye upon your mother
now and then, and if you see any signs of more flopping, give me a call.

For, I tell you,” here he addressed his wife once more, “I won’t be gone
agin, in this manner. I am as rickety as a hackney-coach, I’m as sleepy as
laudanum, my lines is strained to that degree that I shouldn’t know, if it
wasn’t for the pain in ’em, which was me and which somebody else, yet I’m
none the better for it in pocket; and it’s my suspicion that you’ve been at it
from morning to night to prevent me from being the better for it in pocket,
and I won’t put up with it, Aggerawayter, and what do you say now!”
Growling, in addition, such phrases as “Ah! yes! You’re religious, too.
You wouldn’t put yourself in opposition to the interests of your husband
and child, would you? Not you!” and throwing off other sarcastic sparks
from the whirling grindstone of his indignation, Mr. Cruncher betook
himself to his boot-cleaning and his general preparation for business. In the
meantime, his son, whose head was garnished with tenderer spikes, and
whose young eyes stood close by one another, as his father’s did, kept the
required watch upon his mother. He greatly disturbed that poor woman at
intervals, by darting out of his sleeping closet, where he made his toilet,
with a suppressed cry of “You are going to flop, mother. —Halloa, father!”
and, after raising this fictitious alarm, darting in again with an undutiful
grin.
Mr. Cruncher’s temper was not at all improved when he came to his
breakfast. He resented Mrs. Cruncher’s saying grace with particular
animosity.
“Now, Aggerawayter! What are you up to? At it again?”
His wife explained that she had merely “asked a blessing.”
“Don’t do it!” said Mr. Crunches looking about, as if he rather expected
to see the loaf disappear under the efficacy of his wife’s petitions. “I ain’t a
going to be blest out of house and home. I won’t have my wittles blest off
my table. Keep still!”
Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at a party
which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry Cruncher worried his
breakfast rather than ate it, growling over it like any four-footed inmate of a
menagerie. Towards nine o’clock he smoothed his ruffled aspect, and,
presenting as respectable and business-like an exterior as he could overlay
his natural self with, issued forth to the occupation of the day.
It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his favourite description of
himself as “a honest tradesman.” His stock consisted of a wooden stool,

made out of a broken-backed chair cut down, which stool, young Jerry,
walking at his father’s side, carried every morning to beneath the banking-
house window that was nearest Temple Bar: where, with the addition of the
first handful of straw that could be gleaned from any passing vehicle to
keep the cold and wet from the odd-job-man’s feet, it formed the
encampment for the day. On this post of his, Mr. Cruncher was as well
known to Fleet-street and the Temple, as the Bar itself,—and was almost as
in-looking.
Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his three-
cornered hat to the oldest of men as they passed in to Tellson’s, Jerry took
up his station on this windy March morning, with young Jerry standing by
him, when not engaged in making forays through the Bar, to inflict bodily
and mental injuries of an acute description on passing boys who were small
enough for his amiable purpose. Father and son, extremely like each other,
looking silently on at the morning traffic in Fleet-street, with their two
heads as near to one another as the two eyes of each were, bore a
considerable resemblance to a pair of monkeys. The resemblance was not
lessened by the accidental circumstance, that the mature Jerry bit and spat
out straw, while the twinkling eyes of the youthful Jerry were as restlessly
watchful of him as of everything else in Fleet-street.
The head of one of the regular indoor messengers attached to Tellson’s
establishment was put through the door, and the word was given:
“Porter wanted!”
“Hooray, father! Here’s an early job to begin with!”
Having thus given his parent God speed, young Jerry seated himself on
the stool, entered on his reversionary interest in the straw his father had
been chewing, and cogitated.
“Al-ways rusty! His fingers is al-ways rusty!” muttered young Jerry.
“Where does my father get all that iron rust from? He don’t get no iron rust
here!”

CHAPTER II.
A Sight

Y
ou know the Old Bailey well, no doubt?” said one of the oldest of
clerks to Jerry the messenger.
“Ye-es, sir,” returned Jerry, in something of a dogged manner. “I
do know the Bailey.”
“Just so. And you know Mr. Lorry.”
“I know Mr. Lorry, sir, much better than I know the Bailey. Much better,”
said Jerry, not unlike a reluctant witness at the establishment in question,
“than I, as a honest tradesman, wish to know the Bailey.”
“Very well. Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show the door-
keeper this note for Mr. Lorry. He will then let you in.”
“Into the court, sir?”
“Into the court.”
Mr. Cruncher’s eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another, and to
interchange the inquiry, “What do you think of this?”
“Am I to wait in the court, sir?” he asked, as the result of that conference.
“I am going to tell you. The door-keeper will pass the note to Mr. Lorry,
and do you make any gesture that will attract Mr. Lorry’s attention, and
show him where you stand. Then what you have to do, is, to remain there
until he wants you.”
“Is that all, sir?”
“That’s all. He wishes to have a messenger at hand. This is to tell him
you are there.”
As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the note, Mr.
Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came to the blotting-paper
stage, remarked:
“I suppose they’ll be trying Forgeries this morning?”

“Treason!”
“That’s quartering,” said Jerry. “Barbarous!”
“It is the law,” remarked the ancient clerk, turning his surprised
spectacles upon him. “It is the law.”
“It’s hard in the law to spile a man, I think. It’s hard enough to kill him,
but it’s wery hard to spile him, sir.”
“Not at all,” retained the ancient clerk. “Speak well of the law. Take care
of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the law to take care of
itself. I give you that advice.”
“It’s the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice,” said Jerry. “I
leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living mine is.”
“Well, well,” said the old clerk; “we all have our various ways of gaining
a livelihood. Some of us have damp ways, and some of us have dry ways.
Here is the letter. Go along.”
Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less internal
deference than he made an outward show of, “You are a lean old one, too,”
made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of his destination, and went his
way.
They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the street outside Newgate had
not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to it. But, the
gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villainy were
practised, and where dire diseases were bred, that came into court with the
prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief
Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench. It had more than once
happened, that the Judge in the black cap pronounced his own doom as
certainly as the prisoner’s, and even died before him. For the rest, the Old
Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from which pale travellers
set out continually, in carts and coaches, on a violent passage into the other
world: traversing some two miles and a half of public street and road, and
shaming few good citizens, if any. So powerful is use, and so desirable to be
good use in the beginning. It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old
institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the
extent; also, for the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very
humanising and softening to behold in action; also, for extensive
transactions in blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom,

systematically leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be
committed under Heaven. Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a
choice illustration of the precept, that “Whatever is is right;” an aphorism
that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome
consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and down this
hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man accustomed to make his
way quietly, the messenger found out the door he sought, and handed in his
letter through a trap in it. For, people then paid to see the play at the Old
Bailey, just as they paid to see the play in Bedlam—only the former
entertainment was much the dearer. Therefore, all the Old Bailey doors
were well guarded—except, indeed, the social doors by which the criminals
got there, and those were always left wide open.
After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its hinges a
very little way, and allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher to squeeze himself into
court.
“What’s on?” he asked, in a whisper, of the man he found himself next to.
“Nothing yet.”
“What’s coming on?”
“The Treason case.”
“The quartering one, eh?”
“Ah!” returned the man, with a relish; “he’ll be drawn on a hurdle to be
half hanged, and then he’ll be taken down and sliced before his own face,
and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on, and then
his head will be chopped off, and he’ll be cut into quarters. That’s the
sentence.”
“If he’s found Guilty, you mean to say?” Jerry added, by way of proviso.
“Oh! they’ll find him guilty,” said the other. “Don’t you be afraid of
that.”
Mr. Cruncher’s attention was here diverted to the door-keeper, whom he
saw making his way to Mr. Lorry, with the note in his hand. Mr. Lorry sat at
a table, among the gentlemen in wigs: not far from a wigged gentleman, the
prisoner’s counsel, who had a great bundle of papers before him: and nearly
opposite another wigged gentleman with his hands in his pockets, whose
whole attention, when Mr. Cruncher looked at him then or afterwards,

seemed to be concentrated on the ceiling of the court. After some gruff
coughing and rubbing of his chin and signing with his hand, Jerry attracted
the notice of Mr. Lorry, who had stood up to look for him, and who quietly
nodded and sat down again.
“What’s he got to do with the case?” asked the man he had spoken with.
“Blest if I know,” said Jerry.
“What have you got to do with it, then, if a person may inquire?”
“Blest if I know that either,” said Jerry.
The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent great stir and settling down
in the court, stopped the dialogue. Presently, the dock became the central
point of interest. Two gaolers, who had been standing there, went out, and
the prisoner was brought in, and put to the bar.
Everybody present, except the one wigged gentleman who looked at the
ceiling, stared at him. All the human breath in the place, rolled at him, like a
sea, or a wind, or a fire. Eager faces strained round pillars and corners, to
get a sight of him; spectators in back rows stood up, not to miss a hair of
him; people on the floor of the court, laid their hands on the shoulders of
the people before them, to help themselves, at anybody’s cost, to a view of
him—stood a-tiptoe, got upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing, to see
every inch of him. Conspicuous among these latter, like an animated bit of
the spiked wall of Newgate, Jerry stood: aiming at the prisoner the beery
breath of a whet he had taken as he came along, and discharging it to
mingle with the waves of other beer, and gin, and tea, and coffee, and what
not, that flowed at him, and already broke upon the great windows behind
him in an impure mist and rain.
The object of all this staring and blaring, was a young man of about five-
and-twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and a dark
eye. His condition was that of a young gentleman. He was plainly dressed
in black, or very dark grey, and his hair, which was long and dark, was
gathered in a ribbon at the back of his neck; more to be out of his way than
for ornament. As an emotion of the mind will express itself through any
covering of the body, so the paleness which his situation engendered came
through the brown upon his cheek, showing the soul to be stronger than the
sun. He was otherwise quite self-possessed, bowed to the Judge, and stood
quiet.

The sort of interest with which this man was stared and breathed at, was
not a sort that elevated humanity. Had he stood in peril of a less horrible
sentence—had there been a chance of any one of its savage details being
spared—by just so much would he have lost in his fascination. The form
that was to be doomed to be so shamefully mangled, was the sight; the
immortal creature that was to be so butchered and torn asunder, yielded the
sensation. Whatever gloss the various spectators put upon the interest,
according to their several arts and powers of self-deceit, the interest was, at
the root of it, Ogreish.
Silence in the court! Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty to
an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for that he
was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, prince,
our Lord the King, by reason of his having, on divers occasions, and by
divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the French King, in his wars against
our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by
coming and going, between the dominions of our said serene, illustrious,
excellent, and so forth, and those of the said French Lewis, and wickedly,
falsely, traitorously, and otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said
French Lewis what forces our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so
forth, had in preparation to send to Canada and North America. This much,
Jerry, with his head becoming more and more spiky as the law terms
bristled it, made out with huge satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at
the understanding that the aforesaid, and over and over again aforesaid,
Charles Darnay, stood there before him upon his trial; that the jury were
swearing in; and that Mr. Attorney-General was making ready to speak.
The accused, who was (and who knew he was) being mentally hanged,
beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there, neither flinched from the
situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it. He was quiet and attentive;
watched the opening proceedings with a grave interest; and stood with his
hands resting on the slab of wood before him, so composedly, that they had
not displaced a leaf of the herbs with which it was strewn. The court was all
bestrewn with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against gaol
air and gaol fever.
Over the prisoner’s head there was a mirror, to throw the light down upon
him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in it, and
had passed from its surface and this earth’s together. Haunted in a most

ghastly manner that abominable place would have been, if the glass could
ever have rendered back its reflections, as the ocean is one day to give up
its dead. Some passing thought of the infamy and disgrace for which it had
been reserved, may have struck the prisoner’s mind. Be that as it may, a
change in his position making him conscious of a bar of light across his
face, he looked up; and when he saw the glass his face flushed, and his right
hand pushed the herbs away.
It happened, that the action turned his face to that side of the court which
was on his left. About on a level with his eyes, there sat, in that corner of
the Judge’s bench, two persons upon whom his look immediately rested; so
immediately, and so much to the changing of his aspect, that all the eyes
that were turned upon him, turned to them.
The spectators saw in the two figures, a young lady of little more than
twenty, and a gentleman who was evidently her father; a man of a very
remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute whiteness of his hair, and
a certain indescribable intensity of face: not of an active kind, but pondering
and self-communing. When this expression was upon him, he looked as if
he were old; but when it was stirred and broken up—as it was now, in a
moment, on his speaking to his daughter—he became a handsome man, not
past the prime of life.
His daughter had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as she sat by
him, and the other pressed upon it. She had drawn close to him, in her dread
of the scene, and in her pity for the prisoner. Her forehead had been
strikingly expressive of an engrossing terror and compassion that saw
nothing but the peril of the accused. This had been so very noticeable, so
very powerfully and naturally shown, that starers who had had no pity for
him were touched by her; and the whisper went about, “Who are they?”
Jerry, the messenger, who had made his own observations, in his own
manner, and who had been sucking the rust off his fingers in his absorption,
stretched his neck to hear who they were. The crowd about him had pressed
and passed the inquiry on to the nearest attendant, and from him it had been
more slowly pressed and passed back; at last it got to Jerry:
“Witnesses.”
“For which side?”
“Against.”

“Against what side?”
“The prisoner’s.”
The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction, recalled them,
leaned back in his seat, and looked steadily at the man whose life was in his
hand, as Mr. Attorney-General rose to spin the rope, grind the axe, and
hammer the nails into the scaffold.

CHAPTER III.
A Disappointment

M
r. Attorney-General had to inform the jury, that the prisoner before
them, though young in years, was old in the treasonable practices
which claimed the forfeit of his life. That this correspondence
with the public enemy was not a correspondence of to-day, or of yesterday,
or even of last year, or of the year before. That, it was certain the prisoner
had, for longer than that, been in the habit of passing and repassing between
France and England, on secret business of which he could give no honest
account. That, if it were in the nature of traitorous ways to thrive (which
happily it never was), the real wickedness and guilt of his business might
have remained undiscovered. That Providence, however, had put it into the
heart of a person who was beyond fear and beyond reproach, to ferret out
the nature of the prisoner’s schemes, and, struck with horror, to disclose
them to his Majesty’s Chief Secretary of State and most honourable Privy
Council. That, this patriot would be produced before them. That, his
position and attitude were, on the whole, sublime. That, he had been the
prisoner’s friend, but, at once in an auspicious and an evil hour detecting his
infamy, had resolved to immolate the traitor he could no longer cherish in
his bosom, on the sacred altar of his country. That, if statues were decreed
in Britain, as in ancient Greece and Rome, to public benefactors, this
shining citizen would assuredly have had one. That, as they were not so
decreed, he probably would not have one. That, Virtue, as had been
observed by the poets (in many passages which he well knew the jury
would have, word for word, at the tips of their tongues; whereat the jury’s
countenances displayed a guilty consciousness that they knew nothing
about the passages), was in a manner contagious; more especially the bright
virtue known as patriotism, or love of country. That, the lofty example of
this immaculate and unimpeachable witness for the Crown, to refer to
whom however unworthily was an honour, had communicated itself to the

prisoner’s servant, and had engendered in him a holy determination to
examine his master’s table-drawers and pockets, and secrete his papers.
That, he (Mr. Attorney-General) was prepared to hear some disparagement
attempted of this admirable servant; but that, in a general way, he preferred
him to his (Mr. Attorney-General’s) brothers and sisters, and honoured him
more than his (Mr. Attorney-General’s) father and mother. That, he called
with confidence on the jury to come and do likewise. That, the evidence of
these two witnesses, coupled with the documents of their discovering that
would be produced, would show the prisoner to have been furnished with
lists of his Majesty’s forces, and of their disposition and preparation, both
by sea and land, and would leave no doubt that he had habitually conveyed
such information to a hostile power. That, these lists could not be proved to
be in the prisoner’s handwriting; but that it was all the same; that, indeed, it
was rather the better for the prosecution, as showing the prisoner to be
artful in his precautions. That, the proof would go back five years, and
would show the prisoner already engaged in these pernicious missions,
within a few weeks before the date of the very first action fought between
the British troops and the Americans. That, for these reasons, the jury, being
a loyal jury (as he knew they were), and being a responsible jury (as they
knew they were), must positively find the prisoner Guilty, and make an end
of him, whether they liked it or not. That, they never could lay their heads
upon their pillows; that, they never could tolerate the idea of their wives
laying their heads upon their pillows; that, they never could endure the
notion of their children laying their heads upon their pillows; in short, that
there never more could be, for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon
pillows at all, unless the prisoner’s head was taken off. That head Mr.
Attorney-General concluded by demanding of them, in the name of
everything he could think of with a round turn in it, and on the faith of his
solemn asseveration that he already considered the prisoner as good as dead
and gone.
When the Attorney-General ceased, a buzz arose in the court as if a cloud
of great blue-flies were swarming about the prisoner, in anticipation of what
he was soon to become. When toned down again, the unimpeachable patriot
appeared in the witness-box.
Mr. Solicitor-General then, following his leader’s lead, examined the
patriot: John Barsad, gentleman, by name. The story of his pure soul was
exactly what Mr. Attorney-General had described it to be—perhaps, if it had

a fault, a little too exactly. Having released his noble bosom of its burden,
he would have modestly withdrawn himself, but that the wigged gentleman
with the papers before him, sitting not far from Mr. Lorry, begged to ask
him a few questions. The wigged gentleman sitting opposite, still looking at
the ceiling of the court.
Had he ever been a spy himself? No, he scorned the base insinuation.
What did he live upon? His property. Where was his property? He didn’t
precisely remember where it was. What was it? No business of anybody’s.
Had he inherited it? Yes, he had. From whom? Distant relation. Very
distant? Rather. Ever been in prison? Certainly not. Never in a debtors’
prison? Didn’t see what that had to do with it. Never in a debtors’ prison?—
Come, once again. Never? Yes. How many times? Two or three times. Not
five or six? Perhaps. Of what profession? Gentleman. Ever been kicked?
Might have been. Frequently? No. Ever kicked downstairs? Decidedly not;
once received a kick on the top of a staircase, and fell downstairs of his own
accord. Kicked on that occasion for cheating at dice? Something to that
effect was said by the intoxicated liar who committed the assault, but it was
not true. Swear it was not true? Positively. Ever live by cheating at play?
Never. Ever live by play? Not more than other gentlemen do. Ever borrow
money of the prisoner? Yes. Ever pay him? No. Was not this intimacy with
the prisoner, in reality a very slight one, forced upon the prisoner in
coaches, inns, and packets? No. Sure he saw the prisoner with these lists?
Certain. Knew no more about the lists? No. Had not procured them himself,
for instance? No. Expect to get anything by this evidence? No. Not in
regular government pay and employment, to lay traps? Oh dear no. Or to do
anything? Oh dear no. Swear that? Over and over again. No motives but
motives of sheer patriotism? None whatever.
The virtuous servant, Roger Cly, swore his way through the case at a
great rate. He had taken service with the prisoner, in good faith and
simplicity, four years ago. He had asked the prisoner, aboard the Calais
packet, if he wanted a handy fellow, and the prisoner had engaged him. He
had not asked the prisoner to take the handy fellow as an act of charity—
never thought of such a thing. He began to have suspicions of the prisoner,
and to keep an eye upon him, soon afterwards. In arranging his clothes,
while travelling, he had seen similar lists to these in the prisoner’s pockets,
over and over again. He had taken these lists from the drawer of the
prisoner’s desk. He had not put them there first. He had seen the prisoner

show these identical lists to French gentlemen at Calais, and similar lists to
French gentlemen, both at Calais and Boulogne. He loved his country, and
couldn’t bear it, and had given information. He had never been suspected of
stealing a silver tea-pot; he had been maligned respecting a mustard-pot, but
it turned out to be only a plated one. He had known the last witness seven or
eight years; that was merely a coincidence. He didn’t call it a particularly
curious coincidence; most coincidences were curious. Neither did he call it
a curious coincidence that true patriotism was his only motive too. He was a
true Briton, and hoped there were many like him.
The blue-flies buzzed again, and Mr. Attorney-General called Mr. Jarvis
Lorry.
“Mr. Jarvis Lorry, are you a clerk in Tellson’s bank?”
“I am.”
“On a certain Friday night in November one thousand seven hundred and
seventy-five, did business occasion you to travel between London and
Dover by the mail?”
“It did.”
“Were there any other passengers in the mail?”
“Two.”
“Did they alight on the road in the course of the night?”
“They did.”
“Mr. Lorry, look upon the prisoner. Was he one of those two passengers?”
“I cannot undertake to say that he was.”
“Does he resemble either of these two passengers?”
“Both were so wrapped up, and the night was so dark, and we were all so
reserved, that I cannot undertake to say even that.”
“Mr. Lorry, look again upon the prisoner. Supposing him wrapped up as
those two passengers were, is there anything in his bulk and stature to
render it unlikely that he was one of them?”
“No.”
“You will not swear, Mr. Lorry, that he was not one of them?”
“No.”
“So at least you say he may have been one of them?”

“Yes. Except that I remember them both to have been—like myself—
timorous of highwaymen, and the prisoner has not a timorous air.”
“Did you ever see a counterfeit of timidity, Mr. Lorry?”
“I certainly have seen that.”
“Mr. Lorry, look once more upon the prisoner. Have you seen him, to
your certain knowledge, before?”
“I have.”
“When?”
“I was returning from France a few days afterwards, and, at Calais, the
prisoner came on board the packet-ship in which I returned, and made the
voyage with me.”
“At what hour did he come on board?”
“At a little after midnight.”
“In the dead of the night. Was he the only passenger who came on board
at that untimely hour?”
“He happened to be the only one.”
“Never mind about ‘happening,’ Mr. Lorry. He was the only passenger
who came on board in the dead of the night?”
“He was.”
“Were you travelling alone, Mr. Lorry, or with any companion?”
“With two companions. A gentleman and lady. They are here.”
“They are here. Had you any conversation with the prisoner?”
“Hardly any. The weather was stormy, and the passage long and rough,
and I lay on a sofa, almost from shore to shore.”
“Miss Manette!”
The young lady, to whom all eyes had been turned before, and were now
turned again, stood up where she had sat. Her father rose with her, and kept
her hand drawn through his arm.
“Miss Manette, look upon the prisoner.”
To be confronted with such pity, and such earnest youth and beauty, was
far more trying to the accused than to be confronted with all the crowd.
Standing, as it were, apart with her on the edge of his grave, not all the
staring curiosity that looked on, could, for the moment, nerve him to remain

quite still. His hurried right hand parcelled out the herbs before him into
imaginary beds of flowers in a garden; and his efforts to control and steady
his breathing shook the lips from which the colour rushed to his heart. The
buzz of the great flies was loud again.
“Miss Manette, have you seen the prisoner before?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where?”
“On board of the packet-ship just now referred to, sir, and on the same
occasion.”
“You are the young lady just now referred to?”
“O! most unhappily, I am!”
The plaintive tone of her compassion merged into the less musical voice
of the Judge, as he said something fiercely: “Answer the questions put to
you, and make no remark upon them.”
“Miss Manette, had you any conversation with the prisoner on that
passage across the Channel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Recall it.”
In the midst of a profound stillness, she faintly began: “When the
gentleman came on board—”
“Do you mean the prisoner?” inquired the Judge, knitting his brows.
“Yes, my Lord.”
“Then say the prisoner.”
“When the prisoner came on board, he noticed that my father,” turning
her eyes lovingly to him as he stood beside her, “was much fatigued and in
a very weak state of health. My father was so reduced that I was afraid to
take him out of the air, and I had made a bed for him on the deck near the
cabin steps, and I sat on the deck at his side to take care of him. There were
no other passengers that night, but we four. The prisoner was so good as to
beg permission to advise me how I could shelter my father from the wind
and weather, better than I had done. I had not known how to do it well, not
understanding how the wind would set when we were out of the harbour.
He did it for me. He expressed great gentleness and kindness for my

father’s state, and I am sure he felt it. That was the manner of our beginning
to speak together.”
“Let me interrupt you for a moment. Had he come on board alone?”
“No.”
“How many were with him?”
“Two French gentlemen.”
“Had they conferred together?”
“They had conferred together until the last moment, when it was
necessary for the French gentlemen to be landed in their boat.”
“Had any papers been handed about among them, similar to these lists?”
“Some papers had been handed about among them, but I don’t know
what papers.”
“Like these in shape and size?”
“Possibly, but indeed I don’t know, although they stood whispering very
near to me: because they stood at the top of the cabin steps to have the light
of the lamp that was hanging there; it was a dull lamp, and they spoke very
low, and I did not hear what they said, and saw only that they looked at
papers.”
“Now, to the prisoner’s conversation, Miss Manette.”
“The prisoner was as open in his confidence with me—which arose out
of my helpless situation—as he was kind, and good, and useful to my
father. I hope,” bursting into tears, “I may not repay him by doing him harm
to-day.”
Buzzing from the blue-flies.
“Miss Manette, if the prisoner does not perfectly understand that you
give the evidence which it is your duty to give—which you must give—and
which you cannot escape from giving—with great unwillingness, he is the
only person present in that condition. Please to go on.”
“He told me that he was travelling on business of a delicate and difficult
nature, which might get people into trouble, and that he was therefore
travelling under an assumed name. He said that this business had, within a
few days, taken him to France, and might, at intervals, take him backwards
and forwards between France and England for a long time to come.”
“Did he say anything about America, Miss Manette? Be particular.”

“He tried to explain to me how that quarrel had arisen, and he said that,
so far as he could judge, it was a wrong and foolish one on England’s part.
He added, in a jesting way, that perhaps George Washington might gain
almost as great a name in history as George the Third. But there was no
harm in his way of saying this: it was said laughingly, and to beguile the
time.”
Any strongly marked expression of face on the part of a chief actor in a
scene of great interest to whom many eyes are directed, will be
unconsciously imitated by the spectators. Her forehead was painfully
anxious and intent as she gave this evidence, and, in the pauses when she
stopped for the Judge to write it down, watched its effect upon the counsel
for and against. Among the lookers-on there was the same expression in all
quarters of the court; insomuch, that a great majority of the foreheads there,
might have been mirrors reflecting the witness, when the Judge looked up
from his notes to glare at that tremendous heresy about George Washington.
Mr. Attorney-General now signified to my Lord, that he deemed it
necessary, as a matter of precaution and form, to call the young lady’s
father, Doctor Manette. Who was called accordingly.
“Doctor Manette, look upon the prisoner. Have you ever seen him
before?”
“Once. When he called at my lodgings in London. Some three years, or
three years and a half ago.”
“Can you identify him as your fellow-passenger on board the packet, or
speak to his conversation with your daughter?”
“Sir, I can do neither.”
“Is there any particular and special reason for your being unable to do
either?”
He answered, in a low voice, “There is.”
“Has it been your misfortune to undergo a long imprisonment, without
trial, or even accusation, in your native country, Doctor Manette?”

Original

He answered, in a tone that went to every heart, “A long imprisonment.”
“Were you newly released on the occasion in question?”
“They tell me so.”
“Have you no remembrance of the occasion?”
“None. My mind is a blank, from some time—I cannot even say what
time—when I employed myself, in my captivity, in making shoes, to the
time when I found myself living in London with my dear daughter here.
She had become familiar to me, when a gracious God restored my faculties;
but, I am quite unable even to say how she had become familiar. I have no
remembrance of the process.”
Mr. Attorney-General sat down, and the father and daughter sat down
together.
A singular circumstance then arose in the case. The object in hand being
to show that the prisoner went down, with some fellow-plotter untracked, in
the Dover mail on that Friday night in November five years ago, and got out
of the mail in the night, as a blind, at a place where he did not remain, but
from which he travelled back some dozen miles or more, to a garrison and
dockyard, and there collected information; a witness was called to identify
him as having been at the precise time required, in the coffee-room of an
hotel in that garrison-and-dockyard town, waiting for another person. The
prisoner’s counsel was cross-examining this witness with no result, except
that he had never seen the prisoner on any other occasion, when the wigged
gentleman who had all this time been looking at the ceiling of the court,

wrote a word or two on a little piece of paper, screwed it up, and tossed it to
him. Opening this piece of paper in the next pause, the counsel looked with
great attention and curiosity at the prisoner.
“You say again you are quite sure that it was the prisoner?”
The witness was quite sure.
“Did you ever see anybody very like the prisoner?”
Not so like (the witness said) as that he could be mistaken.
“Look well upon that gentleman, my learned friend there,” pointing to
him who had tossed the paper over, “and then look well upon the prisoner.
How say you? Are they very like each other?”
Allowing for my learned friend’s appearance being careless and slovenly
if not debauched, they were sufficiently like each other to surprise, not only
the witness, but everybody present, when they were thus brought into
comparison. My Lord being prayed to bid my learned friend lay aside his
wig, and giving no very gracious consent, the likeness became much more
remarkable. My Lord inquired of Mr. Stryver (the prisoner’s counsel),
whether they were next to try Mr. Carton (name of my learned friend) for
treason? But, Mr. Stryver replied to my Lord, no; but he would ask the
witness to tell him whether what happened once, might happen twice;
whether he would have been so confident if he had seen this illustration of
his rashness sooner, whether he would be so confident, having seen it; and
more. The upshot of which, was, to smash this witness like a crockery
vessel, and shiver his part of the case to useless lumber.
Mr. Cruncher had by this time taken quite a lunch of rust off his fingers
in his following of the evidence. He had now to attend while Mr. Stryver
fitted the prisoner’s case on the jury, like a compact suit of clothes; showing
them how the patriot, Barsad, was a hired spy and traitor, an unblushing
trafficker in blood, and one of the greatest scoundrels upon earth since
accursed Judas—which he certainly did look rather like. How the virtuous
servant, Cly, was his friend and partner, and was worthy to be; how the
watchful eyes of those forgers and false swearers had rested on the prisoner
as a victim, because some family affairs in France, he being of French
extraction, did require his making those passages across the Channel—
though what those affairs were, a consideration for others who were near
and dear to him, forbade him, even for his life, to disclose. How the
evidence that had been warped and wrested from the young lady, whose

anguish in giving it they had witnessed, came to nothing, involving the
mere little innocent gallantries and politenesses likely to pass between any
young gentleman and young lady so thrown together;—with the exception
of that reference to George Washington, which was altogether too
extravagant and impossible to be regarded in any other light than as a
monstrous joke. How it would be a weakness in the government to break
down in this attempt to practise for popularity on the lowest national
antipathies and fears, and therefore Mr. Attorney-General had made the
most of it; how, nevertheless, it rested upon nothing, save that vile and
infamous character of evidence too often disfiguring such cases, and of
which the State Trials of this country were full. But, there my Lord
interposed (with as grave a face as if it had not been true), saying that he
could not sit upon that Bench and suffer those allusions.
Mr. Stryver then called his few witnesses, and Mr. Cruncher had next to
attend while Mr. Attorney-General turned the whole suit of clothes Mr.
Stryver had fitted on the jury, inside out; showing how Barsad and Cly were
even a hundred times better than he had thought them, and the prisoner a
hundred times worse. Lastly, came my Lord himself, turning the suit of
clothes, now inside out, now outside in, but on the whole decidedly
trimming and shaping them into grave-clothes for the prisoner.
And now, the jury turned to consider, and the great flies swarmed again.
Mr. Carton, who had so long sat looking at the ceiling of the court,
changed neither his place nor his attitude, even in this excitement. While his
learned friend, Mr. Stryver, massing his papers before him, whispered with
those who sat near, and from time to time glanced anxiously at the jury;
while all the spectators moved more or less, and grouped themselves anew;
while even my Lord himself arose from his seat, and slowly paced up and
down his platform, not unattended by a suspicion in the minds of the
audience that his state was feverish; this one man sat leaning back, with his
torn gown half off him, his untidy wig put on just as it had happened to
light on his head after its removal, his hands in his pockets, and his eyes on
the ceiling as they had been all day. Something especially reckless in his
demeanour, not only gave him a disreputable look, but so diminished the
strong resemblance he undoubtedly bore to the prisoner (which his
momentary earnestness, when they were compared together, had
strengthened), that many of the lookers-on, taking note of him now, said to

one another they would hardly have thought the two were so alike. Mr.
Cruncher made the observation to his next neighbour, and added, “I’d hold
half a guinea that he don’t get no law-work to do. Don’t look like the sort of
one to get any, do he?”
Yet, this Mr. Carton took in more of the details of the scene than he
appeared to take in; for now, when Miss Manette’s head dropped upon her
father’s breast, he was the first to see it, and to say audibly: “Officer! look
to that young lady. Help the gentleman to take her out. Don’t you see she
will fall!”
There was much commiseration for her as she was removed, and much
sympathy with her father. It had evidently been a great distress to him, to
have the days of his imprisonment recalled. He had shown strong internal
agitation when he was questioned, and that pondering or brooding look
which made him old, had been upon him, like a heavy cloud, ever since. As
he passed out, the jury, who had turned back and paused a moment, spoke,
through their foreman.
They were not agreed, and wished to retire. My Lord (perhaps with
George Washington on his mind) showed some surprise that they were not
agreed, but signified his pleasure that they should retire under watch and
ward, and retired himself. The trial had lasted all day, and the lamps in the
court were now being lighted. It began to be rumoured that the jury would
be out a long while. The spectators dropped off to get refreshment, and the
prisoner withdrew to the back of the dock, and sat down.
Mr. Lorry, who had gone out when the young lady and her father went
out, now reappeared, and beckoned to Jerry: who, in the slackened interest,
could easily get near him.
“Jerry, if you wish to take something to eat, you can. But, keep in the
way. You will be sure to hear when the jury come in. Don’t be a moment
behind them, for I want you to take the verdict back to the bank. You are the
quickest messenger I know, and will get to Temple Bar long before I can.”
Jerry had just enough forehead to knuckle, and he knuckled it in
acknowledgment of this communication and a shilling. Mr. Carton came up
at the moment, and touched Mr. Lorry on the arm.
“How is the young lady?”

“She is greatly distressed; but her father is comforting her, and she feels
the better for being out of court.”
“I’ll tell the prisoner so. It won’t do for a respectable bank gentleman like
you, to be seen speaking to him publicly, you know.”
Mr. Lorry reddened as if he were conscious of having debated the point
in his mind, and Mr. Carton made his way to the outside of the bar. The way
out of court lay in that direction, and Jerry followed him, all eyes, ears, and
spikes.
“Mr. Darnay!”
The prisoner came forward directly.
“You will naturally be anxious to hear of the witness, Miss Manette. She
will do very well. You have seen the worst of her agitation.”
“I am deeply sorry to have been the cause of it. Could you tell her so for
me, with my fervent acknowledgments?”
“Yes, I could. I will, if you ask it.”
Mr. Carton’s manner was so careless as to be almost insolent. He stood,
half turned from the prisoner, lounging with his elbow against the bar.
“I do ask it. Accept my cordial thanks.”
“What,” said Carton, still only half turned towards him, “do you expect,
Mr. Darnay?”
“The worst.”
“It’s the wisest thing to expect, and the likeliest. But I think their
withdrawing is in your favour.”
Loitering on the way out of court not being allowed, Jerry heard no more:
but left them—so like each other in feature, so unlike each other in manner
—standing side by side, both reflected in the glass above them.
An hour and a half limped heavily away in the thief-and-rascal crowded
passages below, even though assisted off with mutton pies and ale. The
hoarse messenger, uncomfortably seated on a form after taking that
refection, had dropped into a doze, when a loud murmur and a rapid tide of
people setting up the stairs that led to the court, carried him along with
them.
“Jerry! Jerry!” Mr. Lorry was already calling at the door when he got
there.

“Here, sir! It’s a fight to get back again. Here I am, sir!”
Mr. Lorry handed him a paper through the throng. “Quick! Have you got
it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Hastily written on the paper was the word “Acquitted.”
“If you had sent the message, ‘Recalled to Life,’ again,” muttered Jerry,
as he turned, “I should have known what you meant, this time.”
He had no opportunity of saying, or so much as thinking, anything else,
until he was clear of the Old Bailey; for, the crowd came pouring out with a
vehemence that nearly took him off his legs, and a loud buzz swept into the
street as if the baffled blue-flies were dispersing in search of other carrion.

Original

CHAPTER IV.
Congratulatory

F
rom the dimly-lighted passages of the court, the last sediment of the
human stew that had been boiling there all day, was straining off,
when Doctor Manette, Lucie Manette, his daughter, Mr. Lorry, the
solicitor for the defence, and its counsel, Mr. Stryver, stood gathered round
Mr. Charles Darnay—just released—congratulating him on his escape from
death.
It would have been difficult by a far brighter light, to recognise in Doctor
Manette, intellectual of face and upright of bearing, the shoemaker of the
garret in Paris. Yet, no one could have looked at him twice, without looking
again: even though the opportunity of observation had not extended to the
mournful cadence of his low grave voice, and to the abstraction that
overclouded him fitfully, without any apparent reason. While one external
cause, and that a reference to his long lingering agony, would always—as
on the trial—evoke this condition from the depths of his soul, it was also in
its nature to arise of itself, and to draw a gloom over him, as
incomprehensible to those unacquainted with his story as if they had seen
the shadow of the actual Bastille thrown upon him by a summer sun, when
the substance was three hundred miles away.
Only his daughter had the power of charming this black brooding from
his mind. She was the golden thread that united him to a Past beyond his
misery, and to a Present beyond his misery: and the sound of her voice, the
light of her face, the touch of her hand, had a strong beneficial influence
with him almost always. Not absolutely always, for she could recall some
occasions on which her power had failed; but they were few and slight, and
she believed them over.
Mr. Darnay had kissed her hand fervently and gratefully, and had turned
to Mr. Stryver, whom he warmly thanked. Mr. Stryver, a man of little more
than thirty, but looking twenty years older than he was, stout, loud, red,

bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy, had a pushing way of
shouldering himself (morally and physically) into companies and
conversations, that argued well for his shouldering his way up in life.
He still had his wig and gown on, and he said, squaring himself at his late
client to that degree that he squeezed the innocent Mr. Lorry clean out of
the group: “I am glad to have brought you off with honour, Mr. Darnay. It
was an infamous prosecution, grossly infamous; but not the less likely to
succeed on that account.”
“You have laid me under an obligation to you for life—in two senses,”
said his late client, taking his hand.
“I have done my best for you, Mr. Darnay; and my best is as good as
another man’s, I believe.”
It clearly being incumbent on some one to say, “Much better,” Mr. Lorry
said it; perhaps not quite disinterestedly, but with the interested object of
squeezing himself back again.
“You think so?” said Mr. Stryver. “Well! you have been present all day,
and you ought to know. You are a man of business, too.”
“And as such,” quoth Mr. Lorry, whom the counsel learned in the law
had now shouldered back into the group, just as he had previously
shouldered him out of it—“as such I will appeal to Doctor Manette, to
break up this conference and order us all to our homes. Miss Lucie looks ill,
Mr. Darnay has had a terrible day, we are worn out.”
“Speak for yourself, Mr. Lorry,” said Stryver; “I have a night’s work to
do yet. Speak for yourself.”
“I speak for myself,” answered Mr. Lorry, “and for Mr. Darnay, and for
Miss Lucie, and—Miss Lucie, do you not think I may speak for us all?” He
asked her the question pointedly, and with a glance at her father.
His face had become frozen, as it were, in a very curious look at Darnay:
an intent look, deepening into a frown of dislike and distrust, not even
unmixed with fear. With this strange expression on him his thoughts had
wandered away.
“My father,” said Lucie, softly laying her hand on his.
He slowly shook the shadow off, and turned to her.
“Shall we go home, my father?”

With a long breath, he answered “Yes.”
The friends of the acquitted prisoner had dispersed, under the impression
—which he himself had originated—that he would not be released that
night. The lights were nearly all extinguished in the passages, the iron gates
were being closed with a jar and a rattle, and the dismal place was deserted
until to-morrow morning’s interest of gallows, pillory, whipping-post, and
branding-iron, should repeople it. Walking between her father and Mr.
Darnay, Lucie Manette passed into the open air. A hackney-coach was
called, and the father and daughter departed in it.
Mr. Stryver had left them in the passages, to shoulder his way back to the
robing-room. Another person, who had not joined the group, or
interchanged a word with any one of them, but who had been leaning
against the wall where its shadow was darkest, had silently strolled out after
the rest, and had looked on until the coach drove away. He now stepped up
to where Mr. Lorry and Mr. Darnay stood upon the pavement.
“So, Mr. Lorry! Men of business may speak to Mr. Darnay now?”
Nobody had made any acknowledgment of Mr. Carton’s part in the day’s
proceedings; nobody had known of it. He was unrobed, and was none the
better for it in appearance.
“If you knew what a conflict goes on in the business mind, when the
business mind is divided between good-natured impulse and business
appearances, you would be amused, Mr. Darnay.”
Mr. Lorry reddened, and said, warmly, “You have mentioned that before,
sir. We men of business, who serve a House, are not our own masters. We
have to think of the House more than ourselves.”
“I know, I know,” rejoined Mr. Carton, carelessly. “Don’t be nettled, Mr.
Lorry. You are as good as another, I have no doubt: better, I dare say.”
“And indeed, sir,” pursued Mr. Lorry, not minding him, “I really don’t
know what you have to do with the matter. If you’ll excuse me, as very
much your elder, for saying so, I really don’t know that it is your business.”
“Business! Bless you, I have no business,” said Mr. Carton.
“It is a pity you have not, sir.”
“I think so, too.”
“If you had,” pursued Mr. Lorry, “perhaps you would attend to it.”

“Lord love you, no!—I shouldn’t,” said Mr. Carton.
“Well, sir!” cried Mr. Lorry, thoroughly heated by his indifference,
“business is a very good thing, and a very respectable thing. And, sir, if
business imposes its restraints and its silences and impediments, Mr.
Darnay as a young gentleman of generosity knows how to make allowance
for that circumstance. Mr. Darnay, good night, God bless you, sir! I hope
you have been this day preserved for a prosperous and happy life.—Chair
there!”
Perhaps a little angry with himself, as well as with the barrister, Mr.
Lorry bustled into the chair, and was carried off to Tellson’s. Carton, who
smelt of port wine, and did not appear to be quite sober, laughed then, and
turned to Darnay:
“This is a strange chance that throws you and me together. This must be a
strange night to you, standing alone here with your counterpart on these
street stones?”
“I hardly seem yet,” returned Charles Darnay, “to belong to this world
again.”
“I don’t wonder at it; it’s not so long since you were pretty far advanced
on your way to another. You speak faintly.”
“I begin to think I am faint.”
“Then why the devil don’t you dine? I dined, myself, while those
numskulls were deliberating which world you should belong to—this, or
some other. Let me show you the nearest tavern to dine well at.”
Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate-hill to
Fleet-street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern. Here, they were shown
into a little room, where Charles Darnay was soon recruiting his strength
with a good plain dinner and good wine: while Carton sat opposite to him at
the same table, with his separate bottle of port before him, and his fully
half-insolent manner upon him.
“Do you feel, yet, that you belong to this terrestrial scheme again, Mr.
Darnay?”
“I am frightfully confused regarding time and place; but I am so far
mended as to feel that.”
“It must be an immense satisfaction!”

He said it bitterly, and filled up his glass again: which was a large one.
“As to me, the greatest desire I have, is to forget that I belong to it. It has
no good in it for me—except wine like this—nor I for it. So we are not
much alike in that particular. Indeed, I begin to think we are not much alike
in any particular, you and I.”
Confused by the emotion of the day, and feeling his being there with this
Double of coarse deportment, to be like a dream, Charles Darnay was at a
loss how to answer; finally, answered not at all.
“Now your dinner is done,” Carton presently said, “why don’t you call a
health, Mr. Darnay; why don’t you give your toast?”
“What health? What toast?”
“Why, it’s on the tip of your tongue. It ought to be, it must be, I’ll swear
it’s there.”
“Miss Manette, then!”
“Miss Manette, then!”
Looking his companion full in the face while he drank the toast, Carton
flung his glass over his shoulder against the wall, where it shivered to
pieces; then, rang the bell, and ordered in another.
“That’s a fair young lady to hand to a coach in the dark, Mr. Darnay!” he
said, filling his new goblet.
A slight frown and a laconic “Yes,” were the answer.
“That’s a fair young lady to be pitied by and wept for by! How does it
feel? Is it worth being tried for one’s life, to be the object of such sympathy
and compassion, Mr. Darnay?”
Again Darnay answered not a word.
“She was mightily pleased to have your message, when I gave it her. Not
that she showed she was pleased, but I suppose she was.”
The allusion served as a timely reminder to Darnay that this disagreeable
companion had, of his own free will, assisted him in the strait of the day. He
turned the dialogue to that point, and thanked him for it.
“I neither want any thanks, nor merit any,” was the careless rejoinder. “It
was nothing to do, in the first place; and I don’t know why I did it, in the
second. Mr. Darnay, let me ask you a question.”
“Willingly, and a small return for your good offices.”

“Do you think I particularly like you?”
“Really, Mr. Carton,” returned the other, oddly disconcerted, “I have not
asked myself the question.”
“But ask yourself the question now.”
“You have acted as if you do; but I don’t think you do.”
“I don’t think I do,” said Carton. “I begin to have a very good opinion of
your understanding.”
“Nevertheless,” pursued Darnay, rising to ring the bell, “there is nothing
in that, I hope, to prevent my calling the reckoning, and our parting without
ill-blood on either side.”
Carton rejoining, “Nothing in life!” Darnay rang. “Do you call the whole
reckoning?” said Carton. On his answering in the affirmative, “Then bring
me another pint of this same wine, drawer, and come and wake me at ten.”
The bill being paid, Charles Darnay rose and wished him good night.
Without returning the wish, Carton rose too, with something of a threat of
defiance in his manner, and said, “A last word, Mr. Darnay: you think I am
drunk?”
“I think you have been drinking, Mr. Carton.”
“Think? You know I have been drinking.”
“Since I must say so, I know it.”
“Then you shall likewise know why. I am a disappointed drudge, sir. I
care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.”
“Much to be regretted. You might have used your talents better.”
“May be so, Mr. Darnay; may be not. Don’t let your sober face elate you,
however; you don’t know what it may come to. Good night!”
When he was left alone, this strange being took up a candle, went to a
glass that hung against the wall, and surveyed himself minutely in it.
“Do you particularly like the man?” he muttered, at his own image; “why
should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in
you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have
made in yourself! A good reason for taking to a man, that he shows you
what you have fallen away from, and what you might have been! Change
places with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes as

he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and
have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.”
He resorted to his pint of wine for consolation, drank it all in a few
minutes, and fell asleep on his arms, with his hair straggling over the table,
and a long winding-sheet in the candle dripping down upon him.

CHAPTER V.
The Jackal

T
hose were drinking days, and most men drank hard. So very great is
the improvement Time has brought about in such habits, that a
moderate statement of the quantity of wine and punch which one
man would swallow in the course of a night, without any detriment to his
reputation as a perfect gentleman, would seem, in these days, a ridiculous
exaggeration. The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind
any other learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither was
Mr. Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative
practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any more than in the drier
parts of the legal race.
A favourite at the Old Bailey, and eke at the Sessions, Mr. Stryver had
begun cautiously to hew away the lower staves of the ladder on which he
mounted. Sessions and Old Bailey had now to summon their favourite,
specially, to their longing arms; and shouldering itself towards the visage of
the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of King’s Bench, the florid countenance
of Mr. Stryver might be daily seen, bursting out of the bed of wigs, like a
great sunflower pushing its way at the sun from among a rank garden-full of
flaring companions.
It had once been noted at the Bar, that while Mr. Stryver was a glib man,
and an unscrupulous, and a ready, and a bold, he had not that faculty of
extracting the essence from a heap of statements, which is among the most
striking and necessary of the advocate’s accomplishments. But, a
remarkable improvement came upon him as to this. The more business he
got, the greater his power seemed to grow of getting at its pith and marrow;
and however late at night he sat carousing with Sydney Carton, he always
had his points at his fingers’ ends in the morning.
Sydney Carton, idlest and most unpromising of men, was Stryver’s great
ally. What the two drank together, between Hilary Term and Michaelmas,

might have floated a king’s ship. Stryver never had a case in hand,
anywhere, but Carton was there, with his hands in his pockets, staring at the
ceiling of the court; they went the same Circuit, and even there they
prolonged their usual orgies late into the night, and Carton was rumoured to
be seen at broad day, going home stealthily and unsteadily to his lodgings,
like a dissipated cat. At last, it began to get about, among such as were
interested in the matter, that although Sydney Carton would never be a lion,
he was an amazingly good jackal, and that he rendered suit and service to
Stryver in that humble capacity.
“Ten o’clock, sir,” said the man at the tavern, whom he had charged to
wake him—“ten o’clock, sir.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Ten o’clock, sir.”
“What do you mean? Ten o’clock at night?”
“Yes, sir. Your honour told me to call you.”
“Oh! I remember. Very well, very well.”
After a few dull efforts to get to sleep again, which the man dexterously
combated by stirring the fire continuously for five minutes, he got up,
tossed his hat on, and walked out. He turned into the Temple, and, having
revived himself by twice pacing the pavements of King’s Bench-walk and
Paper-buildings, turned into the Stryver chambers.
The Stryver clerk, who never assisted at these conferences, had gone
home, and the Stryver principal opened the door. He had his slippers on,
and a loose bed-gown, and his throat was bare for his greater ease. He had
that rather wild, strained, seared marking about the eyes, which may be
observed in all free livers of his class, from the portrait of Jeffries
downward, and which can be traced, under various disguises of Art, through
the portraits of every Drinking Age.
“You are a little late, Memory,” said Stryver.
“About the usual time; it may be a quarter of an hour later.”
They went into a dingy room lined with books and littered with papers,
where there was a blazing fire. A kettle steamed upon the hob, and in the
midst of the wreck of papers a table shone, with plenty of wine upon it, and
brandy, and rum, and sugar, and lemons.

“You have had your bottle, I perceive, Sydney.”
“Two to-night, I think. I have been dining with the day’s client; or seeing
him dine—it’s all one!”
“That was a rare point, Sydney, that you brought to bear upon the
identification. How did you come by it? When did it strike you?”
“I thought he was rather a handsome fellow, and I thought I should have
been much the same sort of fellow, if I had had any luck.”
Mr. Stryver laughed till he shook his precocious paunch.
“You and your luck, Sydney! Get to work, get to work.”
Sullenly enough, the jackal loosened his dress, went into an adjoining
room, and came back with a large jug of cold water, a basin, and a towel or
two. Steeping the towels in the water, and partially wringing them out, he
folded them on his head in a manner hideous to behold, sat down at the
table, and said, “Now I am ready!”
“Not much boiling down to be done to-night, Memory,” said Mr. Stryver,
gaily, as he looked among his papers.
“How much?”
“Only two sets of them.”
“Give me the worst first.”
“There they are, Sydney. Fire away!”
The lion then composed himself on his back on a sofa on one side of the
drinking-table, while the jackal sat at his own paper-bestrewn table proper,
on the other side of it, with the bottles and glasses ready to his hand. Both
resorted to the drinking-table without stint, but each in a different way; the
lion for the most part reclining with his hands in his waistband, looking at
the fire, or occasionally flirting with some lighter document; the jackal,
with knitted brows and intent face, so deep in his task, that his eyes did not
even follow the hand he stretched out for his glass—which often groped
about, for a minute or more, before it found the glass for his lips. Two or
three times, the matter in hand became so knotty, that the jackal found it
imperative on him to get up, and steep his towels anew. From these
pilgrimages to the jug and basin, he returned with such eccentricities of
damp headgear as no words can describe; which were made the more
ludicrous by his anxious gravity.

At length the jackal had got together a compact repast for the lion, and
proceeded to offer it to him. The lion took it with care and caution, made
his selections from it, and his remarks upon it, and the jackal assisted both.
When the repast was fully discussed, the lion put his hands in his waistband
again, and lay down to meditate. The jackal then invigorated himself with a
bumper for his throttle, and a fresh application to his head, and applied
himself to the collection of a second meal; this was administered to the lion
in the same manner, and was not disposed of until the clocks struck three in
the morning.
“And now we have done, Sydney, fill a bumper of punch,” said Mr.
Stryver.
The jackal removed the towels from his head, which had been steaming
again, shook himself, yawned, shivered, and complied.
“You were very sound, Sydney, in the matter of those crown witnesses
to-day. Every question told.”
“I always am sound; am I not?”
“I don’t gainsay it. What has roughened your temper? Put some punch to
it and smooth it again.”
With a deprecatory grunt, the jackal again complied.
“The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School,” said Stryver,
nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past,
“the old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits
and now in despondency!”
“Ah!” returned the other, sighing: “yes! The same Sydney, with the same
luck. Even then, I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did my own.”
“And why not?”
“God knows. It was my way, I suppose.”
He sat, with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out before
him, looking at the fire.
“Carton,” said his friend, squaring himself at him with a bullying air, as if
the fire-grate had been the furnace in which sustained endeavour was
forged, and the one delicate thing to be done for the old Sydney Carton of
old Shrewsbury School was to shoulder him into it, “your way is, and
always was, a lame way. You summon no energy and purpose. Look at me.”

“Oh, botheration!” returned Sydney, with a lighter and more good-
humoured laugh, “don’t you be moral!”
“How have I done what I have done?” said Stryver; “how do I do what I
do?”
“Partly through paying me to help you, I suppose. But it’s not worth your
while to apostrophise me, or the air, about it; what you want to do, you do.
You were always in the front rank, and I was always behind.”
“I had to get into the front rank; I was not born there, was I?”
“I was not present at the ceremony; but my opinion is you were,” said
Carton. At this, he laughed again, and they both laughed.
“Before Shrewsbury, and at Shrewsbury, and ever since Shrewsbury,”
pursued Carton, “you have fallen into your rank, and I have fallen into
mine. Even when we were fellow-students in the Student-Quarter of Paris,
picking up French, and French law, and other French crumbs that we didn’t
get much good of, you were always somewhere, and I was always
nowhere.”
“And whose fault was that?”
“Upon my soul, I am not sure that it was not yours. You were always
driving and riving and shouldering and passing, to that restless degree that I
had no chance for my life but in rust and repose. It’s a gloomy thing,
however, to talk about one’s own past, with the day breaking. Turn me in
some other direction before I go.”
“Well then! Pledge me to the pretty witness,” said Stryver, holding up his
glass. “Are you turned in a pleasant direction?”
Apparently not, for he became gloomy again.
“Pretty witness,” he muttered, looking down into his glass. “I have had
enough of witnesses to-day and to-night; who’s your pretty witness?”
“The picturesque doctor’s daughter, Miss Manette.”
“She pretty?”
“Is she not?”
“No.”
“Why, man alive, she was the admiration of the whole Court!”
“Rot the admiration of the whole Court! Who made the Old Bailey a
judge of beauty? She was a golden-haired doll!”

“Do you know, Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, looking at him with sharp
eyes, and slowly drawing a hand across his florid face: “do you know, I
rather thought, at the time, that you sympathised with the golden-haired
doll, and were quick to see what happened to the golden-haired doll?”
“Quick to see what happened! If a girl, doll or no doll, swoons within a
yard or two of a man’s nose, he can see it without a perspective-glass. I
pledge you, but I deny the beauty. And now I’ll have no more drink; I’ll get
to bed.”
When his host followed him out on the staircase with a candle, to light
him down the stairs, the day was coldly looking in through its grimy
windows. When he got out of the house, the air was cold and sad, the dull
sky overcast, the river dark and dim, the whole scene like a lifeless desert.
And wreaths of dust were spinning round and round before the morning
blast, as if the desert-sand had risen far away, and the first spray of it in its
advance had begun to overwhelm the city.
Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on
his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the
wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and
perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from
which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of
life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and
it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw
himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with
wasted tears.
Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of
good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise,
incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on
him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.

CHAPTER VI.
Hundreds of People

T
he quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner not
far from Soho-square. On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday
when the waves of four months had rolled over the trial for treason,
and carried it, as to the public interest and memory, far out to sea, Mr. Jarvis
Lorry walked along the sunny streets from Clerkenwell where he lived, on
his way to dine with the Doctor. After several relapses into business-
absorption, Mr. Lorry had become the Doctor’s friend, and the quiet street-
corner was the sunny part of his life.
On this certain fine Sunday, Mr. Lorry walked towards Soho, early in the
afternoon, for three reasons of habit. Firstly, because, on fine Sundays, he
often walked out, before dinner, with the Doctor and Lucie; secondly,
because, on unfavourable Sundays, he was accustomed to be with them as
the family friend, talking, reading, looking out of window, and generally
getting through the day; thirdly, because he happened to have his own little
shrewd doubts to solve, and knew how the ways of the Doctor’s household
pointed to that time as a likely time for solving them.
A quainter corner than the corner where the Doctor lived, was not to be
found in London. There was no way through it, and the front windows of
the Doctor’s lodgings commanded a pleasant little vista of street that had a
congenial air of retirement on it. There were few buildings then, north of
the Oxford-road, and forest-trees flourished, and wild flowers grew, and the
hawthorn blossomed, in the now vanished fields. As a consequence, country
airs circulated in Soho with vigorous freedom, instead of languishing into
the parish like stray paupers without a settlement; and there was many a
good south wall, not far off, on which the peaches ripened in their season.
The summer light struck into the corner brilliantly in the earlier part of
the day; but, when the streets grew hot, the corner was in shadow, though
not in shadow so remote but that you could see beyond it into a glare of

brightness. It was a cool spot, staid but cheerful, a wonderful place for
echoes, and a very harbour from the raging streets.
There ought to have been a tranquil bark in such an anchorage, and there
was. The Doctor occupied two floors of a large stiff house, where several
callings purported to be pursued by day, but whereof little was audible any
day, and which was shunned by all of them at night. In a building at the
back, attainable by a courtyard where a plane-tree rustled its green leaves,
church-organs claimed to be made, and silver to be chased, and likewise
gold to be beaten by some mysterious giant who had a golden arm starting
out of the wall of the front hall—as if he had beaten himself precious, and
menaced a similar conversion of all visitors. Very little of these trades, or of
a lonely lodger rumoured to live up-stairs, or of a dim coach-trimming
maker asserted to have a counting-house below, was ever heard or seen.
Occasionally, a stray workman putting his coat on, traversed the hall, or a
stranger peered about there, or a distant clink was heard across the
courtyard, or a thump from the golden giant. These, however, were only the
exceptions required to prove the rule that the sparrows in the plane-tree
behind the house, and the echoes in the corner before it, had their own way
from Sunday morning unto Saturday night.
Doctor Manette received such patients here as his old reputation, and its
revival in the floating whispers of his story, brought him. His scientific
knowledge, and his vigilance and skill in conducting ingenious
experiments, brought him otherwise into moderate request, and he earned as
much as he wanted.
These things were within Mr. Jarvis Lorry’s knowledge, thoughts, and
notice, when he rang the door-bell of the tranquil house in the corner, on the
fine Sunday afternoon.
“Doctor Manette at home?”
Expected home.
“Miss Lucie at home?”
Expected home.
“Miss Pross at home?”
Possibly at home, but of a certainty impossible for handmaid to anticipate
intentions of Miss Pross, as to admission or denial of the fact.
“As I am at home myself,” said Mr. Lorry, “I’ll go upstairs.”

Although the Doctor’s daughter had known nothing of the country of her
birth, she appeared to have innately derived from it that ability to make
much of little means, which is one of its most useful and most agreeable
characteristics. Simple as the furniture was, it was set off by so many little
adornments, of no value but for their taste and fancy, that its effect was
delightful. The disposition of everything in the rooms, from the largest
object to the least; the arrangement of colours, the elegant variety and
contrast obtained by thrift in trifles, by delicate hands, clear eyes, and good
sense; were at once so pleasant in themselves, and so expressive of their
originator, that, as Mr. Lorry stood looking about him, the very chairs and
tables seemed to ask him, with something of that peculiar expression which
he knew so well by this time, whether he approved?
There were three rooms on a floor, and, the doors by which they
communicated being put open that the air might pass freely through them
all, Mr. Lorry, smilingly observant of that fanciful resemblance which he
detected all around him, walked from one to another. The first was the best
room, and in it were Lucie’s birds, and flowers, and books, and desk, and
work-table, and box of water-colours; the second was the Doctor’s
consulting-room, used also as the dining-room; the third, changingly
speckled by the rustle of the plane-tree in the yard, was the Doctor’s
bedroom, and there, in a corner, stood the disused shoemaker’s bench and
tray of tools, much as it had stood on the fifth floor of the dismal house by
the wine-shop, in the suburb of Saint Antoine in Paris.
“I wonder,” said Mr. Lorry, pausing in his looking about, “that he keeps
that reminder of his sufferings about him!”
“And why wonder at that?” was the abrupt inquiry that made him start.
It proceeded from Miss Pross, the wild red woman, strong of hand,
whose acquaintance he had first made at the Royal George Hotel at Dover,
and had since improved.
“I should have thought—” Mr. Lorry began.
“Pooh! You’d have thought!” said Miss Pross; and Mr. Lorry left off.
“How do you do?” inquired that lady then—sharply, and yet as if to
express that she bore him no malice.
“I am pretty well, I thank you,” answered Mr. Lorry, with meekness;
“how are you?”

“Nothing to boast of,” said Miss Pross.
“Indeed?”
“Ah! indeed!” said Miss Pross. “I am very much put out about my
Ladybird.”
“Indeed?”
“For gracious sake say something else besides ‘indeed,’ or you’ll fidget
me to death,” said Miss Pross: whose character (dissociated from stature)
was shortness.
“Really, then?” said Mr. Lorry, as an amendment.
“Really, is bad enough,” returned Miss Pross, “but better. Yes, I am very
much put out.”
“May I ask the cause?”
“I don’t want dozens of people who are not at all worthy of Ladybird, to
come here looking after her,” said Miss Pross.
“Do dozens come for that purpose?”
“Hundreds,” said Miss Pross.
It was characteristic of this lady (as of some other people before her time
and since) that whenever her original proposition was questioned, she
exaggerated it.
“Dear me!” said Mr. Lorry, as the safest remark he could think of.
“I have lived with the darling—or the darling has lived with me, and paid
me for it; which she certainly should never have done, you may take your
affidavit, if I could have afforded to keep either myself or her for nothing—
since she was ten years old. And it’s really very hard,” said Miss Pross.
Not seeing with precision what was very hard, Mr. Lorry shook his head;
using that important part of himself as a sort of fairy cloak that would fit
anything.
“All sorts of people who are not in the least degree worthy of the pet, are
always turning up,” said Miss Pross. “When you began it—”
“I began it, Miss Pross?”
“Didn’t you? Who brought her father to life?”
“Oh! If that was beginning it—” said Mr. Lorry.

“It wasn’t ending it, I suppose? I say, when you began it, it was hard
enough; not that I have any fault to find with Doctor Manette, except that he
is not worthy of such a daughter, which is no imputation on him, for it was
not to be expected that anybody should be, under any circumstances. But it
really is doubly and trebly hard to have crowds and multitudes of people
turning up after him (I could have forgiven him), to take Ladybird’s
affections away from me.”
Mr. Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by
this time to be, beneath the service of her eccentricity, one of those
unselfish creatures—found only among women—who will, for pure love
and admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have
lost it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments that they were
never fortunate enough to gain, to bright hopes that never shone upon their
own sombre lives. He knew enough of the world to know that there is
nothing in it better than the faithful service of the heart; so rendered and so
free from any mercenary taint, he had such an exalted respect for it, that in
the retributive arrangements made by his own mind—we all make such
arrangements, more or less—he stationed Miss Pross much nearer to the
lower Angels than many ladies immeasurably better got up both by Nature
and Art, who had balances at Tellson’s.
“There never was, nor will be, but one man worthy of Ladybird,” said
Miss Pross; “and that was my brother Solomon, if he hadn’t made a mistake
in life.”
Here again: Mr. Lorry’s inquiries into Miss Pross’s personal history had
established the fact that her brother Solomon was a heartless scoundrel who
had stripped her of everything she possessed, as a stake to speculate with,
and had abandoned her in her poverty for evermore, with no touch of
compunction. Miss Pross’s fidelity of belief in Solomon (deducting a mere
trifle for this slight mistake) was quite a serious matter with Mr. Lorry, and
had its weight in his good opinion of her.
“As we happen to be alone for the moment, and are both people of
business,” he said, when they had got back to the drawing-room and had sat
down there in friendly relations, “let me ask you—does the Doctor, in
talking with Lucie, never refer to the shoemaking time, yet?”
“Never.”
“And yet keeps that bench and those tools beside him?”

“Ah!” returned Miss Pross, shaking her head. “But I don’t say he don’t
refer to it within himself.”
“Do you believe that he thinks of it much?”
“I do,” said Miss Pross.
“Do you imagine—” Mr. Lorry had begun, when Miss Pross took him up
short with:
“Never imagine anything. Have no imagination at all.”
“I stand corrected; do you suppose—you go so far as to suppose,
sometimes?”
“Now and then,” said Miss Pross.
“Do you suppose,” Mr. Lorry went on, with a laughing twinkle in his
bright eye, as it looked kindly at her, “that Doctor Manette has any theory
of his own, preserved through all those years, relative to the cause of his
being so oppressed; perhaps, even to the name of his oppressor?”
“I don’t suppose anything about it but what Ladybird tells me.”
“And that is—?”
“That she thinks he has.”
“Now don’t be angry at my asking all these questions; because I am a
mere dull man of business, and you are a woman of business.”
“Dull?” Miss Pross inquired, with placidity.
Rather wishing his modest adjective away, Mr. Lorry replied, “No, no,
no. Surely not. To return to business:—Is it not remarkable that Doctor
Manette, unquestionably innocent of any crime as we are all well assured he
is, should never touch upon that question? I will not say with me, though he
had business relations with me many years ago, and we are now intimate; I
will say with the fair daughter to whom he is so devotedly attached, and
who is so devotedly attached to him? Believe me, Miss Pross, I don’t
approach the topic with you, out of curiosity, but out of zealous interest.”
“Well! To the best of my understanding, and bad’s the best, you’ll tell
me,” said Miss Pross, softened by the tone of the apology, “he is afraid of
the whole subject.”
“Afraid?”
“It’s plain enough, I should think, why he may be. It’s a dreadful
remembrance. Besides that, his loss of himself grew out of it. Not knowing

how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain
of not losing himself again. That alone wouldn’t make the subject pleasant,
I should think.”
It was a profounder remark than Mr. Lorry had looked for. “True,” said
he, “and fearful to reflect upon. Yet, a doubt lurks in my mind, Miss Pross,
whether it is good for Doctor Manette to have that suppression always shut
up within him. Indeed, it is this doubt and the uneasiness it sometimes
causes me that has led me to our present confidence.”
“Can’t be helped,” said Miss Pross, shaking her head. “Touch that string,
and he instantly changes for the worse. Better leave it alone. In short, must
leave it alone, like or no like. Sometimes, he gets up in the dead of the
night, and will be heard, by us overhead there, walking up and down,
walking up and down, in his room. Ladybird has learnt to know then that
his mind is walking up and down, walking up and down, in his old prison.
She hurries to him, and they go on together, walking up and down, walking
up and down, until he is composed. But he never says a word of the true
reason of his restlessness, to her, and she finds it best not to hint at it to him.
In silence they go walking up and down together, walking up and down
together, till her love and company have brought him to himself.”
Notwithstanding Miss Pross’s denial of her own imagination, there was a
perception of the pain of being monotonously haunted by one sad idea, in
her repetition of the phrase, walking up and down, which testified to her
possessing such a thing.
The corner has been mentioned as a wonderful corner for echoes; it had
begun to echo so resoundingly to the tread of coming feet, that it seemed as
though the very mention of that weary pacing to and fro had set it going.
“Here they are!” said Miss Pross, rising to break up the conference; “and
now we shall have hundreds of people pretty soon!”
It was such a curious corner in its acoustical properties, such a peculiar
Ear of a place, that as Mr. Lorry stood at the open window, looking for the
father and daughter whose steps he heard, he fancied they would never
approach. Not only would the echoes die away, as though the steps had
gone; but, echoes of other steps that never came would be heard in their
stead, and would die away for good when they seemed close at hand.
However, father and daughter did at last appear, and Miss Pross was ready
at the street door to receive them.

Miss Pross was a pleasant sight, albeit wild, and red, and grim, taking off
her darling’s bonnet when she came up-stairs, and touching it up with the
ends of her handkerchief, and blowing the dust off it, and folding her
mantle ready for laying by, and smoothing her rich hair with as much pride
as she could possibly have taken in her own hair if she had been the vainest
and handsomest of women. Her darling was a pleasant sight too, embracing
her and thanking her, and protesting against her taking so much trouble for
her—which last she only dared to do playfully, or Miss Pross, sorely hurt,
would have retired to her own chamber and cried. The Doctor was a
pleasant sight too, looking on at them, and telling Miss Pross how she spoilt
Lucie, in accents and with eyes that had as much spoiling in them as Miss
Pross had, and would have had more if it were possible. Mr. Lorry was a
pleasant sight too, beaming at all this in his little wig, and thanking his
bachelor stars for having lighted him in his declining years to a Home. But,
no Hundreds of people came to see the sights, and Mr. Lorry looked in vain
for the fulfilment of Miss Pross’s prediction.
Dinner-time, and still no Hundreds of people. In the arrangements of the
little household, Miss Pross took charge of the lower regions, and always
acquitted herself marvellously. Her dinners, of a very modest quality, were
so well cooked and so well served, and so neat in their contrivances, half
English and half French, that nothing could be better. Miss Pross’s
friendship being of the thoroughly practical kind, she had ravaged Soho and
the adjacent provinces, in search of impoverished French, who, tempted by
shillings and half-crowns, would impart culinary mysteries to her. From
these decayed sons and daughters of Gaul, she had acquired such wonderful
arts, that the woman and girl who formed the staff of domestics regarded
her as quite a Sorceress, or Cinderella’s Godmother: who would send out
for a fowl, a rabbit, a vegetable or two from the garden, and change them
into anything she pleased.
On Sundays, Miss Pross dined at the Doctor’s table, but on other days
persisted in taking her meals at unknown periods, either in the lower
regions, or in her own room on the second floor—a blue chamber, to which
no one but her Ladybird ever gained admittance. On this occasion, Miss
Pross, responding to Ladybird’s pleasant face and pleasant efforts to please
her, unbent exceedingly; so the dinner was very pleasant, too.

It was an oppressive day, and, after dinner, Lucie proposed that the wine
should be carried out under the plane-tree, and they should sit there in the
air. As everything turned upon her, and revolved about her, they went out
under the plane-tree, and she carried the wine down for the special benefit
of Mr. Lorry. She had installed herself, some time before, as Mr. Lorry’s
cup-bearer; and while they sat under the plane-tree, talking, she kept his
glass replenished. Mysterious backs and ends of houses peeped at them as
they talked, and the plane-tree whispered to them in its own way above
their heads.
Still, the Hundreds of people did not present themselves. Mr. Darnay
presented himself while they were sitting under the plane-tree, but he was
only One.
Doctor Manette received him kindly, and so did Lucie. But, Miss Pross
suddenly became afflicted with a twitching in the head and body, and
retired into the house. She was not unfrequently the victim of this disorder,
and she called it, in familiar conversation, “a fit of the jerks.”
The Doctor was in his best condition, and looked specially young. The
resemblance between him and Lucie was very strong at such times, and as
they sat side by side, she leaning on his shoulder, and he resting his arm on
the back of her chair, it was very agreeable to trace the likeness.
He had been talking all day, on many subjects, and with unusual vivacity.
“Pray, Doctor Manette,” said Mr. Darnay, as they sat under the plane-tree—
and he said it in the natural pursuit of the topic in hand, which happened to
be the old buildings of London—“have you seen much of the Tower?”
“Lucie and I have been there; but only casually. We have seen enough of
it, to know that it teems with interest; little more.”
“I have been there, as you remember,” said Darnay, with a smile, though
reddening a little angrily, “in another character, and not in a character that
gives facilities for seeing much of it. They told me a curious thing when I
was there.”
“What was that?” Lucie asked.
“In making some alterations, the workmen came upon an old dungeon,
which had been, for many years, built up and forgotten. Every stone of its
inner wall was covered by inscriptions which had been carved by prisoners
—dates, names, complaints, and prayers. Upon a corner stone in an angle of

the wall, one prisoner, who seemed to have gone to execution, had cut as his
last work, three letters. They were done with some very poor instrument,
and hurriedly, with an unsteady hand. At first, they were read as D. I. C.;
but, on being more carefully examined, the last letter was found to be G.
There was no record or legend of any prisoner with those initials, and many
fruitless guesses were made what the name could have been. At length, it
was suggested that the letters were not initials, but the complete word, DIG.
The floor was examined very carefully under the inscription, and, in the
earth beneath a stone, or tile, or some fragment of paving, were found the
ashes of a paper, mingled with the ashes of a small leathern case or bag.
What the unknown prisoner had written will never be read, but he had
written something, and hidden it away to keep it from the gaoler.”
“My father,” exclaimed Lucie, “you are ill!”
He had suddenly started up, with his hand to his head. His manner and
his look quite terrified them all.
“No, my dear, not ill. There are large drops of rain falling, and they made
me start. We had better go in.”
He recovered himself almost instantly. Rain was really falling in large
drops, and he showed the back of his hand with rain-drops on it. But, he
said not a single word in reference to the discovery that had been told of,
and, as they went into the house, the business eye of Mr. Lorry either
detected, or fancied it detected, on his face, as it turned towards Charles
Darnay, the same singular look that had been upon it when it turned towards
him in the passages of the Court House.
He recovered himself so quickly, however, that Mr. Lorry had doubts of
his business eye. The arm of the golden giant in the hall was not more
steady than he was, when he stopped under it to remark to them that he was
not yet proof against slight surprises (if he ever would be), and that the rain
had startled him.
Tea-time, and Miss Pross making tea, with another fit of the jerks upon
her, and yet no Hundreds of people. Mr. Carton had lounged in, but he made
only Two.
The night was so very sultry, that although they sat with doors and
windows open, they were overpowered by heat. When the tea-table was
done with, they all moved to one of the windows, and looked out into the
heavy twilight. Lucie sat by her father; Darnay sat beside her; Carton leaned

against a window. The curtains were long and white, and some of the
thunder-gusts that whirled into the corner, caught them up to the ceiling,
and waved them like spectral wings.
“The rain-drops are still falling, large, heavy, and few,” said Doctor
Manette. “It comes slowly.”
“It comes surely,” said Carton.
They spoke low, as people watching and waiting mostly do; as people in
a dark room, watching and waiting for Lightning, always do.
There was a great hurry in the streets of people speeding away to get
shelter before the storm broke; the wonderful corner for echoes resounded
with the echoes of footsteps coming and going, yet not a footstep was there.
“A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!” said Darnay, when they had
listened for a while.
“Is it not impressive, Mr. Darnay?” asked Lucie. “Sometimes, I have sat
here of an evening, until I have fancied—but even the shade of a foolish
fancy makes me shudder to-night, when all is so black and solemn—”
“Let us shudder too. We may know what it is.”
“It will seem nothing to you. Such whims are only impressive as we
originate them, I think; they are not to be communicated. I have sometimes
sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I have made the echoes out to
be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by-and-bye into our
lives.”
“There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be so,”
Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way.
The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became more and
more rapid. The corner echoed and re-echoed with the tread of feet; some,
as it seemed, under the windows; some, as it seemed, in the room; some
coming, some going, some breaking off, some stopping altogether; all in the
distant streets, and not one within sight.
“Are all these footsteps destined to come to all of us, Miss Manette, or
are we to divide them among us?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Darnay; I told you it was a foolish fancy, but you
asked for it. When I have yielded myself to it, I have been alone, and then I

have imagined them the footsteps of the people who are to come into my
life, and my father’s.”
“I take them into mine!” said Carton. “I ask no questions and make no
stipulations. There is a great crowd bearing down upon us, Miss Manette,
and I see them—by the Lightning.” He added the last words, after there had
been a vivid flash which had shown him lounging in the window.
“And I hear them!” he added again, after a peal of thunder. “Here they
come, fast, fierce, and furious!”
It was the rush and roar of rain that he typified, and it stopped him, for no
voice could be heard in it. A memorable storm of thunder and lightning
broke with that sweep of water, and there was not a moment’s interval in
crash, and fire, and rain, until after the moon rose at midnight.
The great bell of Saint Paul’s was striking one in the cleared air, when
Mr. Lorry, escorted by Jerry, high-booted and bearing a lantern, set forth on
his return-passage to Clerkenwell. There were solitary patches of road on
the way between Soho and Clerkenwell, and Mr. Lorry, mindful of foot-
pads, always retained Jerry for this service: though it was usually performed
a good two hours earlier.
“What a night it has been! Almost a night, Jerry,” said Mr. Lorry, “to
bring the dead out of their graves.”
“I never see the night myself, master—nor yet I don’t expect to—what
would do that,” answered Jerry.
“Good night, Mr. Carton,” said the man of business. “Good night, Mr.
Darnay. Shall we ever see such a night again, together!”
Perhaps. Perhaps, see the great crowd of people with its rush and roar,
bearing down upon them, too.

CHAPTER VII.
Monseigneur in Town

M
onseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held his
fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was
in his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of
Holiests to the crowd of worshippers in the suite of rooms without.
Monseigneur was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a
great many things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed
to be rather rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning’s chocolate could
not so much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four
strong men besides the Cook.
Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the
Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his
pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to
conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur’s lips. One lacquey carried the
chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the
chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third,
presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches),
poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense
with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under
the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon
if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must
have died of two.
Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night, where the Comedy
and the Grand Opera were charmingly represented. Monseigneur was out at
a little supper most nights, with fascinating company. So polite and so
impressible was Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the Grand Opera had
far more influence with him in the tiresome articles of state affairs and state
secrets, than the needs of all France. A happy circumstance for France, as
the like always is for all countries similarly favoured!—always was for

England (by way of example), in the regretted days of the merry Stuart who
sold it.
Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, which
was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public business,
Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all go his way—
tend to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, general and particular,
Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that the world was made for
them. The text of his order (altered from the original by only a pronoun,
which is not much) ran: “The earth and the fulness thereof are mine, saith
Monseigneur.”
Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar embarrassments crept
into his affairs, both private and public; and he had, as to both classes of
affairs, allied himself perforce with a Farmer-General. As to finances
public, because Monseigneur could not make anything at all of them, and
must consequently let them out to somebody who could; as to finances
private, because Farmer-Generals were rich, and Monseigneur, after
generations of great luxury and expense, was growing poor. Hence
Monseigneur had taken his sister from a convent, while there was yet time
to ward off the impending veil, the cheapest garment she could wear, and
had bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich Farmer-General, poor in
family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate cane with a golden
apple on the top of it, was now among the company in the outer rooms,
much prostrated before by mankind—always excepting superior mankind
of the blood of Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked down
upon him with the loftiest contempt.
A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood in his
stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-women waited
on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing but plunder and forage
where he could, the Farmer-General—howsoever his matrimonial relations
conduced to social morality—was at least the greatest reality among the
personages who attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.
For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and adorned with
every device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could achieve,
were, in truth, not a sound business; considered with any reference to the
scarecrows in the rags and nightcaps elsewhere (and not so far off, either,
but that the watching towers of Notre Dame, almost equidistant from the

two extremes, could see them both), they would have been an exceedingly
uncomfortable business—if that could have been anybody’s business, at the
house of Monseigneur. Military officers destitute of military knowledge;
naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of
affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes,
loose tongues, and looser lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all
lying horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of
the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments
from which anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score
and the score. People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the
State, yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives
passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were no
less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies for
imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly patients in
the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had discovered every
kind of remedy for the little evils with which the State was touched, except
the remedy of setting to work in earnest to root out a single sin, poured their
distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the reception of
Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling the world
with words, and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked
with Unbelieving Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals,
at this wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite
gentlemen of the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time—and
has been since—to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural
subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of exhaustion,
at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various notabilities left
behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the spies among the assembled
devotees of Monseigneur—forming a goodly half of the polite company—
would have found it hard to discover among the angels of that sphere one
solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance, owned to being a
Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of bringing a troublesome creature
into this world—which does not go far towards the realisation of the name
of mother—there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women
kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up, and charming
grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty.
The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance
upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional

people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that
things in general were going rather wrong. As a promising way of setting
them right, half of the half-dozen had become members of a fantastic sect
of Convulsionists, and were even then considering within themselves
whether they should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on the spot—
thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the Future, for
Monseigneur’s guidance. Besides these Dervishes, were other three who
had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with a jargon about
“the Centre of Truth:” holding that Man had got out of the Centre of Truth
—which did not need much demonstration—but had not got out of the
Circumference, and that he was to be kept from flying out of the
Circumference, and was even to be shoved back into the Centre, by fasting
and seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much discoursing with
spirits went on—and it did a world of good which never became manifest.
But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of
Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been
ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally
correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of hair, such delicate
complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant swords to look
at, and such delicate honour to the sense of smell, would surely keep
anything going, for ever and ever. The exquisite gentlemen of the finest
breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they languidly moved;
these golden fetters rang like precious little bells; and what with that
ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and fine linen, there was a
flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and his devouring hunger far
away.
Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping all
things in their places. Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball that was
never to leave off. From the Palace of the Tuileries, through Monseigneur
and the whole Court, through the Chambers, the Tribunals of Justice, and all
society (except the scarecrows), the Fancy Ball descended to the Common
Executioner: who, in pursuance of the charm, was required to officiate
“frizzled, powdered, in a gold-laced coat, pumps, and white silk stockings.”
At the gallows and the wheel—the axe was a rarity—Monsieur Paris, as it
was the episcopal mode among his brother Professors of the provinces,
Monsieur Orleans, and the rest, to call him, presided in this dainty dress.
And who among the company at Monseigneur’s reception in that seventeen

hundred and eightieth year of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system
rooted in a frizzled hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-
silk stockinged, would see the very stars out!
Monseigneur having eased his four men of their burdens and taken his
chocolate, caused the doors of the Holiest of Holiests to be thrown open,
and issued forth. Then, what submission, what cringing and fawning, what
servility, what abject humiliation! As to bowing down in body and spirit,
nothing in that way was left for Heaven—which may have been one among
other reasons why the worshippers of Monseigneur never troubled it.
Bestowing a word of promise here and a smile there, a whisper on one
happy slave and a wave of the hand on another, Monseigneur affably passed
through his rooms to the remote region of the Circumference of Truth.
There, Monseigneur turned, and came back again, and so in due course of
time got himself shut up in his sanctuary by the chocolate sprites, and was
seen no more.
The show being over, the flutter in the air became quite a little storm, and
the precious little bells went ringing downstairs. There was soon but one
person left of all the crowd, and he, with his hat under his arm and his
snuff-box in his hand, slowly passed among the mirrors on his way out.
“I devote you,” said this person, stopping at the last door on his way, and
turning in the direction of the sanctuary, “to the Devil!”
With that, he shook the snuff from his fingers as if he had shaken the dust
from his feet, and quietly walked downstairs.
He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner,
and with a face like a fine mask. A face of a transparent paleness; every
feature in it clearly defined; one set expression on it. The nose, beautifully
formed otherwise, was very slightly pinched at the top of each nostril. In
those two compressions, or dints, the only little change that the face ever
showed, resided. They persisted in changing colour sometimes, and they
would be occasionally dilated and contracted by something like a faint
pulsation; then, they gave a look of treachery, and cruelty, to the whole
countenance. Examined with attention, its capacity of helping such a look
was to be found in the line of the mouth, and the lines of the orbits of the
eyes, being much too horizontal and thin; still, in the effect of the face
made, it was a handsome face, and a remarkable one.

Its owner went downstairs into the courtyard, got into his carriage, and
drove away. Not many people had talked with him at the reception; he had
stood in a little space apart, and Monseigneur might have been warmer in
his manner. It appeared, under the circumstances, rather agreeable to him to
see the common people dispersed before his horses, and often barely
escaping from being run down. His man drove as if he were charging an
enemy, and the furious recklessness of the man brought no check into the
face, or to the lips, of the master. The complaint had sometimes made itself
audible, even in that deaf city and dumb age, that, in the narrow streets
without footways, the fierce patrician custom of hard driving endangered
and maimed the mere vulgar in a barbarous manner. But, few cared enough
for that to think of it a second time, and, in this matter, as in all others, the
common wretches were left to get out of their difficulties as they could.
With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of
consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage dashed
through streets and swept round corners, with women screaming before it,
and men clutching each other and clutching children out of its way. At last,
swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its wheels came to a
sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a number of voices, and
the horses reared and plunged.

Original

But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would not have
stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and leave their wounded

behind, and why not? But the frightened valet had got down in a hurry, and
there were twenty hands at the horses’ bridles.
“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking out.
A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of
the horses, and had laid it on the basement of the fountain, and was down in
the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.
“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it
is a child.”
“Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?”
“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis—it is a pity—yes.”
The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where it was,
into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly got
up from the ground, and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the
Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.
“Killed!” shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both arms at
their length above his head, and staring at him. “Dead!”
The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was
nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness and
eagerness; there was no visible menacing or anger. Neither did the people
say anything; after the first cry, they had been silent, and they remained so.
The voice of the submissive man who had spoken, was flat and tame in its
extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over them all, as if
they had been mere rats come out of their holes.
He took out his purse.
“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care of
yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is for ever in the way.
How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give him that.”
He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned
forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The tall man called
out again with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”
He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest
made way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder,
sobbing and crying, and pointing to the fountain, where some women were

stooping over the motionless bundle, and moving gently about it. They were
as silent, however, as the men.
“I know all, I know all,” said the last comer. “Be a brave man, my
Gaspard! It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to live. It has
died in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour as happily?”
“You are a philosopher, you there,” said the Marquis, smiling. “How do
they call you?”
“They call me Defarge.”
“Of what trade?”
“Monsieur the Marquis, vendor of wine.”
“Pick up that, philosopher and vendor of wine,” said the Marquis,
throwing him another gold coin, “and spend it as you will. The horses there;
are they right?”
Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the
Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven away with the air
of a gentleman who had accidentally broke some common thing, and had
paid for it, and could afford to pay for it; when his ease was suddenly
disturbed by a coin flying into his carriage, and ringing on its floor.
“Hold!” said Monsieur the Marquis. “Hold the horses! Who threw that?”
He looked to the spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had stood, a
moment before; but the wretched father was grovelling on his face on the
pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the figure of
a dark stout woman, knitting.
“You dogs!” said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged
front, except as to the spots on his nose: “I would ride over any of you very
willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal threw
at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he should be
crushed under the wheels.”
So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of
what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not a
voice, or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the men, not one. But
the woman who stood knitting looked up steadily, and looked the Marquis
in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his contemptuous eyes
passed over her, and over all the other rats; and he leaned back in his seat
again, and gave the word “Go on!”

He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick
succession; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the
Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the Comedy, the
whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous flow, came whirling by. The rats
had crept out of their holes to look on, and they remained looking on for
hours; soldiers and police often passing between them and the spectacle,
and making a barrier behind which they slunk, and through which they
peeped. The father had long ago taken up his bundle and bidden himself
away with it, when the women who had tended the bundle while it lay on
the base of the fountain, sat there watching the running of the water and the
rolling of the Fancy Ball—when the one woman who had stood
conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness of Fate. The
water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so
much life in the city ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited
for no man, the rats were sleeping close together in their dark holes again,
the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all things ran their course.

CHAPTER VIII.
Monseigneur in the Country

A
beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it, but not abundant.
Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor
peas and beans, patches of most coarse vegetable substitutes for
wheat. On inanimate nature, as on the men and women who cultivated it, a
prevalent tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly—a
dejected disposition to give up, and wither away.
Monsieur the Marquis in his travelling carriage (which might have been
lighter), conducted by four post-horses and two postilions, fagged up a
steep hill. A blush on the countenance of Monsieur the Marquis was no
impeachment of his high breeding; it was not from within; it was
occasioned by an external circumstance beyond his control—the setting
sun.
The sunset struck so brilliantly into the travelling carriage when it gained
the hill-top, that its occupant was steeped in crimson. “It will die out,” said
Monsieur the Marquis, glancing at his hands, “directly.”
In effect, the sun was so low that it dipped at the moment. When the
heavy drag had been adjusted to the wheel, and the carriage slid down hill,
with a cinderous smell, in a cloud of dust, the red glow departed quickly;
the sun and the Marquis going down together, there was no glow left when
the drag was taken off.
But, there remained a broken country, bold and open, a little village at the
bottom of the hill, a broad sweep and rise beyond it, a church-tower, a
windmill, a forest for the chase, and a crag with a fortress on it used as a
prison. Round upon all these darkening objects as the night drew on, the
Marquis looked, with the air of one who was coming near home.
The village had its one poor street, with its poor brewery, poor tannery,
poor tavern, poor stable-yard for relays of post-horses, poor fountain, all

usual poor appointments. It had its poor people too. All its people were
poor, and many of them were sitting at their doors, shredding spare onions
and the like for supper, while many were at the fountain, washing leaves,
and grasses, and any such small yieldings of the earth that could be eaten.
Expressive signs of what made them poor, were not wanting; the tax for the
state, the tax for the church, the tax for the lord, tax local and tax general,
were to be paid here and to be paid there, according to solemn inscription in
the little village, until the wonder was, that there was any village left
unswallowed.
Few children were to be seen, and no dogs. As to the men and women,
their choice on earth was stated in the prospect—Life on the lowest terms
that could sustain it, down in the little village under the mill; or captivity
and Death in the dominant prison on the crag.
Heralded by a courier in advance, and by the cracking of his postilions’
whips, which twined snake-like about their heads in the evening air, as if he
came attended by the Furies, Monsieur the Marquis drew up in his
travelling carriage at the posting-house gate. It was hard by the fountain,
and the peasants suspended their operations to look at him. He looked at
them, and saw in them, without knowing it, the slow sure filing down of
misery-worn face and figure, that was to make the meagreness of
Frenchmen an English superstition which should survive the truth through
the best part of a hundred years.
Monsieur the Marquis cast his eyes over the submissive faces that
drooped before him, as the like of himself had drooped before Monseigneur
of the Court—only the difference was, that these faces drooped merely to
suffer and not to propitiate—when a grizzled mender of the roads joined the
group.
“Bring me hither that fellow!” said the Marquis to the courier.
The fellow was brought, cap in hand, and the other fellows closed round
to look and listen, in the manner of the people at the Paris fountain.
“I passed you on the road?”
“Monseigneur, it is true. I had the honour of being passed on the road.”
“Coming up the hill, and at the top of the hill, both?”
“Monseigneur, it is true.”
“What did you look at, so fixedly?”

“Monseigneur, I looked at the man.”
He stooped a little, and with his tattered blue cap pointed under the
carriage. All his fellows stooped to look under the carriage.
“What man, pig? And why look there?”
“Pardon, Monseigneur; he swung by the chain of the shoe—the drag.”
“Who?” demanded the traveller.
“Monseigneur, the man.”
“May the Devil carry away these idiots! How do you call the man? You
know all the men of this part of the country. Who was he?”
“Your clemency, Monseigneur! He was not of this part of the country. Of
all the days of my life, I never saw him.”
“Swinging by the chain? To be suffocated?”
“With your gracious permission, that was the wonder of it, Monseigneur.
His head hanging over—like this!”
He turned himself sideways to the carriage, and leaned back, with his
face thrown up to the sky, and his head hanging down; then recovered
himself, fumbled with his cap, and made a bow.
“What was he like?”
“Monseigneur, he was whiter than the miller. All covered with dust,
white as a spectre, tall as a spectre!”
The picture produced an immense sensation in the little crowd; but all
eyes, without comparing notes with other eyes, looked at Monsieur the
Marquis. Perhaps, to observe whether he had any spectre on his conscience.
“Truly, you did well,” said the Marquis, felicitously sensible that such
vermin were not to ruffle him, “to see a thief accompanying my carriage,
and not open that great mouth of yours. Bah! Put him aside, Monsieur
Gabelle!”
Monsieur Gabelle was the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary
united; he had come out with great obsequiousness to assist at this
examination, and had held the examined by the drapery of his arm in an
official manner.
“Bah! Go aside!” said Monsieur Gabelle.

“Lay hands on this stranger if he seeks to lodge in your village to-night,
and be sure that his business is honest, Gabelle.”
“Monseigneur, I am flattered to devote myself to your orders.”
“Did he run away, fellow?—where is that Accursed?”
The accursed was already under the carriage with some half-dozen
particular friends, pointing out the chain with his blue cap. Some half-dozen
other particular friends promptly hauled him out, and presented him
breathless to Monsieur the Marquis.
“Did the man run away, Dolt, when we stopped for the drag?”
“Monseigneur, he precipitated himself over the hill-side, head first, as a
person plunges into the river.”
“See to it, Gabelle. Go on!”
The half-dozen who were peering at the chain were still among the
wheels, like sheep; the wheels turned so suddenly that they were lucky to
save their skins and bones; they had very little else to save, or they might
not have been so fortunate.
The burst with which the carriage started out of the village and up the
rise beyond, was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. Gradually, it
subsided to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering upward among the many
sweet scents of a summer night. The postilions, with a thousand gossamer
gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the points to
the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the courier was
audible, trotting on ahead into the dull distance.
At the steepest point of the hill there was a little burial-ground, with a
Cross and a new large figure of Our Saviour on it; it was a poor figure in
wood, done by some inexperienced rustic carver, but he had studied the
figure from the life—his own life, maybe—for it was dreadfully spare and
thin.
To this distressful emblem of a great distress that had long been growing
worse, and was not at its worst, a woman was kneeling. She turned her head
as the carriage came up to her, rose quickly, and presented herself at the
carriage-door.
“It is you, Monseigneur! Monseigneur, a petition.”

With an exclamation of impatience, but with his unchangeable face,
Monseigneur looked out.
“How, then! What is it? Always petitions!”
“Monseigneur. For the love of the great God! My husband, the forester.”
“What of your husband, the forester? Always the same with you people.
He cannot pay something?”
“He has paid all, Monseigneur. He is dead.”
“Well! He is quiet. Can I restore him to you?”
“Alas, no, Monseigneur! But he lies yonder, under a little heap of poor
grass.”
“Well?”
“Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps of poor grass?”
“Again, well?”
She looked an old woman, but was young. Her manner was one of
passionate grief; by turns she clasped her veinous and knotted hands
together with wild energy, and laid one of them on the carriage-door—
tenderly, caressingly, as if it had been a human breast, and could be
expected to feel the appealing touch.
“Monseigneur, hear me! Monseigneur, hear my petition! My husband
died of want; so many die of want; so many more will die of want.”
“Again, well? Can I feed them?”
“Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I don’t ask it. My petition is,
that a morsel of stone or wood, with my husband’s name, may be placed
over him to show where he lies. Otherwise, the place will be quickly
forgotten, it will never be found when I am dead of the same malady, I shall
be laid under some other heap of poor grass. Monseigneur, they are so
many, they increase so fast, there is so much want. Monseigneur!
Monseigneur!”
The valet had put her away from the door, the carriage had broken into a
brisk trot, the postilions had quickened the pace, she was left far behind,
and Monseigneur, again escorted by the Furies, was rapidly diminishing the
league or two of distance that remained between him and his chateau.
The sweet scents of the summer night rose all around him, and rose, as
the rain falls, impartially, on the dusty, ragged, and toil-worn group at the

fountain not far away; to whom the mender of roads, with the aid of the
blue cap without which he was nothing, still enlarged upon his man like a
spectre, as long as they could bear it. By degrees, as they could bear no
more, they dropped off one by one, and lights twinkled in little casements;
which lights, as the casements darkened, and more stars came out, seemed
to have shot up into the sky instead of having been extinguished.
The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and of many over-hanging
trees, was upon Monsieur the Marquis by that time; and the shadow was
exchanged for the light of a flambeau, as his carriage stopped, and the great
door of his chateau was opened to him.
“Monsieur Charles, whom I expect; is he arrived from England?”
“Monseigneur, not yet.”

CHAPTER IX.
The Gorgon’s Head

I
t was a heavy mass of building, that chateau of Monsieur the Marquis,
with a large stone courtyard before it, and two stone sweeps of staircase
meeting in a stone terrace before the principal door. A stony business
altogether, with heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and stone flowers,
and stone faces of men, and stone heads of lions, in all directions. As if the
Gorgon’s head had surveyed it, when it was finished, two centuries ago.
Up the broad flight of shallow steps, Monsieur the Marquis, flambeau
preceded, went from his carriage, sufficiently disturbing the darkness to
elicit loud remonstrance from an owl in the roof of the great pile of stable
building away among the trees. All else was so quiet, that the flambeau
carried up the steps, and the other flambeau held at the great door, burnt as
if they were in a close room of state, instead of being in the open night-air.
Other sound than the owl’s voice there was none, save the falling of a
fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of those dark nights that hold
their breath by the hour together, and then heave a long low sigh, and hold
their breath again.
The great door clanged behind him, and Monsieur the Marquis crossed a
hall grim with certain old boar-spears, swords, and knives of the chase;
grimmer with certain heavy riding-rods and riding-whips, of which many a
peasant, gone to his benefactor Death, had felt the weight when his lord was
angry.
Avoiding the larger rooms, which were dark and made fast for the night,
Monsieur the Marquis, with his flambeau-bearer going on before, went up
the staircase to a door in a corridor. This thrown open, admitted him to his
own private apartment of three rooms: his bed-chamber and two others.
High vaulted rooms with cool uncarpeted floors, great dogs upon the
hearths for the burning of wood in winter time, and all luxuries befitting the
state of a marquis in a luxurious age and country. The fashion of the last

Louis but one, of the line that was never to break—the fourteenth Louis—
was conspicuous in their rich furniture; but, it was diversified by many
objects that were illustrations of old pages in the history of France.
A supper-table was laid for two, in the third of the rooms; a round room,
in one of the chateau’s four extinguisher-topped towers. A small lofty room,
with its window wide open, and the wooden jalousie-blinds closed, so that
the dark night only showed in slight horizontal lines of black, alternating
with their broad lines of stone colour.
“My nephew,” said the Marquis, glancing at the supper preparation;
“they said he was not arrived.”
Nor was he; but, he had been expected with Monseigneur.
“Ah! It is not probable he will arrive to-night; nevertheless, leave the
table as it is. I shall be ready in a quarter of an hour.”
In a quarter of an hour Monseigneur was ready, and sat down alone to his
sumptuous and choice supper. His chair was opposite to the window, and he
had taken his soup, and was raising his glass of Bordeaux to his lips, when
he put it down.
“What is that?” he calmly asked, looking with attention at the horizontal
lines of black and stone colour.
“Monseigneur? That?”
“Outside the blinds. Open the blinds.”
It was done.
“Well?”
“Monseigneur, it is nothing. The trees and the night are all that are here.”
The servant who spoke, had thrown the blinds wide, had looked out into
the vacant darkness, and stood with that blank behind him, looking round
for instructions.
“Good,” said the imperturbable master. “Close them again.”
That was done too, and the Marquis went on with his supper. He was half
way through it, when he again stopped with his glass in his hand, hearing
the sound of wheels. It came on briskly, and came up to the front of the
chateau.
“Ask who is arrived.”

It was the nephew of Monseigneur. He had been some few leagues
behind Monseigneur, early in the afternoon. He had diminished the distance
rapidly, but not so rapidly as to come up with Monseigneur on the road. He
had heard of Monseigneur, at the posting-houses, as being before him.
He was to be told (said Monseigneur) that supper awaited him then and
there, and that he was prayed to come to it. In a little while he came. He had
been known in England as Charles Darnay.
Monseigneur received him in a courtly manner, but they did not shake
hands.
“You left Paris yesterday, sir?” he said to Monseigneur, as he took his
seat at table.
“Yesterday. And you?”
“I come direct.”
“From London?”
“Yes.”
“You have been a long time coming,” said the Marquis, with a smile.
“On the contrary; I come direct.”
“Pardon me! I mean, not a long time on the journey; a long time
intending the journey.”
“I have been detained by”—the nephew stopped a moment in his answer
—“various business.”
“Without doubt,” said the polished uncle.
So long as a servant was present, no other words passed between them.
When coffee had been served and they were alone together, the nephew,
looking at the uncle and meeting the eyes of the face that was like a fine
mask, opened a conversation.
“I have come back, sir, as you anticipate, pursuing the object that took
me away. It carried me into great and unexpected peril; but it is a sacred
object, and if it had carried me to death I hope it would have sustained me.”
“Not to death,” said the uncle; “it is not necessary to say, to death.”
“I doubt, sir,” returned the nephew, “whether, if it had carried me to the
utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me there.”

The deepened marks in the nose, and the lengthening of the fine straight
lines in the cruel face, looked ominous as to that; the uncle made a graceful
gesture of protest, which was so clearly a slight form of good breeding that
it was not reassuring.
“Indeed, sir,” pursued the nephew, “for anything I know, you may have
expressly worked to give a more suspicious appearance to the suspicious
circumstances that surrounded me.”
“No, no, no,” said the uncle, pleasantly.
“But, however that may be,” resumed the nephew, glancing at him with
deep distrust, “I know that your diplomacy would stop me by any means,
and would know no scruple as to means.”
“My friend, I told you so,” said the uncle, with a fine pulsation in the two
marks. “Do me the favour to recall that I told you so, long ago.”
“I recall it.”
“Thank you,” said the Marquis—very sweetly indeed.
His tone lingered in the air, almost like the tone of a musical instrument.
“In effect, sir,” pursued the nephew, “I believe it to be at once your bad
fortune, and my good fortune, that has kept me out of a prison in France
here.”
“I do not quite understand,” returned the uncle, sipping his coffee. “Dare
I ask you to explain?”
“I believe that if you were not in disgrace with the Court, and had not
been overshadowed by that cloud for years past, a letter de cachet would
have sent me to some fortress indefinitely.”
“It is possible,” said the uncle, with great calmness. “For the honour of
the family, I could even resolve to incommode you to that extent. Pray
excuse me!”
“I perceive that, happily for me, the Reception of the day before
yesterday was, as usual, a cold one,” observed the nephew.
“I would not say happily, my friend,” returned the uncle, with refined
politeness; “I would not be sure of that. A good opportunity for
consideration, surrounded by the advantages of solitude, might influence
your destiny to far greater advantage than you influence it for yourself. But
it is useless to discuss the question. I am, as you say, at a disadvantage.

These little instruments of correction, these gentle aids to the power and
honour of families, these slight favours that might so incommode you, are
only to be obtained now by interest and importunity. They are sought by so
many, and they are granted (comparatively) to so few! It used not to be so,
but France in all such things is changed for the worse. Our not remote
ancestors held the right of life and death over the surrounding vulgar. From
this room, many such dogs have been taken out to be hanged; in the next
room (my bedroom), one fellow, to our knowledge, was poniarded on the
spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter—his
daughter? We have lost many privileges; a new philosophy has become the
mode; and the assertion of our station, in these days, might (I do not go so
far as to say would, but might) cause us real inconvenience. All very bad,
very bad!”
The Marquis took a gentle little pinch of snuff, and shook his head; as
elegantly despondent as he could becomingly be of a country still
containing himself, that great means of regeneration.
“We have so asserted our station, both in the old time and in the modern
time also,” said the nephew, gloomily, “that I believe our name to be more
detested than any name in France.”
“Let us hope so,” said the uncle. “Detestation of the high is the
involuntary homage of the low.”
“There is not,” pursued the nephew, in his former tone, “a face I can look
at, in all this country round about us, which looks at me with any deference
on it but the dark deference of fear and slavery.”
“A compliment,” said the Marquis, “to the grandeur of the family,
merited by the manner in which the family has sustained its grandeur. Hah!”
And he took another gentle little pinch of snuff, and lightly crossed his legs.
But, when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table, covered his eyes
thoughtfully and dejectedly with his hand, the fine mask looked at him
sideways with a stronger concentration of keenness, closeness, and dislike,
than was comportable with its wearer’s assumption of indifference.
“Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear
and slavery, my friend,” observed the Marquis, “will keep the dogs obedient
to the whip, as long as this roof,” looking up to it, “shuts out the sky.”

That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the
chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as they too
were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to him that
night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from the ghastly, fire-
charred, plunder-wrecked rains. As for the roof he vaunted, he might have
found that shutting out the sky in a new way—to wit, for ever, from the
eyes of the bodies into which its lead was fired, out of the barrels of a
hundred thousand muskets.
“Meanwhile,” said the Marquis, “I will preserve the honour and repose of
the family, if you will not. But you must be fatigued. Shall we terminate our
conference for the night?”
“A moment more.”
“An hour, if you please.”
“Sir,” said the nephew, “we have done wrong, and are reaping the fruits
of wrong.”
“We have done wrong?” repeated the Marquis, with an inquiring smile,
and delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then to himself.
“Our family; our honourable family, whose honour is of so much account
to both of us, in such different ways. Even in my father’s time, we did a
world of wrong, injuring every human creature who came between us and
our pleasure, whatever it was. Why need I speak of my father’s time, when
it is equally yours? Can I separate my father’s twin-brother, joint inheritor,
and next successor, from himself?”
“Death has done that!” said the Marquis.
“And has left me,” answered the nephew, “bound to a system that is
frightful to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it; seeking to execute the
last request of my dear mother’s lips, and obey the last look of my dear
mother’s eyes, which implored me to have mercy and to redress; and
tortured by seeking assistance and power in vain.”
“Seeking them from me, my nephew,” said the Marquis, touching him on
the breast with his forefinger—they were now standing by the hearth—“you
will for ever seek them in vain, be assured.”
Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of his face, was cruelly,
craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking quietly at his
nephew, with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again he touched him on the

breast, as though his finger were the fine point of a small sword, with
which, in delicate finesse, he ran him through the body, and said,
“My friend, I will die, perpetuating the system under which I have lived.”
When he had said it, he took a culminating pinch of snuff, and put his
box in his pocket.
“Better to be a rational creature,” he added then, after ringing a small bell
on the table, “and accept your natural destiny. But you are lost, Monsieur
Charles, I see.”
“This property and France are lost to me,” said the nephew, sadly; “I
renounce them.”
“Are they both yours to renounce? France may be, but is the property? It
is scarcely worth mentioning; but, is it yet?”
“I had no intention, in the words I used, to claim it yet. If it passed to me
from you, to-morrow—”
“Which I have the vanity to hope is not probable.”
“—or twenty years hence—”
“You do me too much honour,” said the Marquis; “still, I prefer that
supposition.”
“—I would abandon it, and live otherwise and elsewhere. It is little to
relinquish. What is it but a wilderness of misery and ruin!”
“Hah!” said the Marquis, glancing round the luxurious room.
“To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity, under the sky,
and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement,
extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering.”
“Hah!” said the Marquis again, in a well-satisfied manner.
“If it ever becomes mine, it shall be put into some hands better qualified
to free it slowly (if such a thing is possible) from the weight that drags it
down, so that the miserable people who cannot leave it and who have been
long wrung to the last point of endurance, may, in another generation, suffer
less; but it is not for me. There is a curse on it, and on all this land.”
“And you?” said the uncle. “Forgive my curiosity; do you, under your
new philosophy, graciously intend to live?”
“I must do, to live, what others of my countrymen, even with nobility at
their backs, may have to do some day—work.”

“In England, for example?”
“Yes. The family honour, sir, is safe from me in this country. The family
name can suffer from me in no other, for I bear it in no other.”
The ringing of the bell had caused the adjoining bed-chamber to be
lighted. It now shone brightly, through the door of communication. The
Marquis looked that way, and listened for the retreating step of his valet.
“England is very attractive to you, seeing how indifferently you have
prospered there,” he observed then, turning his calm face to his nephew
with a smile.
“I have already said, that for my prospering there, I am sensible I may be
indebted to you, sir. For the rest, it is my Refuge.”
“They say, those boastful English, that it is the Refuge of many. You
know a compatriot who has found a Refuge there? A Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“With a daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” said the Marquis. “You are fatigued. Good night!”
As he bent his head in his most courtly manner, there was a secrecy in his
smiling face, and he conveyed an air of mystery to those words, which
struck the eyes and ears of his nephew forcibly. At the same time, the thin
straight lines of the setting of the eyes, and the thin straight lips, and the
markings in the nose, curved with a sarcasm that looked handsomely
diabolic.
“Yes,” repeated the Marquis. “A Doctor with a daughter. Yes. So
commences the new philosophy! You are fatigued. Good night!”
It would have been of as much avail to interrogate any stone face outside
the chateau as to interrogate that face of his. The nephew looked at him, in
vain, in passing on to the door.
“Good night!” said the uncle. “I look to the pleasure of seeing you again
in the morning. Good repose! Light Monsieur my nephew to his chamber
there!—And burn Monsieur my nephew in his bed, if you will,” he added to
himself, before he rang his little bell again, and summoned his valet to his
own bedroom.

The valet come and gone, Monsieur the Marquis walked to and fro in his
loose chamber-robe, to prepare himself gently for sleep, that hot still night.
Rustling about the room, his softly-slippered feet making no noise on the
floor, he moved like a refined tiger:—looked like some enchanted marquis
of the impenitently wicked sort, in story, whose periodical change into tiger
form was either just going off, or just coming on.
He moved from end to end of his voluptuous bedroom, looking again at
the scraps of the day’s journey that came unbidden into his mind; the slow
toil up the hill at sunset, the setting sun, the descent, the mill, the prison on
the crag, the little village in the hollow, the peasants at the fountain, and the
mender of roads with his blue cap pointing out the chain under the carriage.
That fountain suggested the Paris fountain, the little bundle lying on the
step, the women bending over it, and the tall man with his arms up, crying,
“Dead!”
“I am cool now,” said Monsieur the Marquis, “and may go to bed.”
So, leaving only one light burning on the large hearth, he let his thin
gauze curtains fall around him, and heard the night break its silence with a
long sigh as he composed himself to sleep.
The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black night for
three heavy hours; for three heavy hours, the horses in the stables rattled at
their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl made a noise with very little
resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to the owl by men-
poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say
what is set down for them.
For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the chateau, lion and human,
stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the landscape, dead
darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust on all the roads. The
burial-place had got to the pass that its little heaps of poor grass were
undistinguishable from one another; the figure on the Cross might have
come down, for anything that could be seen of it. In the village, taxers and
taxed were fast asleep. Dreaming, perhaps, of banquets, as the starved
usually do, and of ease and rest, as the driven slave and the yoked ox may,
its lean inhabitants slept soundly, and were fed and freed.
The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard, and the fountain
at the chateau dropped unseen and unheard—both melting away, like the
minutes that were falling from the spring of Time—through three dark

hours. Then, the grey water of both began to be ghostly in the light, and the
eyes of the stone faces of the chateau were opened.
Lighter and lighter, until at last the sun touched the tops of the still trees,
and poured its radiance over the hill. In the glow, the water of the chateau
fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the stone faces crimsoned. The carol
of the birds was loud and high, and, on the weather-beaten sill of the great
window of the bed-chamber of Monsieur the Marquis, one little bird sang
its sweetest song with all its might. At this, the nearest stone face seemed to
stare amazed, and, with open mouth and dropped under-jaw, looked awe-
stricken.
Now, the sun was full up, and movement began in the village. Casement
windows opened, crazy doors were unbarred, and people came forth
shivering—chilled, as yet, by the new sweet air. Then began the rarely
lightened toil of the day among the village population. Some, to the
fountain; some, to the fields; men and women here, to dig and delve; men
and women there, to see to the poor live stock, and lead the bony cows out,
to such pasture as could be found by the roadside. In the church and at the
Cross, a kneeling figure or two; attendant on the latter prayers, the led cow,
trying for a breakfast among the weeds at its foot.
The chateau awoke later, as became its quality, but awoke gradually and
surely. First, the lonely boar-spears and knives of the chase had been
reddened as of old; then, had gleamed trenchant in the morning sunshine;
now, doors and windows were thrown open, horses in their stables looked
round over their shoulders at the light and freshness pouring in at doorways,
leaves sparkled and rustled at iron-grated windows, dogs pulled hard at
their chains, and reared impatient to be loosed.
All these trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life, and the return of
morning. Surely, not so the ringing of the great bell of the chateau, nor the
running up and down the stairs; nor the hurried figures on the terrace; nor
the booting and tramping here and there and everywhere, nor the quick
saddling of horses and riding away?
What winds conveyed this hurry to the grizzled mender of roads, already
at work on the hill-top beyond the village, with his day’s dinner (not much
to carry) lying in a bundle that it was worth no crow’s while to peck at, on a
heap of stones? Had the birds, carrying some grains of it to a distance,
dropped one over him as they sow chance seeds? Whether or no, the

mender of roads ran, on the sultry morning, as if for his life, down the hill,
knee-high in dust, and never stopped till he got to the fountain.
All the people of the village were at the fountain, standing about in their
depressed manner, and whispering low, but showing no other emotions than
grim curiosity and surprise. The led cows, hastily brought in and tethered to
anything that would hold them, were looking stupidly on, or lying down
chewing the cud of nothing particularly repaying their trouble, which they
had picked up in their interrupted saunter. Some of the people of the
chateau, and some of those of the posting-house, and all the taxing
authorities, were armed more or less, and were crowded on the other side of
the little street in a purposeless way, that was highly fraught with nothing.
Already, the mender of roads had penetrated into the midst of a group of
fifty particular friends, and was smiting himself in the breast with his blue
cap. What did all this portend, and what portended the swift hoisting-up of
Monsieur Gabelle behind a servant on horseback, and the conveying away
of the said Gabelle (double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop, like a
new version of the German ballad of Leonora?
It portended that there was one stone face too many, up at the chateau.
The Gorgon had surveyed the building again in the night, and had added
the one stone face wanting; the stone face for which it had waited through
about two hundred years.
It lay back on the pillow of Monsieur the Marquis. It was like a fine
mask, suddenly startled, made angry, and petrified. Driven home into the
heart of the stone figure attached to it, was a knife. Round its hilt was a frill
of paper, on which was scrawled:
“Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques.”

CHAPTER X.
Two Promises

M
ore months, to the number of twelve, had come and gone, and Mr.
Charles Darnay was established in England as a higher teacher of
the French language who was conversant with French literature.
In this age, he would have been a Professor; in that age, he was a Tutor. He
read with young men who could find any leisure and interest for the study
of a living tongue spoken all over the world, and he cultivated a taste for its
stores of knowledge and fancy. He could write of them, besides, in sound
English, and render them into sound English. Such masters were not at that
time easily found; Princes that had been, and Kings that were to be, were
not yet of the Teacher class, and no ruined nobility had dropped out of
Tellson’s ledgers, to turn cooks and carpenters. As a tutor, whose
attainments made the student’s way unusually pleasant and profitable, and
as an elegant translator who brought something to his work besides mere
dictionary knowledge, young Mr. Darnay soon became known and
encouraged. He was well acquainted, more-over, with the circumstances of
his country, and those were of ever-growing interest. So, with great
perseverance and untiring industry, he prospered.
In London, he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold, nor to
lie on beds of roses; if he had had any such exalted expectation, he would
not have prospered. He had expected labour, and he found it, and did it and
made the best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted.
A certain portion of his time was passed at Cambridge, where he read
with undergraduates as a sort of tolerated smuggler who drove a contraband
trade in European languages, instead of conveying Greek and Latin through
the Custom-house. The rest of his time he passed in London.
Now, from the days when it was always summer in Eden, to these days
when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of a man has

invariably gone one way—Charles Darnay’s way—the way of the love of a
woman.
He had loved Lucie Manette from the hour of his danger. He had never
heard a sound so sweet and dear as the sound of her compassionate voice;
he had never seen a face so tenderly beautiful, as hers when it was
confronted with his own on the edge of the grave that had been dug for him.
But, he had not yet spoken to her on the subject; the assassination at the
deserted chateau far away beyond the heaving water and the long, long,
dusty roads—the solid stone chateau which had itself become the mere mist
of a dream—had been done a year, and he had never yet, by so much as a
single spoken word, disclosed to her the state of his heart.
That he had his reasons for this, he knew full well. It was again a summer
day when, lately arrived in London from his college occupation, he turned
into the quiet corner in Soho, bent on seeking an opportunity of opening his
mind to Doctor Manette. It was the close of the summer day, and he knew
Lucie to be out with Miss Pross.
He found the Doctor reading in his arm-chair at a window. The energy
which had at once supported him under his old sufferings and aggravated
their sharpness, had been gradually restored to him. He was now a very
energetic man indeed, with great firmness of purpose, strength of
resolution, and vigour of action. In his recovered energy he was sometimes
a little fitful and sudden, as he had at first been in the exercise of his other
recovered faculties; but, this had never been frequently observable, and had
grown more and more rare.
He studied much, slept little, sustained a great deal of fatigue with ease,
and was equably cheerful. To him, now entered Charles Darnay, at sight of
whom he laid aside his book and held out his hand.
“Charles Darnay! I rejoice to see you. We have been counting on your
return these three or four days past. Mr. Stryver and Sydney Carton were
both here yesterday, and both made you out to be more than due.”
“I am obliged to them for their interest in the matter,” he answered, a
little coldly as to them, though very warmly as to the Doctor. “Miss Manette
—”
“Is well,” said the Doctor, as he stopped short, “and your return will
delight us all. She has gone out on some household matters, but will soon
be home.”

“Doctor Manette, I knew she was from home. I took the opportunity of
her being from home, to beg to speak to you.”
There was a blank silence.
“Yes?” said the Doctor, with evident constraint. “Bring your chair here,
and speak on.”
He complied as to the chair, but appeared to find the speaking on less
easy.
“I have had the happiness, Doctor Manette, of being so intimate here,” so
he at length began, “for some year and a half, that I hope the topic on which
I am about to touch may not—”
He was stayed by the Doctor’s putting out his hand to stop him. When he
had kept it so a little while, he said, drawing it back:
“Is Lucie the topic?”
“She is.”
“It is hard for me to speak of her at any time. It is very hard for me to
hear her spoken of in that tone of yours, Charles Darnay.”
“It is a tone of fervent admiration, true homage, and deep love, Doctor
Manette!” he said deferentially.
There was another blank silence before her father rejoined:
“I believe it. I do you justice; I believe it.”
His constraint was so manifest, and it was so manifest, too, that it
originated in an unwillingness to approach the subject, that Charles Darnay
hesitated.
“Shall I go on, sir?”
Another blank.
“Yes, go on.”
“You anticipate what I would say, though you cannot know how earnestly
I say it, how earnestly I feel it, without knowing my secret heart, and the
hopes and fears and anxieties with which it has long been laden. Dear
Doctor Manette, I love your daughter fondly, dearly, disinterestedly,
devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love her. You have loved
yourself; let your old love speak for me!”

The Doctor sat with his face turned away, and his eyes bent on the
ground. At the last words, he stretched out his hand again, hurriedly, and
cried:
“Not that, sir! Let that be! I adjure you, do not recall that!”
His cry was so like a cry of actual pain, that it rang in Charles Darnay’s
ears long after he had ceased. He motioned with the hand he had extended,
and it seemed to be an appeal to Darnay to pause. The latter so received it,
and remained silent.
“I ask your pardon,” said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, after some
moments. “I do not doubt your loving Lucie; you may be satisfied of it.”
He turned towards him in his chair, but did not look at him, or raise his
eyes. His chin dropped upon his hand, and his white hair overshadowed his
face:
“Have you spoken to Lucie?”
“No.”
“Nor written?”
“Never.”
“It would be ungenerous to affect not to know that your self-denial is to
be referred to your consideration for her father. Her father thanks you.”
He offered his hand; but his eyes did not go with it.
“I know,” said Darnay, respectfully, “how can I fail to know, Doctor
Manette, I who have seen you together from day to day, that between you
and Miss Manette there is an affection so unusual, so touching, so
belonging to the circumstances in which it has been nurtured, that it can
have few parallels, even in the tenderness between a father and child. I
know, Doctor Manette—how can I fail to know—that, mingled with the
affection and duty of a daughter who has become a woman, there is, in her
heart, towards you, all the love and reliance of infancy itself. I know that, as
in her childhood she had no parent, so she is now devoted to you with all
the constancy and fervour of her present years and character, united to the
trustfulness and attachment of the early days in which you were lost to her. I
know perfectly well that if you had been restored to her from the world
beyond this life, you could hardly be invested, in her sight, with a more
sacred character than that in which you are always with her. I know that
when she is clinging to you, the hands of baby, girl, and woman, all in one,

are round your neck. I know that in loving you she sees and loves her
mother at her own age, sees and loves you at my age, loves her mother
broken-hearted, loves you through your dreadful trial and in your blessed
restoration. I have known this, night and day, since I have known you in
your home.”
Her father sat silent, with his face bent down. His breathing was a little
quickened; but he repressed all other signs of agitation.
“Dear Doctor Manette, always knowing this, always seeing her and you
with this hallowed light about you, I have forborne, and forborne, as long as
it was in the nature of man to do it. I have felt, and do even now feel, that to
bring my love—even mine—between you, is to touch your history with
something not quite so good as itself. But I love her. Heaven is my witness
that I love her!”
“I believe it,” answered her father, mournfully. “I have thought so before
now. I believe it.”
“But, do not believe,” said Darnay, upon whose ear the mournful voice
struck with a reproachful sound, “that if my fortune were so cast as that,
being one day so happy as to make her my wife, I must at any time put any
separation between her and you, I could or would breathe a word of what I
now say. Besides that I should know it to be hopeless, I should know it to
be a baseness. If I had any such possibility, even at a remote distance of
years, harboured in my thoughts, and hidden in my heart—if it ever had
been there—if it ever could be there—I could not now touch this honoured
hand.”
He laid his own upon it as he spoke.
“No, dear Doctor Manette. Like you, a voluntary exile from France; like
you, driven from it by its distractions, oppressions, and miseries; like you,
striving to live away from it by my own exertions, and trusting in a happier
future; I look only to sharing your fortunes, sharing your life and home, and
being faithful to you to the death. Not to divide with Lucie her privilege as
your child, companion, and friend; but to come in aid of it, and bind her
closer to you, if such a thing can be.”
His touch still lingered on her father’s hand. Answering the touch for a
moment, but not coldly, her father rested his hands upon the arms of his
chair, and looked up for the first time since the beginning of the conference.

A struggle was evidently in his face; a struggle with that occasional look
which had a tendency in it to dark doubt and dread.
“You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay, that I thank
you with all my heart, and will open all my heart—or nearly so. Have you
any reason to believe that Lucie loves you?”
“None. As yet, none.”
“Is it the immediate object of this confidence, that you may at once
ascertain that, with my knowledge?”
“Not even so. I might not have the hopefulness to do it for weeks; I might
(mistaken or not mistaken) have that hopefulness to-morrow.”
“Do you seek any guidance from me?”
“I ask none, sir. But I have thought it possible that you might have it in
your power, if you should deem it right, to give me some.”
“Do you seek any promise from me?”
“I do seek that.”
“What is it?”
“I well understand that, without you, I could have no hope. I well
understand that, even if Miss Manette held me at this moment in her
innocent heart—do not think I have the presumption to assume so much—I
could retain no place in it against her love for her father.”
“If that be so, do you see what, on the other hand, is involved in it?”
“I understand equally well, that a word from her father in any suitor’s
favour, would outweigh herself and all the world. For which reason, Doctor
Manette,” said Darnay, modestly but firmly, “I would not ask that word, to
save my life.”
“I am sure of it. Charles Darnay, mysteries arise out of close love, as well
as out of wide division; in the former case, they are subtle and delicate, and
difficult to penetrate. My daughter Lucie is, in this one respect, such a
mystery to me; I can make no guess at the state of her heart.”
“May I ask, sir, if you think she is—” As he hesitated, her father supplied
the rest.
“Is sought by any other suitor?”
“It is what I meant to say.”

Her father considered a little before he answered:
“You have seen Mr. Carton here, yourself. Mr. Stryver is here too,
occasionally. If it be at all, it can only be by one of these.”
“Or both,” said Darnay.
“I had not thought of both; I should not think either, likely. You want a
promise from me. Tell me what it is.”
“It is, that if Miss Manette should bring to you at any time, on her own
part, such a confidence as I have ventured to lay before you, you will bear
testimony to what I have said, and to your belief in it. I hope you may be
able to think so well of me, as to urge no influence against me. I say nothing
more of my stake in this; this is what I ask. The condition on which I ask it,
and which you have an undoubted right to require, I will observe
immediately.”
“I give the promise,” said the Doctor, “without any condition. I believe
your object to be, purely and truthfully, as you have stated it. I believe your
intention is to perpetuate, and not to weaken, the ties between me and my
other and far dearer self. If she should ever tell me that you are essential to
her perfect happiness, I will give her to you. If there were—Charles Darnay,
if there were—”
The young man had taken his hand gratefully; their hands were joined as
the Doctor spoke:
“—any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything whatsoever,
new or old, against the man she really loved—the direct responsibility
thereof not lying on his head—they should all be obliterated for her sake.
She is everything to me; more to me than suffering, more to me than wrong,
more to me—Well! This is idle talk.”
So strange was the way in which he faded into silence, and so strange his
fixed look when he had ceased to speak, that Darnay felt his own hand turn
cold in the hand that slowly released and dropped it.
“You said something to me,” said Doctor Manette, breaking into a smile.
“What was it you said to me?”
He was at a loss how to answer, until he remembered having spoken of a
condition. Relieved as his mind reverted to that, he answered:
“Your confidence in me ought to be returned with full confidence on my
part. My present name, though but slightly changed from my mother’s, is

not, as you will remember, my own. I wish to tell you what that is, and why
I am in England.”
“Stop!” said the Doctor of Beauvais.
“I wish it, that I may the better deserve your confidence, and have no
secret from you.”
“Stop!”
For an instant, the Doctor even had his two hands at his ears; for another
instant, even had his two hands laid on Darnay’s lips.
“Tell me when I ask you, not now. If your suit should prosper, if Lucie
should love you, you shall tell me on your marriage morning. Do you
promise?”
“Willingly.
“Give me your hand. She will be home directly, and it is better she
should not see us together to-night. Go! God bless you!”
It was dark when Charles Darnay left him, and it was an hour later and
darker when Lucie came home; she hurried into the room alone—for Miss
Pross had gone straight up-stairs—and was surprised to find his reading-
chair empty.
“My father!” she called to him. “Father dear!”
Nothing was said in answer, but she heard a low hammering sound in his
bedroom. Passing lightly across the intermediate room, she looked in at his
door and came running back frightened, crying to herself, with her blood all
chilled, “What shall I do! What shall I do!”
Her uncertainty lasted but a moment; she hurried back, and tapped at his
door, and softly called to him. The noise ceased at the sound of her voice,
and he presently came out to her, and they walked up and down together for
a long time.
She came down from her bed, to look at him in his sleep that night. He
slept heavily, and his tray of shoemaking tools, and his old unfinished work,
were all as usual.

CHAPTER XI.
A Companion Picture

S
ydney,” said Mr. Stryver, on that self-same night, or morning, to his
jackal; “mix another bowl of punch; I have something to say to you.”
Sydney had been working double tides that night, and the night
before, and the night before that, and a good many nights in succession,
making a grand clearance among Mr. Stryver’s papers before the setting in
of the long vacation. The clearance was effected at last; the Stryver arrears
were handsomely fetched up; everything was got rid of until November
should come with its fogs atmospheric, and fogs legal, and bring grist to the
mill again.
Sydney was none the livelier and none the soberer for so much
application. It had taken a deal of extra wet-towelling to pull him through
the night; a correspondingly extra quantity of wine had preceded the
towelling; and he was in a very damaged condition, as he now pulled his
turban off and threw it into the basin in which he had steeped it at intervals
for the last six hours.
“Are you mixing that other bowl of punch?” said Stryver the portly, with
his hands in his waistband, glancing round from the sofa where he lay on
his back.
“I am.”
“Now, look here! I am going to tell you something that will rather
surprise you, and that perhaps will make you think me not quite as shrewd
as you usually do think me. I intend to marry.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. And not for money. What do you say now?”
“I don’t feel disposed to say much. Who is she?”
“Guess.”

“Do I know her?”
“Guess.”
“I am not going to guess, at five o’clock in the morning, with my brains
frying and sputtering in my head. If you want me to guess, you must ask me
to dinner.”
“Well then, I’ll tell you,” said Stryver, coming slowly into a sitting
posture. “Sydney, I rather despair of making myself intelligible to you,
because you are such an insensible dog.”
“And you,” returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, “are such a
sensitive and poetical spirit—”
“Come!” rejoined Stryver, laughing boastfully, “though I don’t prefer any
claim to being the soul of Romance (for I hope I know better), still I am a
tenderer sort of fellow than you.”
“You are a luckier, if you mean that.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean I am a man of more—more—”
“Say gallantry, while you are about it,” suggested Carton.
“Well! I’ll say gallantry. My meaning is that I am a man,” said Stryver,
inflating himself at his friend as he made the punch, “who cares more to be
agreeable, who takes more pains to be agreeable, who knows better how to
be agreeable, in a woman’s society, than you do.”
“Go on,” said Sydney Carton.
“No; but before I go on,” said Stryver, shaking his head in his bullying
way, “I’ll have this out with you. You’ve been at Doctor Manette’s house as
much as I have, or more than I have. Why, I have been ashamed of your
moroseness there! Your manners have been of that silent and sullen and
hangdog kind, that, upon my life and soul, I have been ashamed of you,
Sydney!”
“It should be very beneficial to a man in your practice at the bar, to be
ashamed of anything,” returned Sydney; “you ought to be much obliged to
me.”
“You shall not get off in that way,” rejoined Stryver, shouldering the
rejoinder at him; “no, Sydney, it’s my duty to tell you—and I tell you to
your face to do you good—that you are a devilish ill-conditioned fellow in
that sort of society. You are a disagreeable fellow.”

Sydney drank a bumper of the punch he had made, and laughed.
“Look at me!” said Stryver, squaring himself; “I have less need to make
myself agreeable than you have, being more independent in circumstances.
Why do I do it?”
“I never saw you do it yet,” muttered Carton.
“I do it because it’s politic; I do it on principle. And look at me! I get on.”
“You don’t get on with your account of your matrimonial intentions,”
answered Carton, with a careless air; “I wish you would keep to that. As to
me—will you never understand that I am incorrigible?”
He asked the question with some appearance of scorn.
“You have no business to be incorrigible,” was his friend’s answer,
delivered in no very soothing tone.
“I have no business to be, at all, that I know of,” said Sydney Carton.
“Who is the lady?”
“Now, don’t let my announcement of the name make you uncomfortable,
Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, preparing him with ostentatious friendliness for
the disclosure he was about to make, “because I know you don’t mean half
you say; and if you meant it all, it would be of no importance. I make this
little preface, because you once mentioned the young lady to me in slighting
terms.”
“I did?”
“Certainly; and in these chambers.”
Sydney Carton looked at his punch and looked at his complacent friend;
drank his punch and looked at his complacent friend.
“You made mention of the young lady as a golden-haired doll. The young
lady is Miss Manette. If you had been a fellow of any sensitiveness or
delicacy of feeling in that kind of way, Sydney, I might have been a little
resentful of your employing such a designation; but you are not. You want
that sense altogether; therefore I am no more annoyed when I think of the
expression, than I should be annoyed by a man’s opinion of a picture of
mine, who had no eye for pictures: or of a piece of music of mine, who had
no ear for music.”
Sydney Carton drank the punch at a great rate; drank it by bumpers,
looking at his friend.

“Now you know all about it, Syd,” said Mr. Stryver. “I don’t care about
fortune: she is a charming creature, and I have made up my mind to please
myself: on the whole, I think I can afford to please myself. She will have in
me a man already pretty well off, and a rapidly rising man, and a man of
some distinction: it is a piece of good fortune for her, but she is worthy of
good fortune. Are you astonished?”
Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, “Why should I be astonished?”
“You approve?”
Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, “Why should I not approve?”
“Well!” said his friend Stryver, “you take it more easily than I fancied
you would, and are less mercenary on my behalf than I thought you would
be; though, to be sure, you know well enough by this time that your ancient
chum is a man of a pretty strong will. Yes, Sydney, I have had enough of
this style of life, with no other as a change from it; I feel that it is a pleasant
thing for a man to have a home when he feels inclined to go to it (when he
doesn’t, he can stay away), and I feel that Miss Manette will tell well in any
station, and will always do me credit. So I have made up my mind. And
now, Sydney, old boy, I want to say a word to you about your prospects.
You are in a bad way, you know; you really are in a bad way. You don’t
know the value of money, you live hard, you’ll knock up one of these days,
and be ill and poor; you really ought to think about a nurse.”
The prosperous patronage with which he said it, made him look twice as
big as he was, and four times as offensive.
“Now, let me recommend you,” pursued Stryver, “to look it in the face. I
have looked it in the face, in my different way; look it in the face, you, in
your different way. Marry. Provide somebody to take care of you. Never
mind your having no enjoyment of women’s society, nor understanding of
it, nor tact for it. Find out somebody. Find out some respectable woman
with a little property—somebody in the landlady way, or lodging-letting
way—and marry her, against a rainy day. That’s the kind of thing for you.
Now think of it, Sydney.”
“I’ll think of it,” said Sydney.

CHAPTER XII.
The Fellow of Delicacy

M
r. Stryver having made up his mind to that magnanimous bestowal
of good fortune on the Doctor’s daughter, resolved to make her
happiness known to her before he left town for the Long Vacation.
After some mental debating of the point, he came to the conclusion that it
would be as well to get all the preliminaries done with, and they could then
arrange at their leisure whether he should give her his hand a week or two
before Michaelmas Term, or in the little Christmas vacation between it and
Hilary.
As to the strength of his case, he had not a doubt about it, but clearly saw
his way to the verdict. Argued with the jury on substantial worldly grounds
—the only grounds ever worth taking into account—it was a plain case, and
had not a weak spot in it. He called himself for the plaintiff, there was no
getting over his evidence, the counsel for the defendant threw up his brief,
and the jury did not even turn to consider. After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was
satisfied that no plainer case could be.
Accordingly, Mr. Stryver inaugurated the Long Vacation with a formal
proposal to take Miss Manette to Vauxhall Gardens; that failing, to
Ranelagh; that unaccountably failing too, it behoved him to present himself
in Soho, and there declare his noble mind.
Towards Soho, therefore, Mr. Stryver shouldered his way from the
Temple, while the bloom of the Long Vacation’s infancy was still upon it.
Anybody who had seen him projecting himself into Soho while he was yet
on Saint Dunstan’s side of Temple Bar, bursting in his full-blown way along
the pavement, to the jostlement of all weaker people, might have seen how
safe and strong he was.
His way taking him past Tellson’s, and he both banking at Tellson’s and
knowing Mr. Lorry as the intimate friend of the Manettes, it entered Mr.
Stryver’s mind to enter the bank, and reveal to Mr. Lorry the brightness of

the Soho horizon. So, he pushed open the door with the weak rattle in its
throat, stumbled down the two steps, got past the two ancient cashiers, and
shouldered himself into the musty back closet where Mr. Lorry sat at great
books ruled for figures, with perpendicular iron bars to his window as if
that were ruled for figures too, and everything under the clouds were a sum.
“Halloa!” said Mr. Stryver. “How do you do? I hope you are well!”
It was Stryver’s grand peculiarity that he always seemed too big for any
place, or space. He was so much too big for Tellson’s, that old clerks in
distant corners looked up with looks of remonstrance, as though he
squeezed them against the wall. The House itself, magnificently reading the
paper quite in the far-off perspective, lowered displeased, as if the Stryver
head had been butted into its responsible waistcoat.
The discreet Mr. Lorry said, in a sample tone of the voice he would
recommend under the circumstances, “How do you do, Mr. Stryver? How
do you do, sir?” and shook hands. There was a peculiarity in his manner of
shaking hands, always to be seen in any clerk at Tellson’s who shook hands
with a customer when the House pervaded the air. He shook in a self-
abnegating way, as one who shook for Tellson and Co.
“Can I do anything for you, Mr. Stryver?” asked Mr. Lorry, in his
business character.
“Why, no, thank you; this is a private visit to yourself, Mr. Lorry; I have
come for a private word.”
“Oh indeed!” said Mr. Lorry, bending down his ear, while his eye strayed
to the House afar off.
“I am going,” said Mr. Stryver, leaning his arms confidentially on the
desk: whereupon, although it was a large double one, there appeared to be
not half desk enough for him: “I am going to make an offer of myself in
marriage to your agreeable little friend, Miss Manette, Mr. Lorry.”
“Oh dear me!” cried Mr. Lorry, rubbing his chin, and looking at his
visitor dubiously.
“Oh dear me, sir?” repeated Stryver, drawing back. “Oh dear you, sir?
What may your meaning be, Mr. Lorry?”
“My meaning,” answered the man of business, “is, of course, friendly
and appreciative, and that it does you the greatest credit, and—in short, my
meaning is everything you could desire. But—really, you know, Mr. Stryver

—” Mr. Lorry paused, and shook his head at him in the oddest manner, as if
he were compelled against his will to add, internally, “you know there
really is so much too much of you!”
“Well!” said Stryver, slapping the desk with his contentious hand,
opening his eyes wider, and taking a long breath, “if I understand you, Mr.
Lorry, I’ll be hanged!”
Mr. Lorry adjusted his little wig at both ears as a means towards that end,
and bit the feather of a pen.
“D—n it all, sir!” said Stryver, staring at him, “am I not eligible?”
“Oh dear yes! Yes. Oh yes, you’re eligible!” said Mr. Lorry. “If you say
eligible, you are eligible.”

Original

“Am I not prosperous?” asked Stryver.
“Oh! if you come to prosperous, you are prosperous,” said Mr. Lorry.
“And advancing?”
“If you come to advancing you know,” said Mr. Lorry, delighted to be
able to make another admission, “nobody can doubt that.”
“Then what on earth is your meaning, Mr. Lorry?” demanded Stryver,
perceptibly crestfallen.
“Well! I—Were you going there now?” asked Mr. Lorry.

“Straight!” said Stryver, with a plump of his fist on the desk.
“Then I think I wouldn’t, if I was you.”
“Why?” said Stryver. “Now, I’ll put you in a corner,” forensically
shaking a forefinger at him. “You are a man of business and bound to have
a reason. State your reason. Why wouldn’t you go?”
“Because,” said Mr. Lorry, “I wouldn’t go on such an object without
having some cause to believe that I should succeed.”
“D—n me!” cried Stryver, “but this beats everything.”
Mr. Lorry glanced at the distant House, and glanced at the angry Stryver.
“Here’s a man of business—a man of years—a man of experience—in a
Bank,” said Stryver; “and having summed up three leading reasons for
complete success, he says there’s no reason at all! Says it with his head on!”
Mr. Stryver remarked upon the peculiarity as if it would have been
infinitely less remarkable if he had said it with his head off.
“When I speak of success, I speak of success with the young lady; and
when I speak of causes and reasons to make success probable, I speak of
causes and reasons that will tell as such with the young lady. The young
lady, my good sir,” said Mr. Lorry, mildly tapping the Stryver arm, “the
young lady. The young lady goes before all.”
“Then you mean to tell me, Mr. Lorry,” said Stryver, squaring his elbows,
“that it is your deliberate opinion that the young lady at present in question
is a mincing Fool?”
“Not exactly so. I mean to tell you, Mr. Stryver,” said Mr. Lorry,
reddening, “that I will hear no disrespectful word of that young lady from
any lips; and that if I knew any man—which I hope I do not—whose taste
was so coarse, and whose temper was so overbearing, that he could not
restrain himself from speaking disrespectfully of that young lady at this
desk, not even Tellson’s should prevent my giving him a piece of my
mind.”
The necessity of being angry in a suppressed tone had put Mr. Stryver’s
blood-vessels into a dangerous state when it was his turn to be angry; Mr.
Lorry’s veins, methodical as their courses could usually be, were in no
better state now it was his turn.
“That is what I mean to tell you, sir,” said Mr. Lorry. “Pray let there be
no mistake about it.”

Mr. Stryver sucked the end of a ruler for a little while, and then stood
hitting a tune out of his teeth with it, which probably gave him the
toothache. He broke the awkward silence by saying:
“This is something new to me, Mr. Lorry. You deliberately advise me not
to go up to Soho and offer myself—myself, Stryver of the King’s Bench
bar?”
“Do you ask me for my advice, Mr. Stryver?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Very good. Then I give it, and you have repeated it correctly.”
“And all I can say of it is,” laughed Stryver with a vexed laugh, “that this
—ha, ha!—beats everything past, present, and to come.”
“Now understand me,” pursued Mr. Lorry. “As a man of business, I am
not justified in saying anything about this matter, for, as a man of business,
I know nothing of it. But, as an old fellow, who has carried Miss Manette in
his arms, who is the trusted friend of Miss Manette and of her father too,
and who has a great affection for them both, I have spoken. The confidence
is not of my seeking, recollect. Now, you think I may not be right?”
“Not I!” said Stryver, whistling. “I can’t undertake to find third parties in
common sense; I can only find it for myself. I suppose sense in certain
quarters; you suppose mincing bread-and-butter nonsense. It’s new to me,
but you are right, I dare say.”
“What I suppose, Mr. Stryver, I claim to characterise for myself—And
understand me, sir,” said Mr. Lorry, quickly flushing again, “I will not—not
even at Tellson’s—have it characterised for me by any gentleman
breathing.”
“There! I beg your pardon!” said Stryver.
“Granted. Thank you. Well, Mr. Stryver, I was about to say:—it might be
painful to you to find yourself mistaken, it might be painful to Doctor
Manette to have the task of being explicit with you, it might be very painful
to Miss Manette to have the task of being explicit with you. You know the
terms upon which I have the honour and happiness to stand with the family.
If you please, committing you in no way, representing you in no way, I will
undertake to correct my advice by the exercise of a little new observation
and judgment expressly brought to bear upon it. If you should then be
dissatisfied with it, you can but test its soundness for yourself; if, on the

other hand, you should be satisfied with it, and it should be what it now is,
it may spare all sides what is best spared. What do you say?”
“How long would you keep me in town?”
“Oh! It is only a question of a few hours. I could go to Soho in the
evening, and come to your chambers afterwards.”
“Then I say yes,” said Stryver: “I won’t go up there now, I am not so hot
upon it as that comes to; I say yes, and I shall expect you to look in to-night.
Good morning.”
Then Mr. Stryver turned and burst out of the Bank, causing such a
concussion of air on his passage through, that to stand up against it bowing
behind the two counters, required the utmost remaining strength of the two
ancient clerks. Those venerable and feeble persons were always seen by the
public in the act of bowing, and were popularly believed, when they had
bowed a customer out, still to keep on bowing in the empty office until they
bowed another customer in.
The barrister was keen enough to divine that the banker would not have
gone so far in his expression of opinion on any less solid ground than moral
certainty. Unprepared as he was for the large pill he had to swallow, he got
it down. “And now,” said Mr. Stryver, shaking his forensic forefinger at the
Temple in general, when it was down, “my way out of this, is, to put you all
in the wrong.”
It was a bit of the art of an Old Bailey tactician, in which he found great
relief. “You shall not put me in the wrong, young lady,” said Mr. Stryver;
“I’ll do that for you.”
Accordingly, when Mr. Lorry called that night as late as ten o’clock, Mr.
Stryver, among a quantity of books and papers littered out for the purpose,
seemed to have nothing less on his mind than the subject of the morning.
He even showed surprise when he saw Mr. Lorry, and was altogether in an
absent and preoccupied state.
“Well!” said that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour of bootless
attempts to bring him round to the question. “I have been to Soho.”
“To Soho?” repeated Mr. Stryver, coldly. “Oh, to be sure! What am I
thinking of!”
“And I have no doubt,” said Mr. Lorry, “that I was right in the
conversation we had. My opinion is confirmed, and I reiterate my advice.”

“I assure you,” returned Mr. Stryver, in the friendliest way, “that I am
sorry for it on your account, and sorry for it on the poor father’s account. I
know this must always be a sore subject with the family; let us say no more
about it.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Mr. Lorry.
“I dare say not,” rejoined Stryver, nodding his head in a smoothing and
final way; “no matter, no matter.”
“But it does matter,” Mr. Lorry urged.
“No it doesn’t; I assure you it doesn’t. Having supposed that there was
sense where there is no sense, and a laudable ambition where there is not a
laudable ambition, I am well out of my mistake, and no harm is done.
Young women have committed similar follies often before, and have
repented them in poverty and obscurity often before. In an unselfish aspect,
I am sorry that the thing is dropped, because it would have been a bad thing
for me in a worldly point of view; in a selfish aspect, I am glad that the
thing has dropped, because it would have been a bad thing for me in a
worldly point of view—it is hardly necessary to say I could have gained
nothing by it. There is no harm at all done. I have not proposed to the young
lady, and, between ourselves, I am by no means certain, on reflection, that I
ever should have committed myself to that extent. Mr. Lorry, you cannot
control the mincing vanities and giddinesses of empty-headed girls; you
must not expect to do it, or you will always be disappointed. Now, pray say
no more about it. I tell you, I regret it on account of others, but I am
satisfied on my own account. And I am really very much obliged to you for
allowing me to sound you, and for giving me your advice; you know the
young lady better than I do; you were right, it never would have done.”
Mr. Lorry was so taken aback, that he looked quite stupidly at Mr.
Stryver shouldering him towards the door, with an appearance of showering
generosity, forbearance, and goodwill, on his erring head. “Make the best of
it, my dear sir,” said Stryver; “say no more about it; thank you again for
allowing me to sound you; good night!”
Mr. Lorry was out in the night, before he knew where he was. Mr.
Stryver was lying back on his sofa, winking at his ceiling.

CHAPTER XIII.
The Fellow of No Delicacy

I
f Sydney Carton ever shone anywhere, he certainly never shone in the
house of Doctor Manette. He had been there often, during a whole year,
and had always been the same moody and morose lounger there. When
he cared to talk, he talked well; but, the cloud of caring for nothing, which
overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by
the light within him.
And yet he did care something for the streets that environed that house,
and for the senseless stones that made their pavements. Many a night he
vaguely and unhappily wandered there, when wine had brought no
transitory gladness to him; many a dreary daybreak revealed his solitary
figure lingering there, and still lingering there when the first beams of the
sun brought into strong relief, removed beauties of architecture in spires of
churches and lofty buildings, as perhaps the quiet time brought some sense
of better things, else forgotten and unattainable, into his mind. Of late, the
neglected bed in the Temple Court had known him more scantily than ever;
and often when he had thrown himself upon it no longer than a few
minutes, he had got up again, and haunted that neighbourhood.
On a day in August, when Mr. Stryver (after notifying to his jackal that
“he had thought better of that marrying matter”) had carried his delicacy
into Devonshire, and when the sight and scent of flowers in the City streets
had some waifs of goodness in them for the worst, of health for the
sickliest, and of youth for the oldest, Sydney’s feet still trod those stones.
From being irresolute and purposeless, his feet became animated by an
intention, and, in the working out of that intention, they took him to the
Doctor’s door.
He was shown up-stairs, and found Lucie at her work, alone. She had
never been quite at her ease with him, and received him with some little
embarrassment as he seated himself near her table. But, looking up at his

face in the interchange of the first few common-places, she observed a
change in it.
“I fear you are not well, Mr. Carton!”
“No. But the life I lead, Miss Manette, is not conducive to health. What is
to be expected of, or by, such profligates?”
“Is it not—forgive me; I have begun the question on my lips—a pity to
live no better life?”
“God knows it is a shame!”
“Then why not change it?”
Looking gently at him again, she was surprised and saddened to see that
there were tears in his eyes. There were tears in his voice too, as he
answered:
“It is too late for that. I shall never be better than I am. I shall sink lower,
and be worse.”
He leaned an elbow on her table, and covered his eyes with his hand. The
table trembled in the silence that followed.
She had never seen him softened, and was much distressed. He knew her
to be so, without looking at her, and said:
“Pray forgive me, Miss Manette. I break down before the knowledge of
what I want to say to you. Will you hear me?”
“If it will do you any good, Mr. Carton, if it would make you happier, it
would make me very glad!”
“God bless you for your sweet compassion!”
He unshaded his face after a little while, and spoke steadily.
“Don’t be afraid to hear me. Don’t shrink from anything I say. I am like
one who died young. All my life might have been.”
“No, Mr. Carton. I am sure that the best part of it might still be; I am sure
that you might be much, much worthier of yourself.”
“Say of you, Miss Manette, and although I know better—although in the
mystery of my own wretched heart I know better—I shall never forget it!”
She was pale and trembling. He came to her relief with a fixed despair of
himself which made the interview unlike any other that could have been
holden.

“If it had been possible, Miss Manette, that you could have returned the
love of the man you see before yourself—flung away, wasted, drunken,
poor creature of misuse as you know him to be—he would have been
conscious this day and hour, in spite of his happiness, that he would bring
you to misery, bring you to sorrow and repentance, blight you, disgrace
you, pull you down with him. I know very well that you can have no
tenderness for me; I ask for none; I am even thankful that it cannot be.”
“Without it, can I not save you, Mr. Carton? Can I not recall you—
forgive me again!—to a better course? Can I in no way repay your
confidence? I know this is a confidence,” she modestly said, after a little
hesitation, and in earnest tears, “I know you would say this to no one else.
Can I turn it to no good account for yourself, Mr. Carton?”
He shook his head.
“To none. No, Miss Manette, to none. If you will hear me through a very
little more, all you can ever do for me is done. I wish you to know that you
have been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation I have not been so
degraded but that the sight of you with your father, and of this home made
such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of
me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought
would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices
impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had
unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and
sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that
ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to
know that you inspired it.”
“Will nothing of it remain? O Mr. Carton, think again! Try again!”
“No, Miss Manette; all through it, I have known myself to be quite
undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness,
to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of
ashes that I am, into fire—a fire, however, inseparable in its nature from
myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning
away.”
“Since it is my misfortune, Mr. Carton, to have made you more unhappy
than you were before you knew me—”
“Don’t say that, Miss Manette, for you would have reclaimed me, if
anything could. You will not be the cause of my becoming worse.”

“Since the state of your mind that you describe, is, at all events,
attributable to some influence of mine—this is what I mean, if I can make it
plain—can I use no influence to serve you? Have I no power for good, with
you, at all?”
“The utmost good that I am capable of now, Miss Manette, I have come
here to realise. Let me carry through the rest of my misdirected life, the
remembrance that I opened my heart to you, last of all the world; and that
there was something left in me at this time which you could deplore and
pity.”
“Which I entreated you to believe, again and again, most fervently, with
all my heart, was capable of better things, Mr. Carton!”
“Entreat me to believe it no more, Miss Manette. I have proved myself,
and I know better. I distress you; I draw fast to an end. Will you let me
believe, when I recall this day, that the last confidence of my life was
reposed in your pure and innocent breast, and that it lies there alone, and
will be shared by no one?”
“If that will be a consolation to you, yes.”
“Not even by the dearest one ever to be known to you?”
“Mr. Carton,” she answered, after an agitated pause, “the secret is yours,
not mine; and I promise to respect it.”
“Thank you. And again, God bless you.”
He put her hand to his lips, and moved towards the door.
“Be under no apprehension, Miss Manette, of my ever resuming this
conversation by so much as a passing word. I will never refer to it again. If
I were dead, that could not be surer than it is henceforth. In the hour of my
death, I shall hold sacred the one good remembrance—and shall thank and
bless you for it—that my last avowal of myself was made to you, and that
my name, and faults, and miseries were gently carried in your heart. May it
otherwise be light and happy!”
He was so unlike what he had ever shown himself to be, and it was so sad
to think how much he had thrown away, and how much he every day kept
down and perverted, that Lucie Manette wept mournfully for him as he
stood looking back at her.
“Be comforted!” he said, “I am not worth such feeling, Miss Manette. An
hour or two hence, and the low companions and low habits that I scorn but

yield to, will render me less worth such tears as those, than any wretch who
creeps along the streets. Be comforted! But, within myself, I shall always
be, towards you, what I am now, though outwardly I shall be what you have
heretofore seen me. The last supplication but one I make to you, is, that you
will believe this of me.”
“I will, Mr. Carton.”
“My last supplication of all, is this; and with it, I will relieve you of a
visitor with whom I well know you have nothing in unison, and between
whom and you there is an impassable space. It is useless to say it, I know,
but it rises out of my soul. For you, and for any dear to you, I would do
anything. If my career were of that better kind that there was any
opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for
you and for those dear to you. Try to hold me in your mind, at some quiet
times, as ardent and sincere in this one thing. The time will come, the time
will not be long in coming, when new ties will be formed about you—ties
that will bind you yet more tenderly and strongly to the home you so adorn
—the dearest ties that will ever grace and gladden you. O Miss Manette,
when the little picture of a happy father’s face looks up in yours, when you
see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and
then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love
beside you!”
He said, “Farewell!” said a last “God bless you!” and left her.

CHAPTER XIV.
The Honest Tradesman

T
o the eyes of Mr. Jeremiah Cruncher, sitting on his stool in Fleet-
street with his grisly urchin beside him, a vast number and variety of
objects in movement were every day presented. Who could sit upon
anything in Fleet-street during the busy hours of the day, and not be dazed
and deafened by two immense processions, one ever tending westward with
the sun, the other ever tending eastward from the sun, both ever tending to
the plains beyond the range of red and purple where the sun goes down!
With his straw in his mouth, Mr. Cruncher sat watching the two streams,
like the heathen rustic who has for several centuries been on duty watching
one stream—saving that Jerry had no expectation of their ever running dry.
Nor would it have been an expectation of a hopeful kind, since a small part
of his income was derived from the pilotage of timid women (mostly of a
full habit and past the middle term of life) from Tellson’s side of the tides to
the opposite shore. Brief as such companionship was in every separate
instance, Mr. Cruncher never failed to become so interested in the lady as to
express a strong desire to have the honour of drinking her very good health.
And it was from the gifts bestowed upon him towards the execution of this
benevolent purpose, that he recruited his finances, as just now observed.
Time was, when a poet sat upon a stool in a public place, and mused in
the sight of men. Mr. Cruncher, sitting on a stool in a public place, but not
being a poet, mused as little as possible, and looked about him.
It fell out that he was thus engaged in a season when crowds were few,
and belated women few, and when his affairs in general were so
unprosperous as to awaken a strong suspicion in his breast that Mrs.
Cruncher must have been “flopping” in some pointed manner, when an
unusual concourse pouring down Fleet-street westward, attracted his
attention. Looking that way, Mr. Cruncher made out that some kind of

funeral was coming along, and that there was popular objection to this
funeral, which engendered uproar.
“Young Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, turning to his offspring, “it’s a
buryin’.”
“Hooroar, father!” cried Young Jerry.
The young gentleman uttered this exultant sound with mysterious
significance. The elder gentleman took the cry so ill, that he watched his
opportunity, and smote the young gentleman on the ear.
“What d’ye mean? What are you hooroaring at? What do you want to
conwey to your own father, you young Rip? This boy is a getting too many
for me!” said Mr. Cruncher, surveying him. “Him and his hooroars! Don’t
let me hear no more of you, or you shall feel some more of me. D’ye hear?”
“I warn’t doing no harm,” Young Jerry protested, rubbing his cheek.
“Drop it then,” said Mr. Cruncher; “I won’t have none of your no harms.
Get a top of that there seat, and look at the crowd.”
His son obeyed, and the crowd approached; they were bawling and
hissing round a dingy hearse and dingy mourning coach, in which mourning
coach there was only one mourner, dressed in the dingy trappings that were
considered essential to the dignity of the position. The position appeared by
no means to please him, however, with an increasing rabble surrounding the
coach, deriding him, making grimaces at him, and incessantly groaning and
calling out: “Yah! Spies! Tst! Yaha! Spies!” with many compliments too
numerous and forcible to repeat.
Funerals had at all times a remarkable attraction for Mr. Cruncher; he
always pricked up his senses, and became excited, when a funeral passed
Tellson’s. Naturally, therefore, a funeral with this uncommon attendance
excited him greatly, and he asked of the first man who ran against him:
“What is it, brother? What’s it about?”
“I don’t know,” said the man. “Spies! Yaha! Tst! Spies!”
He asked another man. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know,” returned the man, clapping his hands to his mouth
nevertheless, and vociferating in a surprising heat and with the greatest
ardour, “Spies! Yaha! Tst, tst! Spi—ies!”

At length, a person better informed on the merits of the case, tumbled
against him, and from this person he learned that the funeral was the funeral
of one Roger Cly.
“Was he a spy?” asked Mr. Cruncher.
“Old Bailey spy,” returned his informant. “Yaha! Tst! Yah! Old Bailey
Spi—i—ies!”
“Why, to be sure!” exclaimed Jerry, recalling the Trial at which he had
assisted. “I’ve seen him. Dead, is he?”
“Dead as mutton,” returned the other, “and can’t be too dead. Have ’em
out, there! Spies! Pull ’em out, there! Spies!”
The idea was so acceptable in the prevalent absence of any idea, that the
crowd caught it up with eagerness, and loudly repeating the suggestion to
have ’em out, and to pull ’em out, mobbed the two vehicles so closely that
they came to a stop. On the crowd’s opening the coach doors, the one
mourner scuffled out by himself and was in their hands for a moment; but
he was so alert, and made such good use of his time, that in another moment
he was scouring away up a bye-street, after shedding his cloak, hat, long
hatband, white pocket-handkerchief, and other symbolical tears.
These, the people tore to pieces and scattered far and wide with great
enjoyment, while the tradesmen hurriedly shut up their shops; for a crowd
in those times stopped at nothing, and was a monster much dreaded. They
had already got the length of opening the hearse to take the coffin out, when
some brighter genius proposed instead, its being escorted to its destination
amidst general rejoicing. Practical suggestions being much needed, this
suggestion, too, was received with acclamation, and the coach was
immediately filled with eight inside and a dozen out, while as many people
got on the roof of the hearse as could by any exercise of ingenuity stick
upon it. Among the first of these volunteers was Jerry Cruncher himself,
who modestly concealed his spiky head from the observation of Tellson’s,
in the further corner of the mourning coach.
The officiating undertakers made some protest against these changes in
the ceremonies; but, the river being alarmingly near, and several voices
remarking on the efficacy of cold immersion in bringing refractory
members of the profession to reason, the protest was faint and brief. The
remodelled procession started, with a chimney-sweep driving the hearse—
advised by the regular driver, who was perched beside him, under close

inspection, for the purpose—and with a pieman, also attended by his
cabinet minister, driving the mourning coach. A bear-leader, a popular street
character of the time, was impressed as an additional ornament, before the
cavalcade had gone far down the Strand; and his bear, who was black and
very mangy, gave quite an Undertaking air to that part of the procession in
which he walked.

Original

Thus, with beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, song-roaring, and infinite
caricaturing of woe, the disorderly procession went its way, recruiting at
every step, and all the shops shutting up before it. Its destination was the
old church of Saint Pancras, far off in the fields. It got there in course of
time; insisted on pouring into the burial-ground; finally, accomplished the
interment of the deceased Roger Cly in its own way, and highly to its own
satisfaction.
The dead man disposed of, and the crowd being under the necessity of
providing some other entertainment for itself, another brighter genius (or
perhaps the same) conceived the humour of impeaching casual passers-by,
as Old Bailey spies, and wreaking vengeance on them. Chase was given to
some scores of inoffensive persons who had never been near the Old Bailey
in their lives, in the realisation of this fancy, and they were roughly hustled
and maltreated. The transition to the sport of window-breaking, and thence
to the plundering of public-houses, was easy and natural. At last, after
several hours, when sundry summer-houses had been pulled down, and
some area-railings had been torn up, to arm the more belligerent spirits, a
rumour got about that the Guards were coming. Before this rumour, the

crowd gradually melted away, and perhaps the Guards came, and perhaps
they never came, and this was the usual progress of a mob.
Mr. Cruncher did not assist at the closing sports, but had remained behind
in the churchyard, to confer and condole with the undertakers. The place
had a soothing influence on him. He procured a pipe from a neighbouring
public-house, and smoked it, looking in at the railings and maturely
considering the spot.
“Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, apostrophising himself in his usual way, “you
see that there Cly that day, and you see with your own eyes that he was a
young ’un and a straight made ’un.”
Having smoked his pipe out, and ruminated a little longer, he turned
himself about, that he might appear, before the hour of closing, on his
station at Tellson’s. Whether his meditations on mortality had touched his
liver, or whether his general health had been previously at all amiss, or
whether he desired to show a little attention to an eminent man, is not so
much to the purpose, as that he made a short call upon his medical adviser
—a distinguished surgeon—on his way back.
Young Jerry relieved his father with dutiful interest, and reported No job
in his absence. The bank closed, the ancient clerks came out, the usual
watch was set, and Mr. Cruncher and his son went home to tea.
“Now, I tell you where it is!” said Mr. Cruncher to his wife, on entering.
“If, as a honest tradesman, my wenturs goes wrong to-night, I shall make
sure that you’ve been praying again me, and I shall work you for it just the
same as if I seen you do it.”
The dejected Mrs. Cruncher shook her head.
“Why, you’re at it afore my face!” said Mr. Cruncher, with signs of angry
apprehension.
“I am saying nothing.”
“Well, then; don’t meditate nothing. You might as well flop as meditate.
You may as well go again me one way as another. Drop it altogether.”
“Yes, Jerry.”
“Yes, Jerry,” repeated Mr. Cruncher sitting down to tea. “Ah! It is yes,
Jerry. That’s about it. You may say yes, Jerry.”

Mr. Cruncher had no particular meaning in these sulky corroborations,
but made use of them, as people not unfrequently do, to express general
ironical dissatisfaction.
“You and your yes, Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, taking a bite out of his
bread-and-butter, and seeming to help it down with a large invisible oyster
out of his saucer. “Ah! I think so. I believe you.”
“You are going out to-night?” asked his decent wife, when he took
another bite.
“Yes, I am.”
“May I go with you, father?” asked his son, briskly.
“No, you mayn’t. I’m a going—as your mother knows—a fishing. That’s
where I’m going to. Going a fishing.”
“Your fishing-rod gets rayther rusty; don’t it, father?”
“Never you mind.”
“Shall you bring any fish home, father?”
“If I don’t, you’ll have short commons, to-morrow,” returned that
gentleman, shaking his head; “that’s questions enough for you; I ain’t a
going out, till you’ve been long abed.”
He devoted himself during the remainder of the evening to keeping a
most vigilant watch on Mrs. Cruncher, and sullenly holding her in
conversation that she might be prevented from meditating any petitions to
his disadvantage. With this view, he urged his son to hold her in
conversation also, and led the unfortunate woman a hard life by dwelling on
any causes of complaint he could bring against her, rather than he would
leave her for a moment to her own reflections. The devoutest person could
have rendered no greater homage to the efficacy of an honest prayer than he
did in this distrust of his wife. It was as if a professed unbeliever in ghosts
should be frightened by a ghost story.
“And mind you!” said Mr. Cruncher. “No games to-morrow! If I, as a
honest tradesman, succeed in providing a jinte of meat or two, none of your
not touching of it, and sticking to bread. If I, as a honest tradesman, am able
to provide a little beer, none of your declaring on water. When you go to
Rome, do as Rome does. Rome will be a ugly customer to you, if you don’t.
I’m your Rome, you know.”

Then he began grumbling again:
“With your flying into the face of your own wittles and drink! I don’t
know how scarce you mayn’t make the wittles and drink here, by your
flopping tricks and your unfeeling conduct. Look at your boy: he is your’n,
ain’t he? He’s as thin as a lath. Do you call yourself a mother, and not know
that a mother’s first duty is to blow her boy out?”
This touched Young Jerry on a tender place; who adjured his mother to
perform her first duty, and, whatever else she did or neglected, above all
things to lay especial stress on the discharge of that maternal function so
affectingly and delicately indicated by his other parent.
Thus the evening wore away with the Cruncher family, until Young Jerry
was ordered to bed, and his mother, laid under similar injunctions, obeyed
them. Mr. Cruncher beguiled the earlier watches of the night with solitary
pipes, and did not start upon his excursion until nearly one o’clock.
Towards that small and ghostly hour, he rose up from his chair, took a key
out of his pocket, opened a locked cupboard, and brought forth a sack, a
crowbar of convenient size, a rope and chain, and other fishing tackle of
that nature. Disposing these articles about him in skilful manner, he
bestowed a parting defiance on Mrs. Cruncher, extinguished the light, and
went out.
Young Jerry, who had only made a feint of undressing when he went to
bed, was not long after his father. Under cover of the darkness he followed
out of the room, followed down the stairs, followed down the court,
followed out into the streets. He was in no uneasiness concerning his
getting into the house again, for it was full of lodgers, and the door stood
ajar all night.
Impelled by a laudable ambition to study the art and mystery of his
father’s honest calling, Young Jerry, keeping as close to house fronts, walls,
and doorways, as his eyes were close to one another, held his honoured
parent in view. The honoured parent steering Northward, had not gone far,
when he was joined by another disciple of Izaak Walton, and the two
trudged on together.
Within half an hour from the first starting, they were beyond the winking
lamps, and the more than winking watchmen, and were out upon a lonely
road. Another fisherman was picked up here—and that so silently, that if

Young Jerry had been superstitious, he might have supposed the second
follower of the gentle craft to have, all of a sudden, split himself into two.
The three went on, and Young Jerry went on, until the three stopped
under a bank overhanging the road. Upon the top of the bank was a low
brick wall, surmounted by an iron railing. In the shadow of bank and wall
the three turned out of the road, and up a blind lane, of which the wall—
there, risen to some eight or ten feet high—formed one side. Crouching
down in a corner, peeping up the lane, the next object that Young Jerry saw,
was the form of his honoured parent, pretty well defined against a watery
and clouded moon, nimbly scaling an iron gate. He was soon over, and then
the second fisherman got over, and then the third. They all dropped softly
on the ground within the gate, and lay there a little—listening perhaps.
Then, they moved away on their hands and knees.
It was now Young Jerry’s turn to approach the gate: which he did,
holding his breath. Crouching down again in a corner there, and looking in,
he made out the three fishermen creeping through some rank grass! and all
the gravestones in the churchyard—it was a large churchyard that they were
in—looking on like ghosts in white, while the church tower itself looked on
like the ghost of a monstrous giant. They did not creep far, before they
stopped and stood upright. And then they began to fish.
They fished with a spade, at first. Presently the honoured parent appeared
to be adjusting some instrument like a great corkscrew. Whatever tools they
worked with, they worked hard, until the awful striking of the church clock
so terrified Young Jerry, that he made off, with his hair as stiff as his
father’s.
But, his long-cherished desire to know more about these matters, not only
stopped him in his running away, but lured him back again. They were still
fishing perseveringly, when he peeped in at the gate for the second time;
but, now they seemed to have got a bite. There was a screwing and
complaining sound down below, and their bent figures were strained, as if
by a weight. By slow degrees the weight broke away the earth upon it, and
came to the surface. Young Jerry very well knew what it would be; but,
when he saw it, and saw his honoured parent about to wrench it open, he
was so frightened, being new to the sight, that he made off again, and never
stopped until he had run a mile or more.

He would not have stopped then, for anything less necessary than breath,
it being a spectral sort of race that he ran, and one highly desirable to get to
the end of. He had a strong idea that the coffin he had seen was running
after him; and, pictured as hopping on behind him, bolt upright, upon its
narrow end, always on the point of overtaking him and hopping on at his
side—perhaps taking his arm—it was a pursuer to shun. It was an
inconsistent and ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it was making the whole
night behind him dreadful, he darted out into the roadway to avoid dark
alleys, fearful of its coming hopping out of them like a dropsical boy’s kite
without tail and wings. It hid in doorways too, rubbing its horrible
shoulders against doors, and drawing them up to its ears, as if it were
laughing. It got into shadows on the road, and lay cunningly on its back to
trip him up. All this time it was incessantly hopping on behind and gaining
on him, so that when the boy got to his own door he had reason for being
half dead. And even then it would not leave him, but followed him upstairs
with a bump on every stair, scrambled into bed with him, and bumped
down, dead and heavy, on his breast when he fell asleep.
From his oppressed slumber, Young Jerry in his closet was awakened
after daybreak and before sunrise, by the presence of his father in the family
room. Something had gone wrong with him; at least, so Young Jerry
inferred, from the circumstance of his holding Mrs. Cruncher by the ears,
and knocking the back of her head against the head-board of the bed.
“I told you I would,” said Mr. Cruncher, “and I did.”
“Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!” his wife implored.
“You oppose yourself to the profit of the business,” said Jerry, “and me
and my partners suffer. You was to honour and obey; why the devil don’t
you?”
“I try to be a good wife, Jerry,” the poor woman protested, with tears.
“Is it being a good wife to oppose your husband’s business? Is it
honouring your husband to dishonour his business? Is it obeying your
husband to disobey him on the wital subject of his business?”
“You hadn’t taken to the dreadful business then, Jerry.”
“It’s enough for you,” retorted Mr. Cruncher, “to be the wife of a honest
tradesman, and not to occupy your female mind with calculations when he
took to his trade or when he didn’t. A honouring and obeying wife would let

his trade alone altogether. Call yourself a religious woman? If you’re a
religious woman, give me a irreligious one! You have no more nat’ral sense
of duty than the bed of this here Thames river has of a pile, and similarly it
must be knocked into you.”
The altercation was conducted in a low tone of voice, and terminated in
the honest tradesman’s kicking off his clay-soiled boots, and lying down at
his length on the floor. After taking a timid peep at him lying on his back,
with his rusty hands under his head for a pillow, his son lay down too, and
fell asleep again.
There was no fish for breakfast, and not much of anything else. Mr.
Cruncher was out of spirits, and out of temper, and kept an iron pot-lid by
him as a projectile for the correction of Mrs. Cruncher, in case he should
observe any symptoms of her saying Grace. He was brushed and washed at
the usual hour, and set off with his son to pursue his ostensible calling.
Young Jerry, walking with the stool under his arm at his father’s side
along sunny and crowded Fleet-street, was a very different Young Jerry
from him of the previous night, running home through darkness and
solitude from his grim pursuer. His cunning was fresh with the day, and his
qualms were gone with the night—in which particulars it is not improbable
that he had compeers in Fleet-street and the City of London, that fine
morning.
“Father,” said Young Jerry, as they walked along: taking care to keep at
arm’s length and to have the stool well between them: “what’s a
Resurrection-Man?”
Mr. Cruncher came to a stop on the pavement before he answered, “How
should I know?”
“I thought you knowed everything, father,” said the artless boy.
“Hem! Well,” returned Mr. Cruncher, going on again, and lifting off his
hat to give his spikes free play, “he’s a tradesman.”
“What’s his goods, father?” asked the brisk Young Jerry.
“His goods,” said Mr. Cruncher, after turning it over in his mind, “is a
branch of Scientific goods.”
“Persons’ bodies, ain’t it, father?” asked the lively boy.
“I believe it is something of that sort,” said Mr. Cruncher.

“Oh, father, I should so like to be a Resurrection-Man when I’m quite
growed up!”
Mr. Cruncher was soothed, but shook his head in a dubious and moral
way. “It depends upon how you dewelop your talents. Be careful to
dewelop your talents, and never to say no more than you can help to
nobody, and there’s no telling at the present time what you may not come to
be fit for.” As Young Jerry, thus encouraged, went on a few yards in
advance, to plant the stool in the shadow of the Bar, Mr. Cruncher added to
himself: “Jerry, you honest tradesman, there’s hopes wot that boy will yet
be a blessing to you, and a recompense to you for his mother!”

CHAPTER XV.
Knitting

T
here had been earlier drinking than usual in the wine-shop of
Monsieur Defarge. As early as six o’clock in the morning, sallow
faces peeping through its barred windows had descried other faces
within, bending over measures of wine. Monsieur Defarge sold a very thin
wine at the best of times, but it would seem to have been an unusually thin
wine that he sold at this time. A sour wine, moreover, or a souring, for its
influence on the mood of those who drank it was to make them gloomy. No
vivacious Bacchanalian flame leaped out of the pressed grape of Monsieur
Defarge: but, a smouldering fire that burnt in the dark, lay hidden in the
dregs of it.
This had been the third morning in succession, on which there had been
early drinking at the wine-shop of Monsieur Defarge. It had begun on
Monday, and here was Wednesday come. There had been more of early
brooding than drinking; for, many men had listened and whispered and
slunk about there from the time of the opening of the door, who could not
have laid a piece of money on the counter to save their souls. These were to
the full as interested in the place, however, as if they could have
commanded whole barrels of wine; and they glided from seat to seat, and
from corner to corner, swallowing talk in lieu of drink, with greedy looks.
Notwithstanding an unusual flow of company, the master of the wine-
shop was not visible. He was not missed; for, nobody who crossed the
threshold looked for him, nobody asked for him, nobody wondered to see
only Madame Defarge in her seat, presiding over the distribution of wine,
with a bowl of battered small coins before her, as much defaced and beaten
out of their original impress as the small coinage of humanity from whose
ragged pockets they had come.
A suspended interest and a prevalent absence of mind, were perhaps
observed by the spies who looked in at the wine-shop, as they looked in at

every place, high and low, from the king’s palace to the criminal’s gaol.
Games at cards languished, players at dominoes musingly built towers with
them, drinkers drew figures on the tables with spilt drops of wine, Madame
Defarge herself picked out the pattern on her sleeve with her toothpick, and
saw and heard something inaudible and invisible a long way off.
Thus, Saint Antoine in this vinous feature of his, until midday. It was
high noontide, when two dusty men passed through his streets and under his
swinging lamps: of whom, one was Monsieur Defarge: the other a mender
of roads in a blue cap. All adust and athirst, the two entered the wine-shop.
Their arrival had lighted a kind of fire in the breast of Saint Antoine, fast
spreading as they came along, which stirred and flickered in flames of faces
at most doors and windows. Yet, no one had followed them, and no man
spoke when they entered the wine-shop, though the eyes of every man there
were turned upon them.

Original

“Good day, gentlemen!” said Monsieur Defarge.
It may have been a signal for loosening the general tongue. It elicited an
answering chorus of “Good day!”
“It is bad weather, gentlemen,” said Defarge, shaking his head.
Upon which, every man looked at his neighbour, and then all cast down
their eyes and sat silent. Except one man, who got up and went out.

“My wife,” said Defarge aloud, addressing Madame Defarge: “I have
travelled certain leagues with this good mender of roads, called Jacques. I
met him—by accident—a day and half’s journey out of Paris. He is a good
child, this mender of roads, called Jacques. Give him to drink, my wife!”
A second man got up and went out. Madame Defarge set wine before the
mender of roads called Jacques, who doffed his blue cap to the company,
and drank. In the breast of his blouse he carried some coarse dark bread; he
ate of this between whiles, and sat munching and drinking near Madame
Defarge’s counter. A third man got up and went out.
Defarge refreshed himself with a draught of wine—but, he took less than
was given to the stranger, as being himself a man to whom it was no rarity
—and stood waiting until the countryman had made his breakfast. He
looked at no one present, and no one now looked at him; not even Madame
Defarge, who had taken up her knitting, and was at work.
“Have you finished your repast, friend?” he asked, in due season.
“Yes, thank you.”
“Come, then! You shall see the apartment that I told you you could
occupy. It will suit you to a marvel.”
Out of the wine-shop into the street, out of the street into a courtyard, out
of the courtyard up a steep staircase, out of the staircase into a garret—
formerly the garret where a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping
forward and very busy, making shoes.
No white-haired man was there now; but, the three men were there who
had gone out of the wine-shop singly. And between them and the white-
haired man afar off, was the one small link, that they had once looked in at
him through the chinks in the wall.
Defarge closed the door carefully, and spoke in a subdued voice:
“Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques Three! This is the witness
encountered by appointment, by me, Jacques Four. He will tell you all.
Speak, Jacques Five!”
The mender of roads, blue cap in hand, wiped his swarthy forehead with
it, and said, “Where shall I commence, monsieur?”
“Commence,” was Monsieur Defarge’s not unreasonable reply, “at the
commencement.”

“I saw him then, messieurs,” began the mender of roads, “a year ago this
running summer, underneath the carriage of the Marquis, hanging by the
chain. Behold the manner of it. I leaving my work on the road, the sun
going to bed, the carriage of the Marquis slowly ascending the hill, he
hanging by the chain—like this.”
Again the mender of roads went through the whole performance; in
which he ought to have been perfect by that time, seeing that it had been the
infallible resource and indispensable entertainment of his village during a
whole year.
Jacques One struck in, and asked if he had ever seen the man before?
“Never,” answered the mender of roads, recovering his perpendicular.
Jacques Three demanded how he afterwards recognised him then?
“By his tall figure,” said the mender of roads, softly, and with his finger
at his nose. “When Monsieur the Marquis demands that evening, ‘Say, what
is he like?’ I make response, ‘Tall as a spectre.’”
“You should have said, short as a dwarf,” returned Jacques Two.
“But what did I know? The deed was not then accomplished, neither did
he confide in me. Observe! Under those circumstances even, I do not offer
my testimony. Monsieur the Marquis indicates me with his finger, standing
near our little fountain, and says, ‘To me! Bring that rascal!’ My faith,
messieurs, I offer nothing.”
“He is right there, Jacques,” murmured Defarge, to him who had
interrupted. “Go on!”
“Good!” said the mender of roads, with an air of mystery. “The tall man
is lost, and he is sought—how many months? Nine, ten, eleven?”
“No matter, the number,” said Defarge. “He is well hidden, but at last he
is unluckily found. Go on!”
“I am again at work upon the hill-side, and the sun is again about to go to
bed. I am collecting my tools to descend to my cottage down in the village
below, where it is already dark, when I raise my eyes, and see coming over
the hill six soldiers. In the midst of them is a tall man with his arms bound
—tied to his sides—like this!”
With the aid of his indispensable cap, he represented a man with his
elbows bound fast at his hips, with cords that were knotted behind him.

“I stand aside, messieurs, by my heap of stones, to see the soldiers and
their prisoner pass (for it is a solitary road, that, where any spectacle is well
worth looking at), and at first, as they approach, I see no more than that
they are six soldiers with a tall man bound, and that they are almost black to
my sight—except on the side of the sun going to bed, where they have a red
edge, messieurs. Also, I see that their long shadows are on the hollow ridge
on the opposite side of the road, and are on the hill above it, and are like the
shadows of giants. Also, I see that they are covered with dust, and that the
dust moves with them as they come, tramp, tramp! But when they advance
quite near to me, I recognise the tall man, and he recognises me. Ah, but he
would be well content to precipitate himself over the hill-side once again, as
on the evening when he and I first encountered, close to the same spot!”
He described it as if he were there, and it was evident that he saw it
vividly; perhaps he had not seen much in his life.
“I do not show the soldiers that I recognise the tall man; he does not
show the soldiers that he recognises me; we do it, and we know it, with our
eyes. ‘Come on!’ says the chief of that company, pointing to the village,
‘bring him fast to his tomb!’ and they bring him faster. I follow. His arms
are swelled because of being bound so tight, his wooden shoes are large and
clumsy, and he is lame. Because he is lame, and consequently slow, they
drive him with their guns—like this!”
He imitated the action of a man’s being impelled forward by the butt-
ends of muskets.
“As they descend the hill like madmen running a race, he falls. They
laugh and pick him up again. His face is bleeding and covered with dust,
but he cannot touch it; thereupon they laugh again. They bring him into the
village; all the village runs to look; they take him past the mill, and up to
the prison; all the village sees the prison gate open in the darkness of the
night, and swallow him—like this!”
He opened his mouth as wide as he could, and shut it with a sounding
snap of his teeth. Observant of his unwillingness to mar the effect by
opening it again, Defarge said, “Go on, Jacques.”
“All the village,” pursued the mender of roads, on tiptoe and in a low
voice, “withdraws; all the village whispers by the fountain; all the village
sleeps; all the village dreams of that unhappy one, within the locks and bars
of the prison on the crag, and never to come out of it, except to perish. In

the morning, with my tools upon my shoulder, eating my morsel of black
bread as I go, I make a circuit by the prison, on my way to my work. There
I see him, high up, behind the bars of a lofty iron cage, bloody and dusty as
last night, looking through. He has no hand free, to wave to me; I dare not
call to him; he regards me like a dead man.”
Defarge and the three glanced darkly at one another. The looks of all of
them were dark, repressed, and revengeful, as they listened to the
countryman’s story; the manner of all of them, while it was secret, was
authoritative too. They had the air of a rough tribunal; Jacques One and
Two sitting on the old pallet-bed, each with his chin resting on his hand,
and his eyes intent on the road-mender; Jacques Three, equally intent, on
one knee behind them, with his agitated hand always gliding over the
network of fine nerves about his mouth and nose; Defarge standing between
them and the narrator, whom he had stationed in the light of the window, by
turns looking from him to them, and from them to him.
“Go on, Jacques,” said Defarge.
“He remains up there in his iron cage some days. The village looks at
him by stealth, for it is afraid. But it always looks up, from a distance, at the
prison on the crag; and in the evening, when the work of the day is achieved
and it assembles to gossip at the fountain, all faces are turned towards the
prison. Formerly, they were turned towards the posting-house; now, they are
turned towards the prison. They whisper at the fountain, that although
condemned to death he will not be executed; they say that petitions have
been presented in Paris, showing that he was enraged and made mad by the
death of his child; they say that a petition has been presented to the King
himself. What do I know? It is possible. Perhaps yes, perhaps no.”
“Listen then, Jacques,” Number One of that name sternly interposed.
“Know that a petition was presented to the King and Queen. All here,
yourself excepted, saw the King take it, in his carriage in the street, sitting
beside the Queen. It is Defarge whom you see here, who, at the hazard of
his life, darted out before the horses, with the petition in his hand.”
“And once again listen, Jacques!” said the kneeling Number Three: his
fingers ever wandering over and over those fine nerves, with a strikingly
greedy air, as if he hungered for something—that was neither food nor
drink; “the guard, horse and foot, surrounded the petitioner, and struck him
blows. You hear?”

“I hear, messieurs.”
“Go on then,” said Defarge.
“Again; on the other hand, they whisper at the fountain,” resumed the
countryman, “that he is brought down into our country to be executed on
the spot, and that he will very certainly be executed. They even whisper that
because he has slain Monseigneur, and because Monseigneur was the father
of his tenants—serfs—what you will—he will be executed as a parricide.
One old man says at the fountain, that his right hand, armed with the knife,
will be burnt off before his face; that, into wounds which will be made in
his arms, his breast, and his legs, there will be poured boiling oil, melted
lead, hot resin, wax, and sulphur; finally, that he will be torn limb from limb
by four strong horses. That old man says, all this was actually done to a
prisoner who made an attempt on the life of the late King, Louis Fifteen.
But how do I know if he lies? I am not a scholar.”
“Listen once again then, Jacques!” said the man with the restless hand
and the craving air. “The name of that prisoner was Damiens, and it was all
done in open day, in the open streets of this city of Paris; and nothing was
more noticed in the vast concourse that saw it done, than the crowd of
ladies of quality and fashion, who were full of eager attention to the last—
to the last, Jacques, prolonged until nightfall, when he had lost two legs and
an arm, and still breathed! And it was done—why, how old are you?”
“Thirty-five,” said the mender of roads, who looked sixty.
“It was done when you were more than ten years old; you might have
seen it.”
“Enough!” said Defarge, with grim impatience. “Long live the Devil! Go
on.”
“Well! Some whisper this, some whisper that; they speak of nothing else;
even the fountain appears to fall to that tune. At length, on Sunday night
when all the village is asleep, come soldiers, winding down from the prison,
and their guns ring on the stones of the little street. Workmen dig, workmen
hammer, soldiers laugh and sing; in the morning, by the fountain, there is
raised a gallows forty feet high, poisoning the water.”
The mender of roads looked through rather than at the low ceiling, and
pointed as if he saw the gallows somewhere in the sky.

“All work is stopped, all assemble there, nobody leads the cows out, the
cows are there with the rest. At midday, the roll of drums. Soldiers have
marched into the prison in the night, and he is in the midst of many soldiers.
He is bound as before, and in his mouth there is a gag—tied so, with a tight
string, making him look almost as if he laughed.” He suggested it, by
creasing his face with his two thumbs, from the corners of his mouth to his
ears. “On the top of the gallows is fixed the knife, blade upwards, with its
point in the air. He is hanged there forty feet high—and is left hanging,
poisoning the water.”
They looked at one another, as he used his blue cap to wipe his face, on
which the perspiration had started afresh while he recalled the spectacle.
“It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and the children draw
water! Who can gossip of an evening, under that shadow! Under it, have I
said? When I left the village, Monday evening as the sun was going to bed,
and looked back from the hill, the shadow struck across the church, across
the mill, across the prison—seemed to strike across the earth, messieurs, to
where the sky rests upon it!”
The hungry man gnawed one of his fingers as he looked at the other
three, and his finger quivered with the craving that was on him.
“That’s all, messieurs. I left at sunset (as I had been warned to do), and I
walked on, that night and half next day, until I met (as I was warned I
should) this comrade. With him, I came on, now riding and now walking,
through the rest of yesterday and through last night. And here you see me!”
After a gloomy silence, the first Jacques said, “Good! You have acted and
recounted faithfully. Will you wait for us a little, outside the door?”
“Very willingly,” said the mender of roads. Whom Defarge escorted to
the top of the stairs, and, leaving seated there, returned.
The three had risen, and their heads were together when he came back to
the garret.
“How say you, Jacques?” demanded Number One. “To be registered?”
“To be registered, as doomed to destruction,” returned Defarge.
“Magnificent!” croaked the man with the craving.
“The chateau, and all the race?” inquired the first.
“The chateau and all the race,” returned Defarge. “Extermination.”

The hungry man repeated, in a rapturous croak, “Magnificent!” and
began gnawing another finger.
“Are you sure,” asked Jacques Two, of Defarge, “that no embarrassment
can arise from our manner of keeping the register? Without doubt it is safe,
for no one beyond ourselves can decipher it; but shall we always be able to
decipher it—or, I ought to say, will she?”
“Jacques,” returned Defarge, drawing himself up, “if madame my wife
undertook to keep the register in her memory alone, she would not lose a
word of it—not a syllable of it. Knitted, in her own stitches and her own
symbols, it will always be as plain to her as the sun. Confide in Madame
Defarge. It would be easier for the weakest poltroon that lives, to erase
himself from existence, than to erase one letter of his name or crimes from
the knitted register of Madame Defarge.”
There was a murmur of confidence and approval, and then the man who
hungered, asked: “Is this rustic to be sent back soon? I hope so. He is very
simple; is he not a little dangerous?”
“He knows nothing,” said Defarge; “at least nothing more than would
easily elevate himself to a gallows of the same height. I charge myself with
him; let him remain with me; I will take care of him, and set him on his
road. He wishes to see the fine world—the King, the Queen, and Court; let
him see them on Sunday.”
“What?” exclaimed the hungry man, staring. “Is it a good sign, that he
wishes to see Royalty and Nobility?”
“Jacques,” said Defarge; “judiciously show a cat milk, if you wish her to
thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, if you wish him to
bring it down one day.”
Nothing more was said, and the mender of roads, being found already
dozing on the topmost stair, was advised to lay himself down on the pallet-
bed and take some rest. He needed no persuasion, and was soon asleep.
Worse quarters than Defarge’s wine-shop, could easily have been found
in Paris for a provincial slave of that degree. Saving for a mysterious dread
of madame by which he was constantly haunted, his life was very new and
agreeable. But, madame sat all day at her counter, so expressly unconscious
of him, and so particularly determined not to perceive that his being there
had any connection with anything below the surface, that he shook in his

wooden shoes whenever his eye lighted on her. For, he contended with
himself that it was impossible to foresee what that lady might pretend next;
and he felt assured that if she should take it into her brightly ornamented
head to pretend that she had seen him do a murder and afterwards flay the
victim, she would infallibly go through with it until the play was played out.
Therefore, when Sunday came, the mender of roads was not enchanted
(though he said he was) to find that madame was to accompany monsieur
and himself to Versailles. It was additionally disconcerting to have madame
knitting all the way there, in a public conveyance; it was additionally
disconcerting yet, to have madame in the crowd in the afternoon, still with
her knitting in her hands as the crowd waited to see the carriage of the King
and Queen.
“You work hard, madame,” said a man near her.
“Yes,” answered Madame Defarge; “I have a good deal to do.”
“What do you make, madame?”
“Many things.”
“For instance—”
“For instance,” returned Madame Defarge, composedly, “shrouds.”
The man moved a little further away, as soon as he could, and the mender
of roads fanned himself with his blue cap: feeling it mightily close and
oppressive. If he needed a King and Queen to restore him, he was fortunate
in having his remedy at hand; for, soon the large-faced King and the fair-
faced Queen came in their golden coach, attended by the shining Bull’s Eye
of their Court, a glittering multitude of laughing ladies and fine lords; and
in jewels and silks and powder and splendour and elegantly spurning
figures and handsomely disdainful faces of both sexes, the mender of roads
bathed himself, so much to his temporary intoxication, that he cried Long
live the King, Long live the Queen, Long live everybody and everything! as
if he had never heard of ubiquitous Jacques in his time. Then, there were
gardens, courtyards, terraces, fountains, green banks, more King and
Queen, more Bull’s Eye, more lords and ladies, more Long live they all!
until he absolutely wept with sentiment. During the whole of this scene,
which lasted some three hours, he had plenty of shouting and weeping and
sentimental company, and throughout Defarge held him by the collar, as if

to restrain him from flying at the objects of his brief devotion and tearing
them to pieces.
“Bravo!” said Defarge, clapping him on the back when it was over, like a
patron; “you are a good boy!”
The mender of roads was now coming to himself, and was mistrustful of
having made a mistake in his late demonstrations; but no.
“You are the fellow we want,” said Defarge, in his ear; “you make these
fools believe that it will last for ever. Then, they are the more insolent, and
it is the nearer ended.”
“Hey!” cried the mender of roads, reflectively; “that’s true.”
“These fools know nothing. While they despise your breath, and would
stop it for ever and ever, in you or in a hundred like you rather than in one
of their own horses or dogs, they only know what your breath tells them.
Let it deceive them, then, a little longer; it cannot deceive them too much.”
Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client, and nodded in
confirmation.
“As to you,” said she, “you would shout and shed tears for anything, if it
made a show and a noise. Say! Would you not?”
“Truly, madame, I think so. For the moment.”
“If you were shown a great heap of dolls, and were set upon them to
pluck them to pieces and despoil them for your own advantage, you would
pick out the richest and gayest. Say! Would you not?”
“Truly yes, madame.”
“Yes. And if you were shown a flock of birds, unable to fly, and were set
upon them to strip them of their feathers for your own advantage, you
would set upon the birds of the finest feathers; would you not?”
“It is true, madame.”
“You have seen both dolls and birds to-day,” said Madame Defarge, with
a wave of her hand towards the place where they had last been apparent;
“now, go home!”

CHAPTER XVI.
Still Knitting

M
adame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned amicably to
the bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled
through the darkness, and through the dust, and down the weary
miles of avenue by the wayside, slowly tending towards that point of the
compass where the chateau of Monsieur the Marquis, now in his grave,
listened to the whispering trees. Such ample leisure had the stone faces,
now, for listening to the trees and to the fountain, that the few village
scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat and fragments of dead stick
to burn, strayed within sight of the great stone courtyard and terrace
staircase, had it borne in upon their starved fancy that the expression of the
faces was altered. A rumour just lived in the village—had a faint and bare
existence there, as its people had—that when the knife struck home, the
faces changed, from faces of pride to faces of anger and pain; also, that
when that dangling figure was hauled up forty feet above the fountain, they
changed again, and bore a cruel look of being avenged, which they would
henceforth bear for ever. In the stone face over the great window of the bed-
chamber where the murder was done, two fine dints were pointed out in the
sculptured nose, which everybody recognised, and which nobody had seen
of old; and on the scarce occasions when two or three ragged peasants
emerged from the crowd to take a hurried peep at Monsieur the Marquis
petrified, a skinny finger would not have pointed to it for a minute, before
they all started away among the moss and leaves, like the more fortunate
hares who could find a living there.
Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the
stone floor, and the pure water in the village well—thousands of acres of
land—a whole province of France—all France itself—lay under the night
sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. So does a whole world, with
all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere

human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its
composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of
this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every
responsible creature on it.
The Defarges, husband and wife, came lumbering under the starlight, in
their public vehicle, to that gate of Paris whereunto their journey naturally
tended. There was the usual stoppage at the barrier guardhouse, and the
usual lanterns came glancing forth for the usual examination and inquiry.
Monsieur Defarge alighted; knowing one or two of the soldiery there, and
one of the police. The latter he was intimate with, and affectionately
embraced.
When Saint Antoine had again enfolded the Defarges in his dusky wings,
and they, having finally alighted near the Saint’s boundaries, were picking
their way on foot through the black mud and offal of his streets, Madame
Defarge spoke to her husband:
“Say then, my friend; what did Jacques of the police tell thee?”
“Very little to-night, but all he knows. There is another spy
commissioned for our quarter. There may be many more, for all that he can
say, but he knows of one.”
“Eh well!” said Madame Defarge, raising her eyebrows with a cool
business air. “It is necessary to register him. How do they call that man?”
“He is English.”
“So much the better. His name?”
“Barsad,” said Defarge, making it French by pronunciation. But, he had
been so careful to get it accurately, that he then spelt it with perfect
correctness.
“Barsad,” repeated madame. “Good. Christian name?”
“John.”
“John Barsad,” repeated madame, after murmuring it once to herself.
“Good. His appearance; is it known?”
“Age, about forty years; height, about five feet nine; black hair;
complexion dark; generally, rather handsome visage; eyes dark, face thin,
long, and sallow; nose aquiline, but not straight, having a peculiar
inclination towards the left cheek; expression, therefore, sinister.”

“Eh my faith. It is a portrait!” said madame, laughing. “He shall be
registered to-morrow.”
They turned into the wine-shop, which was closed (for it was midnight),
and where Madame Defarge immediately took her post at her desk, counted
the small moneys that had been taken during her absence, examined the
stock, went through the entries in the book, made other entries of her own,
checked the serving man in every possible way, and finally dismissed him
to bed. Then she turned out the contents of the bowl of money for the
second time, and began knotting them up in her handkerchief, in a chain of
separate knots, for safe keeping through the night. All this while, Defarge,
with his pipe in his mouth, walked up and down, complacently admiring,
but never interfering; in which condition, indeed, as to the business and his
domestic affairs, he walked up and down through life.
The night was hot, and the shop, close shut and surrounded by so foul a
neighbourhood, was ill-smelling. Monsieur Defarge’s olfactory sense was
by no means delicate, but the stock of wine smelt much stronger than it ever
tasted, and so did the stock of rum and brandy and aniseed. He whiffed the
compound of scents away, as he put down his smoked-out pipe.
“You are fatigued,” said madame, raising her glance as she knotted the
money. “There are only the usual odours.”
“I am a little tired,” her husband acknowledged.
“You are a little depressed, too,” said madame, whose quick eyes had
never been so intent on the accounts, but they had had a ray or two for him.
“Oh, the men, the men!”
“But my dear!” began Defarge.
“But my dear!” repeated madame, nodding firmly; “but my dear! You are
faint of heart to-night, my dear!”
“Well, then,” said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung out of his breast,
“it is a long time.”
“It is a long time,” repeated his wife; “and when is it not a long time?
Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.”
“It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning,” said
Defarge.
“How long,” demanded madame, composedly, “does it take to make and
store the lightning? Tell me.”

Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something in that
too.
“It does not take a long time,” said madame, “for an earthquake to
swallow a town. Eh well! Tell me how long it takes to prepare the
earthquake?”
“A long time, I suppose,” said Defarge.
“But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything
before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it is not seen or
heard. That is your consolation. Keep it.”
She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a foe.
“I tell thee,” said madame, extending her right hand, for emphasis, “that
although it is a long time on the road, it is on the road and coming. I tell
thee it never retreats, and never stops. I tell thee it is always advancing.
Look around and consider the lives of all the world that we know, consider
the faces of all the world that we know, consider the rage and discontent to
which the Jacquerie addresses itself with more and more of certainty every
hour. Can such things last? Bah! I mock you.”
“My brave wife,” returned Defarge, standing before her with his head a
little bent, and his hands clasped at his back, like a docile and attentive
pupil before his catechist, “I do not question all this. But it has lasted a long
time, and it is possible—you know well, my wife, it is possible—that it may
not come, during our lives.”
“Eh well! How then?” demanded madame, tying another knot, as if there
were another enemy strangled.
“Well!” said Defarge, with a half complaining and half apologetic shrug.
“We shall not see the triumph.”
“We shall have helped it,” returned madame, with her extended hand in
strong action. “Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all my
soul, that we shall see the triumph. But even if not, even if I knew certainly
not, show me the neck of an aristocrat and tyrant, and still I would—”
Then madame, with her teeth set, tied a very terrible knot indeed.
“Hold!” cried Defarge, reddening a little as if he felt charged with
cowardice; “I too, my dear, will stop at nothing.”

“Yes! But it is your weakness that you sometimes need to see your victim
and your opportunity, to sustain you. Sustain yourself without that. When
the time comes, let loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the time with the
tiger and the devil chained—not shown—yet always ready.”
Madame enforced the conclusion of this piece of advice by striking her
little counter with her chain of money as if she knocked its brains out, and
then gathering the heavy handkerchief under her arm in a serene manner,
and observing that it was time to go to bed.
Next noontide saw the admirable woman in her usual place in the wine-
shop, knitting away assiduously. A rose lay beside her, and if she now and
then glanced at the flower, it was with no infraction of her usual
preoccupied air. There were a few customers, drinking or not drinking,
standing or seated, sprinkled about. The day was very hot, and heaps of
flies, who were extending their inquisitive and adventurous perquisitions
into all the glutinous little glasses near madame, fell dead at the bottom.
Their decease made no impression on the other flies out promenading, who
looked at them in the coolest manner (as if they themselves were elephants,
or something as far removed), until they met the same fate. Curious to
consider how heedless flies are!—perhaps they thought as much at Court
that sunny summer day.
A figure entering at the door threw a shadow on Madame Defarge which
she felt to be a new one. She laid down her knitting, and began to pin her
rose in her head-dress, before she looked at the figure.
It was curious. The moment Madame Defarge took up the rose, the
customers ceased talking, and began gradually to drop out of the wine-shop.
“Good day, madame,” said the new-comer.
“Good day, monsieur.”
She said it aloud, but added to herself, as she resumed her knitting: “Hah!
Good day, age about forty, height about five feet nine, black hair, generally
rather handsome visage, complexion dark, eyes dark, thin, long and sallow
face, aquiline nose but not straight, having a peculiar inclination towards
the left cheek which imparts a sinister expression! Good day, one and all!”
“Have the goodness to give me a little glass of old cognac, and a
mouthful of cool fresh water, madame.”
Madame complied with a polite air.

“Marvellous cognac this, madame!”
It was the first time it had ever been so complimented, and Madame
Defarge knew enough of its antecedents to know better. She said, however,
that the cognac was flattered, and took up her knitting. The visitor watched
her fingers for a few moments, and took the opportunity of observing the
place in general.
“You knit with great skill, madame.”
“I am accustomed to it.”
“A pretty pattern too!”
“You think so?” said madame, looking at him with a smile.
“Decidedly. May one ask what it is for?”
“Pastime,” said madame, still looking at him with a smile while her
fingers moved nimbly.
“Not for use?”
“That depends. I may find a use for it one day. If I do—Well,” said
madame, drawing a breath and nodding her head with a stern kind of
coquetry, “I’ll use it!”
It was remarkable; but, the taste of Saint Antoine seemed to be decidedly
opposed to a rose on the head-dress of Madame Defarge. Two men had
entered separately, and had been about to order drink, when, catching sight
of that novelty, they faltered, made a pretence of looking about as if for
some friend who was not there, and went away. Nor, of those who had been
there when this visitor entered, was there one left. They had all dropped off.
The spy had kept his eyes open, but had been able to detect no sign. They
had lounged away in a poverty-stricken, purposeless, accidental manner,
quite natural and unimpeachable.
“John,” thought madame, checking off her work as her fingers knitted,
and her eyes looked at the stranger. “Stay long enough, and I shall knit
‘barsad’ before you go.”
“You have a husband, madame?”
“I have.”
“Children?”
“No children.”
“Business seems bad?”

“Business is very bad; the people are so poor.”
“Ah, the unfortunate, miserable people! So oppressed, too—as you say.”
“As you say,” madame retorted, correcting him, and deftly knitting an
extra something into his name that boded him no good.
“Pardon me; certainly it was I who said so, but you naturally think so. Of
course.”
“I think?” returned madame, in a high voice. “I and my husband have
enough to do to keep this wine-shop open, without thinking. All we think,
here, is how to live. That is the subject we think of, and it gives us, from
morning to night, enough to think about, without embarrassing our heads
concerning others. I think for others? No, no.”
The spy, who was there to pick up any crumbs he could find or make, did
not allow his baffled state to express itself in his sinister face; but, stood
with an air of gossiping gallantry, leaning his elbow on Madame Defarge’s
little counter, and occasionally sipping his cognac.
“A bad business this, madame, of Gaspard’s execution. Ah! the poor
Gaspard!” With a sigh of great compassion.
“My faith!” returned madame, coolly and lightly, “if people use knives
for such purposes, they have to pay for it. He knew beforehand what the
price of his luxury was; he has paid the price.”
“I believe,” said the spy, dropping his soft voice to a tone that invited
confidence, and expressing an injured revolutionary susceptibility in every
muscle of his wicked face: “I believe there is much compassion and anger
in this neighbourhood, touching the poor fellow? Between ourselves.”
“Is there?” asked madame, vacantly.
“Is there not?”
“—Here is my husband!” said Madame Defarge.
As the keeper of the wine-shop entered at the door, the spy saluted him
by touching his hat, and saying, with an engaging smile, “Good day,
Jacques!” Defarge stopped short, and stared at him.
“Good day, Jacques!” the spy repeated; with not quite so much
confidence, or quite so easy a smile under the stare.
“You deceive yourself, monsieur,” returned the keeper of the wine-shop.
“You mistake me for another. That is not my name. I am Ernest Defarge.”

“It is all the same,” said the spy, airily, but discomfited too: “good day!”
“Good day!” answered Defarge, drily.
“I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure of chatting when
you entered, that they tell me there is—and no wonder!—much sympathy
and anger in Saint Antoine, touching the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard.”
“No one has told me so,” said Defarge, shaking his head. “I know
nothing of it.”
Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and stood with his
hand on the back of his wife’s chair, looking over that barrier at the person
to whom they were both opposed, and whom either of them would have
shot with the greatest satisfaction.
The spy, well used to his business, did not change his unconscious
attitude, but drained his little glass of cognac, took a sip of fresh water, and
asked for another glass of cognac. Madame Defarge poured it out for him,
took to her knitting again, and hummed a little song over it.
“You seem to know this quarter well; that is to say, better than I do?”
observed Defarge.
“Not at all, but I hope to know it better. I am so profoundly interested in
its miserable inhabitants.”
“Hah!” muttered Defarge.
“The pleasure of conversing with you, Monsieur Defarge, recalls to me,”
pursued the spy, “that I have the honour of cherishing some interesting
associations with your name.”
“Indeed!” said Defarge, with much indifference.
“Yes, indeed. When Doctor Manette was released, you, his old domestic,
had the charge of him, I know. He was delivered to you. You see I am
informed of the circumstances?”
“Such is the fact, certainly,” said Defarge. He had had it conveyed to
him, in an accidental touch of his wife’s elbow as she knitted and warbled,
that he would do best to answer, but always with brevity.
“It was to you,” said the spy, “that his daughter came; and it was from
your care that his daughter took him, accompanied by a neat brown
monsieur; how is he called?—in a little wig—Lorry—of the bank of Tellson
and Company—over to England.”

“Such is the fact,” repeated Defarge.
“Very interesting remembrances!” said the spy. “I have known Doctor
Manette and his daughter, in England.”
“Yes?” said Defarge.
“You don’t hear much about them now?” said the spy.
“No,” said Defarge.
“In effect,” madame struck in, looking up from her work and her little
song, “we never hear about them. We received the news of their safe arrival,
and perhaps another letter, or perhaps two; but, since then, they have
gradually taken their road in life—we, ours—and we have held no
correspondence.”
“Perfectly so, madame,” replied the spy. “She is going to be married.”
“Going?” echoed madame. “She was pretty enough to have been married
long ago. You English are cold, it seems to me.”
“Oh! You know I am English.”
“I perceive your tongue is,” returned madame; “and what the tongue is, I
suppose the man is.”
He did not take the identification as a compliment; but he made the best
of it, and turned it off with a laugh. After sipping his cognac to the end, he
added:
“Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to an Englishman; to
one who, like herself, is French by birth. And speaking of Gaspard (ah, poor
Gaspard! It was cruel, cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is going to marry
the nephew of Monsieur the Marquis, for whom Gaspard was exalted to that
height of so many feet; in other words, the present Marquis. But he lives
unknown in England, he is no Marquis there; he is Mr. Charles Darnay.
D’Aulnais is the name of his mother’s family.”
Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence had a palpable
effect upon her husband. Do what he would, behind the little counter, as to
the striking of a light and the lighting of his pipe, he was troubled, and his
hand was not trustworthy. The spy would have been no spy if he had failed
to see it, or to record it in his mind.
Having made, at least, this one hit, whatever it might prove to be worth,
and no customers coming in to help him to any other, Mr. Barsad paid for

what he had drunk, and took his leave: taking occasion to say, in a genteel
manner, before he departed, that he looked forward to the pleasure of seeing
Monsieur and Madame Defarge again. For some minutes after he had
emerged into the outer presence of Saint Antoine, the husband and wife
remained exactly as he had left them, lest he should come back.
“Can it be true,” said Defarge, in a low voice, looking down at his wife as
he stood smoking with his hand on the back of her chair: “what he has said
of Ma’amselle Manette?”
“As he has said it,” returned madame, lifting her eyebrows a little, “it is
probably false. But it may be true.”
“If it is—” Defarge began, and stopped.
“If it is?” repeated his wife.
“—And if it does come, while we live to see it triumph—I hope, for her
sake, Destiny will keep her husband out of France.”
“Her husband’s destiny,” said Madame Defarge, with her usual
composure, “will take him where he is to go, and will lead him to the end
that is to end him. That is all I know.”
“But it is very strange—now, at least, is it not very strange”—said
Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to induce her to admit it, “that, after
all our sympathy for Monsieur her father, and herself, her husband’s name
should be proscribed under your hand at this moment, by the side of that
infernal dog’s who has just left us?”
“Stranger things than that will happen when it does come,” answered
madame. “I have them both here, of a certainty; and they are both here for
their merits; that is enough.”
She rolled up her knitting when she had said those words, and presently
took the rose out of the handkerchief that was wound about her head. Either
Saint Antoine had an instinctive sense that the objectionable decoration was
gone, or Saint Antoine was on the watch for its disappearance; howbeit, the
Saint took courage to lounge in, very shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop
recovered its habitual aspect.
In the evening, at which season of all others Saint Antoine turned himself
inside out, and sat on door-steps and window-ledges, and came to the
corners of vile streets and courts, for a breath of air, Madame Defarge with
her work in her hand was accustomed to pass from place to place and from

group to group: a Missionary—there were many like her—such as the
world will do well never to breed again. All the women knitted. They
knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical
substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the
digestive apparatus: if the bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would
have been more famine-pinched.
But, as the fingers went, the eyes went, and the thoughts. And as Madame
Defarge moved on from group to group, all three went quicker and fiercer
among every little knot of women that she had spoken with, and left behind.
Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with admiration. “A
great woman,” said he, “a strong woman, a grand woman, a frightfully
grand woman!”
Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells and
the distant beating of the military drums in the Palace Courtyard, as the
women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another
darkness was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing
pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France, should be melted into
thundering cannon; when the military drums should be beating to drown a
wretched voice, that night all potent as the voice of Power and Plenty,
Freedom and Life. So much was closing in about the women who sat
knitting, knitting, that they their very selves were closing in around a
structure yet unbuilt, where they were to sit knitting, knitting, counting
dropping heads.

CHAPTER XVII.
One Night

N
ever did the sun go down with a brighter glory on the quiet corner
in Soho, than one memorable evening when the Doctor and his
daughter sat under the plane-tree together. Never did the moon rise
with a milder radiance over great London, than on that night when it found
them still seated under the tree, and shone upon their faces through its
leaves.
Lucie was to be married to-morrow. She had reserved this last evening
for her father, and they sat alone under the plane-tree.
“You are happy, my dear father?”
“Quite, my child.”
They had said little, though they had been there a long time. When it was
yet light enough to work and read, she had neither engaged herself in her
usual work, nor had she read to him. She had employed herself in both
ways, at his side under the tree, many and many a time; but, this time was
not quite like any other, and nothing could make it so.
“And I am very happy to-night, dear father. I am deeply happy in the love
that Heaven has so blessed—my love for Charles, and Charles’s love for
me. But, if my life were not to be still consecrated to you, or if my marriage
were so arranged as that it would part us, even by the length of a few of
these streets, I should be more unhappy and self-reproachful now than I can
tell you. Even as it is—”
Even as it was, she could not command her voice.
In the sad moonlight, she clasped him by the neck, and laid her face upon
his breast. In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself
is—as the light called human life is—at its coming and its going.
“Dearest dear! Can you tell me, this last time, that you feel quite, quite
sure, no new affections of mine, and no new duties of mine, will ever

interpose between us? I know it well, but do you know it? In your own
heart, do you feel quite certain?”
Her father answered, with a cheerful firmness of conviction he could
scarcely have assumed, “Quite sure, my darling! More than that,” he added,
as he tenderly kissed her: “my future is far brighter, Lucie, seen through
your marriage, than it could have been—nay, than it ever was—without it.”
“If I could hope that, my father!—”
“Believe it, love! Indeed it is so. Consider how natural and how plain it
is, my dear, that it should be so. You, devoted and young, cannot fully
appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your life should not be wasted—”
She moved her hand towards his lips, but he took it in his, and repeated
the word.
“—wasted, my child—should not be wasted, struck aside from the
natural order of things—for my sake. Your unselfishness cannot entirely
comprehend how much my mind has gone on this; but, only ask yourself,
how could my happiness be perfect, while yours was incomplete?”
“If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been quite happy
with you.”
He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have been
unhappy without Charles, having seen him; and replied:
“My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not been Charles,
it would have been another. Or, if it had been no other, I should have been
the cause, and then the dark part of my life would have cast its shadow
beyond myself, and would have fallen on you.”
It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him refer to
the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new sensation while his
words were in her ears; and she remembered it long afterwards.
“See!” said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards the moon.
“I have looked at her from my prison-window, when I could not bear her
light. I have looked at her when it has been such torture to me to think of
her shining upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my head against my
prison-walls. I have looked at her, in a state so dull and lethargic, that I have
thought of nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across
her at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I could
intersect them.” He added in his inward and pondering manner, as he

looked at the moon, “It was twenty either way, I remember, and the
twentieth was difficult to squeeze in.”
The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that time,
deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to shock her in the
manner of his reference. He only seemed to contrast his present
cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance that was over.
“I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon the unborn
child from whom I had been rent. Whether it was alive. Whether it had been
born alive, or the poor mother’s shock had killed it. Whether it was a son
who would some day avenge his father. (There was a time in my
imprisonment, when my desire for vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it
was a son who would never know his father’s story; who might even live to
weigh the possibility of his father’s having disappeared of his own will and
act. Whether it was a daughter who would grow to be a woman.”
She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand.
“I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful of me—
rather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious of me. I have cast up the
years of her age, year after year. I have seen her married to a man who
knew nothing of my fate. I have altogether perished from the remembrance
of the living, and in the next generation my place was a blank.”
“My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a daughter who
never existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been that child.”
“You, Lucie? It is out of the Consolation and restoration you have
brought to me, that these remembrances arise, and pass between us and the
moon on this last night.—What did I say just now?”
“She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you.”
“So! But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness and the silence
have touched me in a different way—have affected me with something as
like a sorrowful sense of peace, as any emotion that had pain for its
foundations could—I have imagined her as coming to me in my cell, and
leading me out into the freedom beyond the fortress. I have seen her image
in the moonlight often, as I now see you; except that I never held her in my
arms; it stood between the little grated window and the door. But, you
understand that that was not the child I am speaking of?”
“The figure was not; the—the—image; the fancy?”

“No. That was another thing. It stood before my disturbed sense of sight,
but it never moved. The phantom that my mind pursued, was another and
more real child. Of her outward appearance I know no more than that she
was like her mother. The other had that likeness too—as you have—but was
not the same. Can you follow me, Lucie? Hardly, I think? I doubt you must
have been a solitary prisoner to understand these perplexed distinctions.”
His collected and calm manner could not prevent her blood from running
cold, as he thus tried to anatomise his old condition.
“In that more peaceful state, I have imagined her, in the moonlight,
coming to me and taking me out to show me that the home of her married
life was full of her loving remembrance of her lost father. My picture was in
her room, and I was in her prayers. Her life was active, cheerful, useful; but
my poor history pervaded it all.”
“I was that child, my father, I was not half so good, but in my love that
was I.”
“And she showed me her children,” said the Doctor of Beauvais, “and
they had heard of me, and had been taught to pity me. When they passed a
prison of the State, they kept far from its frowning walls, and looked up at
its bars, and spoke in whispers. She could never deliver me; I imagined that
she always brought me back after showing me such things. But then,
blessed with the relief of tears, I fell upon my knees, and blessed her.”
“I am that child, I hope, my father. O my dear, my dear, will you bless me
as fervently to-morrow?”
“Lucie, I recall these old troubles in the reason that I have to-night for
loving you better than words can tell, and thanking God for my great
happiness. My thoughts, when they were wildest, never rose near the
happiness that I have known with you, and that we have before us.”
He embraced her, solemnly commended her to Heaven, and humbly
thanked Heaven for having bestowed her on him. By-and-bye, they went
into the house.
There was no one bidden to the marriage but Mr. Lorry; there was even
to be no bridesmaid but the gaunt Miss Pross. The marriage was to make no
change in their place of residence; they had been able to extend it, by taking
to themselves the upper rooms formerly belonging to the apocryphal
invisible lodger, and they desired nothing more.

Doctor Manette was very cheerful at the little supper. They were only
three at table, and Miss Pross made the third. He regretted that Charles was
not there; was more than half disposed to object to the loving little plot that
kept him away; and drank to him affectionately.
So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and they separated.
But, in the stillness of the third hour of the morning, Lucie came downstairs
again, and stole into his room; not free from unshaped fears, beforehand.
All things, however, were in their places; all was quiet; and he lay asleep,
his white hair picturesque on the untroubled pillow, and his hands lying
quiet on the coverlet. She put her needless candle in the shadow at a
distance, crept up to his bed, and put her lips to his; then, leaned over him,
and looked at him.
Into his handsome face, the bitter waters of captivity had worn; but, he
covered up their tracks with a determination so strong, that he held the
mastery of them even in his sleep. A more remarkable face in its quiet,
resolute, and guarded struggle with an unseen assailant, was not to be
beheld in all the wide dominions of sleep, that night.
She timidly laid her hand on his dear breast, and put up a prayer that she
might ever be as true to him as her love aspired to be, and as his sorrows
deserved. Then, she withdrew her hand, and kissed his lips once more, and
went away. So, the sunrise came, and the shadows of the leaves of the
plane-tree moved upon his face, as softly as her lips had moved in praying
for him.

CHAPTER XVIII.
Nine Days

T
he marriage-day was shining brightly, and they were ready outside
the closed door of the Doctor’s room, where he was speaking with
Charles Darnay. They were ready to go to church; the beautiful
bride, Mr. Lorry, and Miss Pross—to whom the event, through a gradual
process of reconcilement to the inevitable, would have been one of absolute
bliss, but for the yet lingering consideration that her brother Solomon
should have been the bridegroom.
“And so,” said Mr. Lorry, who could not sufficiently admire the bride,
and who had been moving round her to take in every point of her quiet,
pretty dress; “and so it was for this, my sweet Lucie, that I brought you
across the Channel, such a baby! Lord bless me! How little I thought what I
was doing! How lightly I valued the obligation I was conferring on my
friend Mr. Charles!”
“You didn’t mean it,” remarked the matter-of-fact Miss Pross, “and
therefore how could you know it? Nonsense!”
“Really? Well; but don’t cry,” said the gentle Mr. Lorry.
“I am not crying,” said Miss Pross; “you are.”
“I, my Pross?” (By this time, Mr. Lorry dared to be pleasant with her, on
occasion.)
“You were, just now; I saw you do it, and I don’t wonder at it. Such a
present of plate as you have made ’em, is enough to bring tears into
anybody’s eyes. There’s not a fork or a spoon in the collection,” said Miss
Pross, “that I didn’t cry over, last night after the box came, till I couldn’t see
it.”
“I am highly gratified,” said Mr. Lorry, “though, upon my honour, I had
no intention of rendering those trifling articles of remembrance invisible to
any one. Dear me! This is an occasion that makes a man speculate on all he

has lost. Dear, dear, dear! To think that there might have been a Mrs. Lorry,
any time these fifty years almost!”
“Not at all!” From Miss Pross.
“You think there never might have been a Mrs. Lorry?” asked the
gentleman of that name.
“Pooh!” rejoined Miss Pross; “you were a bachelor in your cradle.”
“Well!” observed Mr. Lorry, beamingly adjusting his little wig, “that
seems probable, too.”
“And you were cut out for a bachelor,” pursued Miss Pross, “before you
were put in your cradle.”
“Then, I think,” said Mr. Lorry, “that I was very unhandsomely dealt
with, and that I ought to have had a voice in the selection of my pattern.
Enough! Now, my dear Lucie,” drawing his arm soothingly round her waist,
“I hear them moving in the next room, and Miss Pross and I, as two formal
folks of business, are anxious not to lose the final opportunity of saying
something to you that you wish to hear. You leave your good father, my
dear, in hands as earnest and as loving as your own; he shall be taken every
conceivable care of; during the next fortnight, while you are in
Warwickshire and thereabouts, even Tellson’s shall go to the wall
(comparatively speaking) before him. And when, at the fortnight’s end, he
comes to join you and your beloved husband, on your other fortnight’s trip
in Wales, you shall say that we have sent him to you in the best health and
in the happiest frame. Now, I hear Somebody’s step coming to the door. Let
me kiss my dear girl with an old-fashioned bachelor blessing, before
Somebody comes to claim his own.”
For a moment, he held the fair face from him to look at the well-
remembered expression on the forehead, and then laid the bright golden
hair against his little brown wig, with a genuine tenderness and delicacy
which, if such things be old-fashioned, were as old as Adam.
The door of the Doctor’s room opened, and he came out with Charles
Darnay. He was so deadly pale—which had not been the case when they
went in together—that no vestige of colour was to be seen in his face. But,
in the composure of his manner he was unaltered, except that to the shrewd
glance of Mr. Lorry it disclosed some shadowy indication that the old air of
avoidance and dread had lately passed over him, like a cold wind.

He gave his arm to his daughter, and took her down-stairs to the chariot
which Mr. Lorry had hired in honour of the day. The rest followed in
another carriage, and soon, in a neighbouring church, where no strange eyes
looked on, Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette were happily married.
Besides the glancing tears that shone among the smiles of the little group
when it was done, some diamonds, very bright and sparkling, glanced on
the bride’s hand, which were newly released from the dark obscurity of one
of Mr. Lorry’s pockets. They returned home to breakfast, and all went well,
and in due course the golden hair that had mingled with the poor
shoemaker’s white locks in the Paris garret, were mingled with them again
in the morning sunlight, on the threshold of the door at parting.
It was a hard parting, though it was not for long. But her father cheered
her, and said at last, gently disengaging himself from her enfolding arms,
“Take her, Charles! She is yours!”
And her agitated hand waved to them from a chaise window, and she was
gone.
The corner being out of the way of the idle and curious, and the
preparations having been very simple and few, the Doctor, Mr. Lorry, and
Miss Pross, were left quite alone. It was when they turned into the welcome
shade of the cool old hall, that Mr. Lorry observed a great change to have
come over the Doctor; as if the golden arm uplifted there, had struck him a
poisoned blow.
He had naturally repressed much, and some revulsion might have been
expected in him when the occasion for repression was gone. But, it was the
old scared lost look that troubled Mr. Lorry; and through his absent manner
of clasping his head and drearily wandering away into his own room when
they got up-stairs, Mr. Lorry was reminded of Defarge the wine-shop
keeper, and the starlight ride.
“I think,” he whispered to Miss Pross, after anxious consideration, “I
think we had best not speak to him just now, or at all disturb him. I must
look in at Tellson’s; so I will go there at once and come back presently.
Then, we will take him a ride into the country, and dine there, and all will
be well.”
It was easier for Mr. Lorry to look in at Tellson’s, than to look out of
Tellson’s. He was detained two hours. When he came back, he ascended the

old staircase alone, having asked no question of the servant; going thus into
the Doctor’s rooms, he was stopped by a low sound of knocking.
“Good God!” he said, with a start. “What’s that?”
Miss Pross, with a terrified face, was at his ear. “O me, O me! All is
lost!” cried she, wringing her hands. “What is to be told to Ladybird? He
doesn’t know me, and is making shoes!”
Mr. Lorry said what he could to calm her, and went himself into the
Doctor’s room. The bench was turned towards the light, as it had been when
he had seen the shoemaker at his work before, and his head was bent down,
and he was very busy.
“Doctor Manette. My dear friend, Doctor Manette!”
The Doctor looked at him for a moment—half inquiringly, half as if he
were angry at being spoken to—and bent over his work again.
He had laid aside his coat and waistcoat; his shirt was open at the throat,
as it used to be when he did that work; and even the old haggard, faded
surface of face had come back to him. He worked hard—impatiently—as if
in some sense of having been interrupted.
Mr. Lorry glanced at the work in his hand, and observed that it was a
shoe of the old size and shape. He took up another that was lying by him,
and asked what it was.
“A young lady’s walking shoe,” he muttered, without looking up. “It
ought to have been finished long ago. Let it be.”
“But, Doctor Manette. Look at me!”
He obeyed, in the old mechanically submissive manner, without pausing
in his work.
“You know me, my dear friend? Think again. This is not your proper
occupation. Think, dear friend!”
Nothing would induce him to speak more. He looked up, for an instant at
a time, when he was requested to do so; but, no persuasion would extract a
word from him. He worked, and worked, and worked, in silence, and words
fell on him as they would have fallen on an echoless wall, or on the air. The
only ray of hope that Mr. Lorry could discover, was, that he sometimes
furtively looked up without being asked. In that, there seemed a faint

expression of curiosity or perplexity—as though he were trying to reconcile
some doubts in his mind.
Two things at once impressed themselves on Mr. Lorry, as important
above all others; the first, that this must be kept secret from Lucie; the
second, that it must be kept secret from all who knew him. In conjunction
with Miss Pross, he took immediate steps towards the latter precaution, by
giving out that the Doctor was not well, and required a few days of
complete rest. In aid of the kind deception to be practised on his daughter,
Miss Pross was to write, describing his having been called away
professionally, and referring to an imaginary letter of two or three hurried
lines in his own hand, represented to have been addressed to her by the
same post.
These measures, advisable to be taken in any case, Mr. Lorry took in the
hope of his coming to himself. If that should happen soon, he kept another
course in reserve; which was, to have a certain opinion that he thought the
best, on the Doctor’s case.
In the hope of his recovery, and of resort to this third course being
thereby rendered practicable, Mr. Lorry resolved to watch him attentively,
with as little appearance as possible of doing so. He therefore made
arrangements to absent himself from Tellson’s for the first time in his life,
and took his post by the window in the same room.
He was not long in discovering that it was worse than useless to speak to
him, since, on being pressed, he became worried. He abandoned that
attempt on the first day, and resolved merely to keep himself always before
him, as a silent protest against the delusion into which he had fallen, or was
falling. He remained, therefore, in his seat near the window, reading and
writing, and expressing in as many pleasant and natural ways as he could
think of, that it was a free place.
Doctor Manette took what was given him to eat and drink, and worked
on, that first day, until it was too dark to see—worked on, half an hour after
Mr. Lorry could not have seen, for his life, to read or write. When he put his
tools aside as useless, until morning, Mr. Lorry rose and said to him:
“Will you go out?”
He looked down at the floor on either side of him in the old manner,
looked up in the old manner, and repeated in the old low voice:

“Out?”
“Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?”
He made no effort to say why not, and said not a word more. But, Mr.
Lorry thought he saw, as he leaned forward on his bench in the dusk, with
his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, that he was in some
misty way asking himself, “Why not?” The sagacity of the man of business
perceived an advantage here, and determined to hold it.
Miss Pross and he divided the night into two watches, and observed him
at intervals from the adjoining room. He paced up and down for a long time
before he lay down; but, when he did finally lay himself down, he fell
asleep. In the morning, he was up betimes, and went straight to his bench
and to work.
On this second day, Mr. Lorry saluted him cheerfully by his name, and
spoke to him on topics that had been of late familiar to them. He returned
no reply, but it was evident that he heard what was said, and that he thought
about it, however confusedly. This encouraged Mr. Lorry to have Miss
Pross in with her work, several times during the day; at those times, they
quietly spoke of Lucie, and of her father then present, precisely in the usual
manner, and as if there were nothing amiss. This was done without any
demonstrative accompaniment, not long enough, or often enough to harass
him; and it lightened Mr. Lorry’s friendly heart to believe that he looked up
oftener, and that he appeared to be stirred by some perception of
inconsistencies surrounding him.
When it fell dark again, Mr. Lorry asked him as before:
“Dear Doctor, will you go out?”
As before, he repeated, “Out?”
“Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?”
This time, Mr. Lorry feigned to go out when he could extract no answer
from him, and, after remaining absent for an hour, returned. In the
meanwhile, the Doctor had removed to the seat in the window, and had sat
there looking down at the plane-tree; but, on Mr. Lorry’s return, he slipped
away to his bench.
The time went very slowly on, and Mr. Lorry’s hope darkened, and his
heart grew heavier again, and grew yet heavier and heavier every day. The

third day came and went, the fourth, the fifth. Five days, six days, seven
days, eight days, nine days.
With a hope ever darkening, and with a heart always growing heavier and
heavier, Mr. Lorry passed through this anxious time. The secret was well
kept, and Lucie was unconscious and happy; but he could not fail to
observe that the shoemaker, whose hand had been a little out at first, was
growing dreadfully skilful, and that he had never been so intent on his
work, and that his hands had never been so nimble and expert, as in the
dusk of the ninth evening.

CHAPTER XIX.
An Opinion

W
orn out by anxious watching, Mr. Lorry fell asleep at his post. On
the tenth morning of his suspense, he was startled by the shining
of the sun into the room where a heavy slumber had overtaken
him when it was dark night.
He rubbed his eyes and roused himself; but he doubted, when he had
done so, whether he was not still asleep. For, going to the door of the
Doctor’s room and looking in, he perceived that the shoemaker’s bench and
tools were put aside again, and that the Doctor himself sat reading at the
window. He was in his usual morning dress, and his face (which Mr. Lorry
could distinctly see), though still very pale, was calmly studious and
attentive.
Even when he had satisfied himself that he was awake, Mr. Lorry felt
giddily uncertain for some few moments whether the late shoemaking
might not be a disturbed dream of his own; for, did not his eyes show him
his friend before him in his accustomed clothing and aspect, and employed
as usual; and was there any sign within their range, that the change of which
he had so strong an impression had actually happened?
It was but the inquiry of his first confusion and astonishment, the answer
being obvious. If the impression were not produced by a real corresponding
and sufficient cause, how came he, Jarvis Lorry, there? How came he to
have fallen asleep, in his clothes, on the sofa in Doctor Manette’s
consulting-room, and to be debating these points outside the Doctor’s
bedroom door in the early morning?
Within a few minutes, Miss Pross stood whispering at his side. If he had
had any particle of doubt left, her talk would of necessity have resolved it;
but he was by that time clear-headed, and had none. He advised that they
should let the time go by until the regular breakfast-hour, and should then
meet the Doctor as if nothing unusual had occurred. If he appeared to be in

his customary state of mind, Mr. Lorry would then cautiously proceed to
seek direction and guidance from the opinion he had been, in his anxiety, so
anxious to obtain.
Miss Pross, submitting herself to his judgment, the scheme was worked
out with care. Having abundance of time for his usual methodical toilette,
Mr. Lorry presented himself at the breakfast-hour in his usual white linen,
and with his usual neat leg. The Doctor was summoned in the usual way,
and came to breakfast.
So far as it was possible to comprehend him without overstepping those
delicate and gradual approaches which Mr. Lorry felt to be the only safe
advance, he at first supposed that his daughter’s marriage had taken place
yesterday. An incidental allusion, purposely thrown out, to the day of the
week, and the day of the month, set him thinking and counting, and
evidently made him uneasy. In all other respects, however, he was so
composedly himself, that Mr. Lorry determined to have the aid he sought.
And that aid was his own.
Therefore, when the breakfast was done and cleared away, and he and the
Doctor were left together, Mr. Lorry said, feelingly:
“My dear Manette, I am anxious to have your opinion, in confidence, on
a very curious case in which I am deeply interested; that is to say, it is very
curious to me; perhaps, to your better information it may be less so.”
Glancing at his hands, which were discoloured by his late work, the
Doctor looked troubled, and listened attentively. He had already glanced at
his hands more than once.
“Doctor Manette,” said Mr. Lorry, touching him affectionately on the
arm, “the case is the case of a particularly dear friend of mine. Pray give
your mind to it, and advise me well for his sake—and above all, for his
daughter’s—his daughter’s, my dear Manette.”
“If I understand,” said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, “some mental shock
—?”
“Yes!”
“Be explicit,” said the Doctor. “Spare no detail.”
Mr. Lorry saw that they understood one another, and proceeded.
“My dear Manette, it is the case of an old and a prolonged shock, of great
acuteness and severity to the affections, the feelings, the—the—as you

express it—the mind. The mind. It is the case of a shock under which the
sufferer was borne down, one cannot say for how long, because I believe he
cannot calculate the time himself, and there are no other means of getting at
it. It is the case of a shock from which the sufferer recovered, by a process
that he cannot trace himself—as I once heard him publicly relate in a
striking manner. It is the case of a shock from which he has recovered, so
completely, as to be a highly intelligent man, capable of close application of
mind, and great exertion of body, and of constantly making fresh additions
to his stock of knowledge, which was already very large. But, unfortunately,
there has been,” he paused and took a deep breath—“a slight relapse.”
The Doctor, in a low voice, asked, “Of how long duration?”
“Nine days and nights.”
“How did it show itself? I infer,” glancing at his hands again, “in the
resumption of some old pursuit connected with the shock?”
“That is the fact.”
“Now, did you ever see him,” asked the Doctor, distinctly and
collectedly, though in the same low voice, “engaged in that pursuit
originally?”
“Once.”
“And when the relapse fell on him, was he in most respects—or in all
respects—as he was then?”
“I think in all respects.”
“You spoke of his daughter. Does his daughter know of the relapse?”
“No. It has been kept from her, and I hope will always be kept from her.
It is known only to myself, and to one other who may be trusted.”
The Doctor grasped his hand, and murmured, “That was very kind. That
was very thoughtful!” Mr. Lorry grasped his hand in return, and neither of
the two spoke for a little while.
“Now, my dear Manette,” said Mr. Lorry, at length, in his most
considerate and most affectionate way, “I am a mere man of business, and
unfit to cope with such intricate and difficult matters. I do not possess the
kind of information necessary; I do not possess the kind of intelligence; I
want guiding. There is no man in this world on whom I could so rely for
right guidance, as on you. Tell me, how does this relapse come about? Is

there danger of another? Could a repetition of it be prevented? How should
a repetition of it be treated? How does it come about at all? What can I do
for my friend? No man ever can have been more desirous in his heart to
serve a friend, than I am to serve mine, if I knew how.
“But I don’t know how to originate, in such a case. If your sagacity,
knowledge, and experience, could put me on the right track, I might be able
to do so much; unenlightened and undirected, I can do so little. Pray discuss
it with me; pray enable me to see it a little more clearly, and teach me how
to be a little more useful.”
Doctor Manette sat meditating after these earnest words were spoken,
and Mr. Lorry did not press him.
“I think it probable,” said the Doctor, breaking silence with an effort,
“that the relapse you have described, my dear friend, was not quite
unforeseen by its subject.”
“Was it dreaded by him?” Mr. Lorry ventured to ask.
“Very much.” He said it with an involuntary shudder.
“You have no idea how such an apprehension weighs on the sufferer’s
mind, and how difficult—how almost impossible—it is, for him to force
himself to utter a word upon the topic that oppresses him.”
“Would he,” asked Mr. Lorry, “be sensibly relieved if he could prevail
upon himself to impart that secret brooding to any one, when it is on him?”
“I think so. But it is, as I have told you, next to impossible. I even believe
it—in some cases—to be quite impossible.”
“Now,” said Mr. Lorry, gently laying his hand on the Doctor’s arm again,
after a short silence on both sides, “to what would you refer this attack?”
“I believe,” returned Doctor Manette, “that there had been a strong and
extraordinary revival of the train of thought and remembrance that was the
first cause of the malady. Some intense associations of a most distressing
nature were vividly recalled, I think. It is probable that there had long been
a dread lurking in his mind, that those associations would be recalled—say,
under certain circumstances—say, on a particular occasion. He tried to
prepare himself in vain; perhaps the effort to prepare himself made him less
able to bear it.”
“Would he remember what took place in the relapse?” asked Mr. Lorry,
with natural hesitation.

The Doctor looked desolately round the room, shook his head, and
answered, in a low voice, “Not at all.”
“Now, as to the future,” hinted Mr. Lorry.
“As to the future,” said the Doctor, recovering firmness, “I should have
great hope. As it pleased Heaven in its mercy to restore him so soon, I
should have great hope. He, yielding under the pressure of a complicated
something, long dreaded and long vaguely foreseen and contended against,
and recovering after the cloud had burst and passed, I should hope that the
worst was over.”
“Well, well! That’s good comfort. I am thankful!” said Mr. Lorry.
“I am thankful!” repeated the Doctor, bending his head with reverence.
“There are two other points,” said Mr. Lorry, “on which I am anxious to
be instructed. I may go on?”
“You cannot do your friend a better service.” The Doctor gave him his
hand.
“To the first, then. He is of a studious habit, and unusually energetic; he
applies himself with great ardour to the acquisition of professional
knowledge, to the conducting of experiments, to many things. Now, does he
do too much?”
“I think not. It may be the character of his mind, to be always in singular
need of occupation. That may be, in part, natural to it; in part, the result of
affliction. The less it was occupied with healthy things, the more it would
be in danger of turning in the unhealthy direction. He may have observed
himself, and made the discovery.”
“You are sure that he is not under too great a strain?”
“I think I am quite sure of it.”
“My dear Manette, if he were overworked now—”
“My dear Lorry, I doubt if that could easily be. There has been a violent
stress in one direction, and it needs a counterweight.”
“Excuse me, as a persistent man of business. Assuming for a moment,
that he was overworked; it would show itself in some renewal of this
disorder?”
“I do not think so. I do not think,” said Doctor Manette with the firmness
of self-conviction, “that anything but the one train of association would

renew it. I think that, henceforth, nothing but some extraordinary jarring of
that chord could renew it. After what has happened, and after his recovery, I
find it difficult to imagine any such violent sounding of that string again. I
trust, and I almost believe, that the circumstances likely to renew it are
exhausted.”
He spoke with the diffidence of a man who knew how slight a thing
would overset the delicate organisation of the mind, and yet with the
confidence of a man who had slowly won his assurance out of personal
endurance and distress. It was not for his friend to abate that confidence. He
professed himself more relieved and encouraged than he really was, and
approached his second and last point. He felt it to be the most difficult of
all; but, remembering his old Sunday morning conversation with Miss
Pross, and remembering what he had seen in the last nine days, he knew
that he must face it.
“The occupation resumed under the influence of this passing affliction so
happily recovered from,” said Mr. Lorry, clearing his throat, “we will call—
Blacksmith’s work, Blacksmith’s work. We will say, to put a case and for
the sake of illustration, that he had been used, in his bad time, to work at a
little forge. We will say that he was unexpectedly found at his forge again.
Is it not a pity that he should keep it by him?”
The Doctor shaded his forehead with his hand, and beat his foot
nervously on the ground.
“He has always kept it by him,” said Mr. Lorry, with an anxious look at
his friend. “Now, would it not be better that he should let it go?”
Still, the Doctor, with shaded forehead, beat his foot nervously on the
ground.
“You do not find it easy to advise me?” said Mr. Lorry. “I quite
understand it to be a nice question. And yet I think—” And there he shook
his head, and stopped.
“You see,” said Doctor Manette, turning to him after an uneasy pause, “it
is very hard to explain, consistently, the innermost workings of this poor
man’s mind. He once yearned so frightfully for that occupation, and it was
so welcome when it came; no doubt it relieved his pain so much, by
substituting the perplexity of the fingers for the perplexity of the brain, and
by substituting, as he became more practised, the ingenuity of the hands, for
the ingenuity of the mental torture; that he has never been able to bear the

thought of putting it quite out of his reach. Even now, when I believe he is
more hopeful of himself than he has ever been, and even speaks of himself
with a kind of confidence, the idea that he might need that old employment,
and not find it, gives him a sudden sense of terror, like that which one may
fancy strikes to the heart of a lost child.”
He looked like his illustration, as he raised his eyes to Mr. Lorry’s face.
“But may not—mind! I ask for information, as a plodding man of
business who only deals with such material objects as guineas, shillings,
and bank-notes—may not the retention of the thing involve the retention of
the idea? If the thing were gone, my dear Manette, might not the fear go
with it? In short, is it not a concession to the misgiving, to keep the forge?”
There was another silence.
“You see, too,” said the Doctor, tremulously, “it is such an old
companion.”
“I would not keep it,” said Mr. Lorry, shaking his head; for he gained in
firmness as he saw the Doctor disquieted. “I would recommend him to
sacrifice it. I only want your authority. I am sure it does no good. Come!
Give me your authority, like a dear good man. For his daughter’s sake, my
dear Manette!”
Very strange to see what a struggle there was within him!
“In her name, then, let it be done; I sanction it. But, I would not take it
away while he was present. Let it be removed when he is not there; let him
miss his old companion after an absence.”
Mr. Lorry readily engaged for that, and the conference was ended. They
passed the day in the country, and the Doctor was quite restored. On the
three following days he remained perfectly well, and on the fourteenth day
he went away to join Lucie and her husband. The precaution that had been
taken to account for his silence, Mr. Lorry had previously explained to him,
and he had written to Lucie in accordance with it, and she had no
suspicions.
On the night of the day on which he left the house, Mr. Lorry went into
his room with a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer, attended by Miss Pross
carrying a light. There, with closed doors, and in a mysterious and guilty
manner, Mr. Lorry hacked the shoemaker’s bench to pieces, while Miss
Pross held the candle as if she were assisting at a murder—for which,

indeed, in her grimness, she was no unsuitable figure. The burning of the
body (previously reduced to pieces convenient for the purpose) was
commenced without delay in the kitchen fire; and the tools, shoes, and
leather, were buried in the garden. So wicked do destruction and secrecy
appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in
the commission of their deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt,
and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible crime.

Original

CHAPTER XX.
A Plea

W
hen the newly-married pair came home, the first person who
appeared, to offer his congratulations, was Sydney Carton. They
had not been at home many hours, when he presented himself. He
was not improved in habits, or in looks, or in manner; but there was a
certain rugged air of fidelity about him, which was new to the observation
of Charles Darnay.
He watched his opportunity of taking Darnay aside into a window, and of
speaking to him when no one overheard.
“Mr. Darnay,” said Carton, “I wish we might be friends.”
“We are already friends, I hope.”
“You are good enough to say so, as a fashion of speech; but, I don’t mean
any fashion of speech. Indeed, when I say I wish we might be friends, I
scarcely mean quite that, either.”
Charles Darnay—as was natural—asked him, in all good-humour and
good-fellowship, what he did mean?
“Upon my life,” said Carton, smiling, “I find that easier to comprehend in
my own mind, than to convey to yours. However, let me try. You remember
a certain famous occasion when I was more drunk than—than usual?”
“I remember a certain famous occasion when you forced me to confess
that you had been drinking.”
“I remember it too. The curse of those occasions is heavy upon me, for I
always remember them. I hope it may be taken into account one day, when
all days are at an end for me! Don’t be alarmed; I am not going to preach.”
“I am not at all alarmed. Earnestness in you, is anything but alarming to
me.”

“Ah!” said Carton, with a careless wave of his hand, as if he waved that
away. “On the drunken occasion in question (one of a large number, as you
know), I was insufferable about liking you, and not liking you. I wish you
would forget it.”
“I forgot it long ago.”
“Fashion of speech again! But, Mr. Darnay, oblivion is not so easy to me,
as you represent it to be to you. I have by no means forgotten it, and a light
answer does not help me to forget it.”
“If it was a light answer,” returned Darnay, “I beg your forgiveness for it.
I had no other object than to turn a slight thing, which, to my surprise,
seems to trouble you too much, aside. I declare to you, on the faith of a
gentleman, that I have long dismissed it from my mind. Good Heaven, what
was there to dismiss! Have I had nothing more important to remember, in
the great service you rendered me that day?”
“As to the great service,” said Carton, “I am bound to avow to you, when
you speak of it in that way, that it was mere professional claptrap, I don’t
know that I cared what became of you, when I rendered it.—Mind! I say
when I rendered it; I am speaking of the past.”
“You make light of the obligation,” returned Darnay, “but I will not
quarrel with your light answer.”
“Genuine truth, Mr. Darnay, trust me! I have gone aside from my
purpose; I was speaking about our being friends. Now, you know me; you
know I am incapable of all the higher and better flights of men. If you doubt
it, ask Stryver, and he’ll tell you so.”
“I prefer to form my own opinion, without the aid of his.”
“Well! At any rate you know me as a dissolute dog, who has never done
any good, and never will.”
“I don’t know that you ‘never will.’”
“But I do, and you must take my word for it. Well! If you could endure to
have such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of such indifferent reputation,
coming and going at odd times, I should ask that I might be permitted to
come and go as a privileged person here; that I might be regarded as an
useless (and I would add, if it were not for the resemblance I detected
between you and me, an unornamental) piece of furniture, tolerated for its
old service, and taken no notice of. I doubt if I should abuse the permission.

It is a hundred to one if I should avail myself of it four times in a year. It
would satisfy me, I dare say, to know that I had it.”
“Will you try?”
“That is another way of saying that I am placed on the footing I have
indicated. I thank you, Darnay. I may use that freedom with your name?”
“I think so, Carton, by this time.”
They shook hands upon it, and Sydney turned away. Within a minute
afterwards, he was, to all outward appearance, as unsubstantial as ever.
When he was gone, and in the course of an evening passed with Miss
Pross, the Doctor, and Mr. Lorry, Charles Darnay made some mention of
this conversation in general terms, and spoke of Sydney Carton as a
problem of carelessness and recklessness. He spoke of him, in short, not
bitterly or meaning to bear hard upon him, but as anybody might who saw
him as he showed himself.
He had no idea that this could dwell in the thoughts of his fair young
wife; but, when he afterwards joined her in their own rooms, he found her
waiting for him with the old pretty lifting of the forehead strongly marked.
“We are thoughtful to-night!” said Darnay, drawing his arm about her.
“Yes, dearest Charles,” with her hands on his breast, and the inquiring
and attentive expression fixed upon him; “we are rather thoughtful to-night,
for we have something on our mind to-night.”
“What is it, my Lucie?”
“Will you promise not to press one question on me, if I beg you not to
ask it?”
“Will I promise? What will I not promise to my Love?”
What, indeed, with his hand putting aside the golden hair from the cheek,
and his other hand against the heart that beat for him!
“I think, Charles, poor Mr. Carton deserves more consideration and
respect than you expressed for him to-night.”
“Indeed, my own? Why so?”
“That is what you are not to ask me. But I think—I know—he does.”
“If you know it, it is enough. What would you have me do, my Life?”

“I would ask you, dearest, to be very generous with him always, and very
lenient on his faults when he is not by. I would ask you to believe that he
has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that there are deep wounds in
it. My dear, I have seen it bleeding.”
“It is a painful reflection to me,” said Charles Darnay, quite astounded,
“that I should have done him any wrong. I never thought this of him.”
“My husband, it is so. I fear he is not to be reclaimed; there is scarcely a
hope that anything in his character or fortunes is reparable now. But, I am
sure that he is capable of good things, gentle things, even magnanimous
things.”
She looked so beautiful in the purity of her faith in this lost man, that her
husband could have looked at her as she was for hours.
“And, O my dearest Love!” she urged, clinging nearer to him, laying her
head upon his breast, and raising her eyes to his, “remember how strong we
are in our happiness, and how weak he is in his misery!”
The supplication touched him home. “I will always remember it, dear
Heart! I will remember it as long as I live.”
He bent over the golden head, and put the rosy lips to his, and folded her
in his arms. If one forlorn wanderer then pacing the dark streets, could have
heard her innocent disclosure, and could have seen the drops of pity kissed
away by her husband from the soft blue eyes so loving of that husband, he
might have cried to the night—and the words would not have parted from
his lips for the first time—
“God bless her for her sweet compassion!”

CHAPTER XXI.
Echoing Footsteps

A
wonderful corner for echoes, it has been remarked, that corner
where the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the golden thread
which bound her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old
directress and companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house
in the tranquilly resounding corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of
years.
At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy young wife,
when her work would slowly fall from her hands, and her eyes would be
dimmed. For, there was something coming in the echoes, something light,
afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that stirred her heart too much. Fluttering
hopes and doubts—hopes, of a love as yet unknown to her: doubts, of her
remaining upon earth, to enjoy that new delight—divided her breast.
Among the echoes then, there would arise the sound of footsteps at her own
early grave; and thoughts of the husband who would be left so desolate, and
who would mourn for her so much, swelled to her eyes, and broke like
waves.
That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among the
advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of her
prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they would, the young
mother at the cradle side could always hear those coming. They came, and
the shady house was sunny with a child’s laugh, and the Divine friend of
children, to whom in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her
child in his arms, as He took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to
her.
Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all together,
weaving the service of her happy influence through the tissue of all their
lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie heard in the echoes of
years none but friendly and soothing sounds. Her husband’s step was strong

and prosperous among them; her father’s firm and equal. Lo, Miss Pross, in
harness of string, awakening the echoes, as an unruly charger, whip-
corrected, snorting and pawing the earth under the plane-tree in the garden!
Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they were not
harsh nor cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, lay in a halo on a
pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and he said, with a radiant smile,
“Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you both, and to leave my
pretty sister; but I am called, and I must go!” those were not tears all of
agony that wetted his young mother’s cheek, as the spirit departed from her
embrace that had been entrusted to it. Suffer them and forbid them not.
They see my Father’s face. O Father, blessed words!
Thus, the rustling of an Angel’s wings got blended with the other echoes,
and they were not wholly of earth, but had in them that breath of Heaven.
Sighs of the winds that blew over a little garden-tomb were mingled with
them also, and both were audible to Lucie, in a hushed murmur—like the
breathing of a summer sea asleep upon a sandy shore—as the little Lucie,
comically studious at the task of the morning, or dressing a doll at her
mother’s footstool, chattered in the tongues of the Two Cities that were
blended in her life.
The Echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney Carton. Some
half-dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his privilege of coming in
uninvited, and would sit among them through the evening, as he had once
done often. He never came there heated with wine. And one other thing
regarding him was whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by
all true echoes for ages and ages.
No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a
blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a mother,
but her children had a strange sympathy with him—an instinctive delicacy
of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities are touched in such a case, no
echoes tell; but it is so, and it was so here. Carton was the first stranger to
whom little Lucie held out her chubby arms, and he kept his place with her
as she grew. The little boy had spoken of him, almost at the last. “Poor
Carton! Kiss him for me!”
Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some great engine
forcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his useful friend in his
wake, like a boat towed astern. As the boat so favoured is usually in a rough

plight, and mostly under water, so, Sydney had a swamped life of it. But,
easy and strong custom, unhappily so much easier and stronger in him than
any stimulating sense of desert or disgrace, made it the life he was to lead;
and he no more thought of emerging from his state of lion’s jackal, than any
real jackal may be supposed to think of rising to be a lion. Stryver was rich;
had married a florid widow with property and three boys, who had nothing
particularly shining about them but the straight hair of their dumpling
heads.
These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage of the
most offensive quality from every pore, had walked before him like three
sheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and had offered as pupils to Lucie’s
husband: delicately saying “Halloa! here are three lumps of bread-and-
cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!” The polite rejection of
the three lumps of bread-and-cheese had quite bloated Mr. Stryver with
indignation, which he afterwards turned to account in the training of the
young gentlemen, by directing them to beware of the pride of Beggars, like
that tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of declaiming to Mrs. Stryver,
over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay had once put in practice
to “catch” him, and on the diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam,
which had rendered him “not to be caught.” Some of his King’s Bench
familiars, who were occasionally parties to the full-bodied wine and the lie,
excused him for the latter by saying that he had told it so often, that he
believed it himself—which is surely such an incorrigible aggravation of an
originally bad offence, as to justify any such offender’s being carried off to
some suitably retired spot, and there hanged out of the way.
These were among the echoes to which Lucie, sometimes pensive,
sometimes amused and laughing, listened in the echoing corner, until her
little daughter was six years old. How near to her heart the echoes of her
child’s tread came, and those of her own dear father’s, always active and
self-possessed, and those of her dear husband’s, need not be told. Nor, how
the lightest echo of their united home, directed by herself with such a wise
and elegant thrift that it was more abundant than any waste, was music to
her. Nor, how there were echoes all about her, sweet in her ears, of the
many times her father had told her that he found her more devoted to him
married (if that could be) than single, and of the many times her husband
had said to her that no cares and duties seemed to divide her love for him or
her help to him, and asked her “What is the magic secret, my darling, of

your being everything to all of us, as if there were only one of us, yet never
seeming to be hurried, or to have too much to do?”
But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled menacingly
in the corner all through this space of time. And it was now, about little
Lucie’s sixth birthday, that they began to have an awful sound, as of a great
storm in France with a dreadful sea rising.
On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine, Mr.
Lorry came in late, from Tellson’s, and sat himself down by Lucie and her
husband in the dark window. It was a hot, wild night, and they were all
three reminded of the old Sunday night when they had looked at the
lightning from the same place.
“I began to think,” said Mr. Lorry, pushing his brown wig back, “that I
should have to pass the night at Tellson’s. We have been so full of business
all day, that we have not known what to do first, or which way to turn.
There is such an uneasiness in Paris, that we have actually a run of
confidence upon us! Our customers over there, seem not to be able to
confide their property to us fast enough. There is positively a mania among
some of them for sending it to England.”
“That has a bad look,” said Darnay—
“A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay? Yes, but we don’t know what
reason there is in it. People are so unreasonable! Some of us at Tellson’s are
getting old, and we really can’t be troubled out of the ordinary course
without due occasion.”
“Still,” said Darnay, “you know how gloomy and threatening the sky is.”
“I know that, to be sure,” assented Mr. Lorry, trying to persuade himself
that his sweet temper was soured, and that he grumbled, “but I am
determined to be peevish after my long day’s botheration. Where is
Manette?”
“Here he is,” said the Doctor, entering the dark room at the moment.
“I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and forebodings by
which I have been surrounded all day long, have made me nervous without
reason. You are not going out, I hope?”
“No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like,” said the
Doctor.

“I don’t think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to be pitted
against you to-night. Is the teaboard still there, Lucie? I can’t see.”
“Of course, it has been kept for you.”
“Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed?”
“And sleeping soundly.”
“That’s right; all safe and well! I don’t know why anything should be
otherwise than safe and well here, thank God; but I have been so put out all
day, and I am not as young as I was! My tea, my dear! Thank ye. Now,
come and take your place in the circle, and let us sit quiet, and hear the
echoes about which you have your theory.”
“Not a theory; it was a fancy.”
“A fancy, then, my wise pet,” said Mr. Lorry, patting her hand. “They are
very numerous and very loud, though, are they not? Only hear them!”
Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into
anybody’s life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, the
footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in the dark
London window.
Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows
heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the billowy heads,
where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous roar arose
from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked arms struggled in the
air like shrivelled branches of trees in a winter wind: all the fingers
convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance of a weapon that was
thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.
Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, through
what agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a time, over the
heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throng could have
told; but, muskets were being distributed—so were cartridges, powder, and
ball, bars of iron and wood, knives, axes, pikes, every weapon that
distracted ingenuity could discover or devise. People who could lay hold of
nothing else, set themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks
out of their places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on
high-fever strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creature there held life
as of no account, and was demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice
it.

As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging
circled round Defarge’s wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron
had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself,
already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms,
thrust this man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed one to arm
another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar.
“Keep near to me, Jacques Three,” cried Defarge; “and do you, Jacques
One and Two, separate and put yourselves at the head of as many of these
patriots as you can. Where is my wife?”
“Eh, well! Here you see me!” said madame, composed as ever, but not
knitting to-day. Madame’s resolute right hand was occupied with an axe, in
place of the usual softer implements, and in her girdle were a pistol and a
cruel knife.
“Where do you go, my wife?”
“I go,” said madame, “with you at present. You shall see me at the head
of women, by-and-bye.”
“Come, then!” cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. “Patriots and
friends, we are ready! The Bastille!”
With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped
into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth,
and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums beating,
the sea raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack began.
Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great
towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire and through the
smoke—in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast him up against a
cannon, and on the instant he became a cannonier—Defarge of the wine-
shop worked like a manful soldier, Two fierce hours.
Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers,
cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down! “Work, comrades
all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand,
Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name of
all the Angels or the Devils—which you prefer—work!” Thus Defarge of
the wine-shop, still at his gun, which had long grown hot.
“To me, women!” cried madame his wife. “What! We can kill as well as
the men when the place is taken!” And to her, with a shrill thirsty cry,

trooping women variously armed, but all armed alike in hunger and
revenge.
Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still the deep ditch, the single
drawbridge, the massive stone walls, and the eight great towers. Slight
displacements of the raging sea, made by the falling wounded. Flashing
weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggonloads of wet straw, hard work at
neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys, execrations,
bravery without stint, boom smash and rattle, and the furious sounding of
the living sea; but, still the deep ditch, and the single drawbridge, and the
massive stone walls, and the eight great towers, and still Defarge of the
wine-shop at his gun, grown doubly hot by the service of Four fierce hours.
A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley—this dimly
perceptible through the raging storm, nothing audible in it—suddenly the
sea rose immeasurably wider and higher, and swept Defarge of the wine-
shop over the lowered drawbridge, past the massive stone outer walls, in
among the eight great towers surrendered!
So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that even to draw
his breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if he had been struggling
in the surf at the South Sea, until he was landed in the outer courtyard of the
Bastille. There, against an angle of a wall, he made a struggle to look about
him. Jacques Three was nearly at his side; Madame Defarge, still heading
some of her women, was visible in the inner distance, and her knife was in
her hand. Everywhere was tumult, exultation, deafening and maniacal
bewilderment, astounding noise, yet furious dumb-show.
“The Prisoners!”
“The Records!”
“The secret cells!”
“The instruments of torture!”
“The Prisoners!”
Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherences, “The Prisoners!” was
the cry most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if there were an eternity
of people, as well as of time and space. When the foremost billows rolled
past, bearing the prison officers with them, and threatening them all with
instant death if any secret nook remained undisclosed, Defarge laid his
strong hand on the breast of one of these men—a man with a grey head,

who had a lighted torch in his hand—separated him from the rest, and got
him between himself and the wall.
“Show me the North Tower!” said Defarge. “Quick!”
“I will faithfully,” replied the man, “if you will come with me. But there
is no one there.”
“What is the meaning of One Hundred and Five, North Tower?” asked
Defarge. “Quick!”
“The meaning, monsieur?”
“Does it mean a captive, or a place of captivity? Or do you mean that I
shall strike you dead?”
“Kill him!” croaked Jacques Three, who had come close up.
“Monsieur, it is a cell.”
“Show it me!”
“Pass this way, then.”
Jacques Three, with his usual craving on him, and evidently disappointed
by the dialogue taking a turn that did not seem to promise bloodshed, held
by Defarge’s arm as he held by the turnkey’s. Their three heads had been
close together during this brief discourse, and it had been as much as they
could do to hear one another, even then: so tremendous was the noise of the
living ocean, in its irruption into the Fortress, and its inundation of the
courts and passages and staircases. All around outside, too, it beat the walls
with a deep, hoarse roar, from which, occasionally, some partial shouts of
tumult broke and leaped into the air like spray.
Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, past
hideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps, and
again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick, more like dry waterfalls
than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three, linked hand and
arm, went with all the speed they could make. Here and there, especially at
first, the inundation started on them and swept by; but when they had done
descending, and were winding and climbing up a tower, they were alone.
Hemmed in here by the massive thickness of walls and arches, the storm
within the fortress and without was only audible to them in a dull, subdued
way, as if the noise out of which they had come had almost destroyed their
sense of hearing.

The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a key in a clashing lock, swung
the door slowly open, and said, as they all bent their heads and passed in:
“One hundred and five, North Tower!”
There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed window high in the wall,
with a stone screen before it, so that the sky could be only seen by stooping
low and looking up. There was a small chimney, heavily barred across, a
few feet within. There was a heap of old feathery wood-ashes on the hearth.
There was a stool, and table, and a straw bed. There were the four
blackened walls, and a rusted iron ring in one of them.
“Pass that torch slowly along these walls, that I may see them,” said
Defarge to the turnkey.
The man obeyed, and Defarge followed the light closely with his eyes.
“Stop!—Look here, Jacques!”
“A. M.!” croaked Jacques Three, as he read greedily.
“Alexandre Manette,” said Defarge in his ear, following the letters with
his swart forefinger, deeply engrained with gunpowder. “And here he wrote
‘a poor physician.’ And it was he, without doubt, who scratched a calendar
on this stone. What is that in your hand? A crowbar? Give it me!”
He had still the linstock of his gun in his own hand. He made a sudden
exchange of the two instruments, and turning on the worm-eaten stool and
table, beat them to pieces in a few blows.
“Hold the light higher!” he said, wrathfully, to the turnkey. “Look among
those fragments with care, Jacques. And see! Here is my knife,” throwing it
to him; “rip open that bed, and search the straw. Hold the light higher, you!”
With a menacing look at the turnkey he crawled upon the hearth, and,
peering up the chimney, struck and prised at its sides with the crowbar, and
worked at the iron grating across it. In a few minutes, some mortar and dust
came dropping down, which he averted his face to avoid; and in it, and in
the old wood-ashes, and in a crevice in the chimney into which his weapon
had slipped or wrought itself, he groped with a cautious touch.
“Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the straw, Jacques?”
“Nothing.”
“Let us collect them together, in the middle of the cell. So! Light them,
you!”

The turnkey fired the little pile, which blazed high and hot. Stooping
again to come out at the low-arched door, they left it burning, and retraced
their way to the courtyard; seeming to recover their sense of hearing as they
came down, until they were in the raging flood once more.
They found it surging and tossing, in quest of Defarge himself. Saint
Antoine was clamorous to have its wine-shop keeper foremost in the guard
upon the governor who had defended the Bastille and shot the people.
Otherwise, the governor would not be marched to the Hotel de Ville for
judgment. Otherwise, the governor would escape, and the people’s blood
(suddenly of some value, after many years of worthlessness) be unavenged.
In the howling universe of passion and contention that seemed to
encompass this grim old officer conspicuous in his grey coat and red
decoration, there was but one quite steady figure, and that was a woman’s.
“See, there is my husband!” she cried, pointing him out. “See Defarge!”
She stood immovable close to the grim old officer, and remained
immovable close to him; remained immovable close to him through the
streets, as Defarge and the rest bore him along; remained immovable close
to him when he was got near his destination, and began to be struck at from
behind; remained immovable close to him when the long-gathering rain of
stabs and blows fell heavy; was so close to him when he dropped dead
under it, that, suddenly animated, she put her foot upon his neck, and with
her cruel knife—long ready—hewed off his head.
The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was to execute his horrible idea
of hoisting up men for lamps to show what he could be and do. Saint
Antoine’s blood was up, and the blood of tyranny and domination by the
iron hand was down—down on the steps of the Hotel de Ville where the
governor’s body lay—down on the sole of the shoe of Madame Defarge
where she had trodden on the body to steady it for mutilation. “Lower the
lamp yonder!” cried Saint Antoine, after glaring round for a new means of
death; “here is one of his soldiers to be left on guard!” The swinging
sentinel was posted, and the sea rushed on.
The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheaving of
wave against wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and whose forces
were yet unknown. The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes,
voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until
the touch of pity could make no mark on them.

But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was
in vivid life, there were two groups of faces—each seven in number—so
fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore more
memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly released by
the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high overhead: all scared,
all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and those
who rejoiced around them were lost spirits. Other seven faces there were,
carried higher, seven dead faces, whose drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes
awaited the Last Day. Impassive faces, yet with a suspended—not an
abolished—expression on them; faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having
yet to raise the dropped lids of the eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless
lips, “Thou Didst It!”
Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the keys of the
accursed fortress of the eight strong towers, some discovered letters and
other memorials of prisoners of old time, long dead of broken hearts,—
such, and such—like, the loudly echoing footsteps of Saint Antoine escort
through the Paris streets in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and
eighty-nine. Now, Heaven defeat the fancy of Lucie Darnay, and keep these
feet far out of her life! For, they are headlong, mad, and dangerous; and in
the years so long after the breaking of the cask at Defarge’s wine-shop door,
they are not easily purified when once stained red.

CHAPTER XXII.
The Sea Still Rises

H
aggard Saint Antoine had had only one exultant week, in which to
soften his modicum of hard and bitter bread to such extent as he
could, with the relish of fraternal embraces and congratulations,
when Madame Defarge sat at her counter, as usual, presiding over the
customers. Madame Defarge wore no rose in her head, for the great
brotherhood of Spies had become, even in one short week, extremely chary
of trusting themselves to the saint’s mercies. The lamps across his streets
had a portentously elastic swing with them.
Madame Defarge, with her arms folded, sat in the morning light and heat,
contemplating the wine-shop and the street. In both, there were several
knots of loungers, squalid and miserable, but now with a manifest sense of
power enthroned on their distress. The raggedest nightcap, awry on the
wretchedest head, had this crooked significance in it: “I know how hard it
has grown for me, the wearer of this, to support life in myself; but do you
know how easy it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to destroy life in
you?” Every lean bare arm, that had been without work before, had this
work always ready for it now, that it could strike. The fingers of the knitting
women were vicious, with the experience that they could tear. There was a
change in the appearance of Saint Antoine; the image had been hammering
into this for hundreds of years, and the last finishing blows had told
mightily on the expression.
Madame Defarge sat observing it, with such suppressed approval as was
to be desired in the leader of the Saint Antoine women. One of her
sisterhood knitted beside her. The short, rather plump wife of a starved
grocer, and the mother of two children withal, this lieutenant had already
earned the complimentary name of The Vengeance.
“Hark!” said The Vengeance. “Listen, then! Who comes?”

As if a train of powder laid from the outermost bound of Saint Antoine
Quarter to the wine-shop door, had been suddenly fired, a fast-spreading
murmur came rushing along.
“It is Defarge,” said madame. “Silence, patriots!”
Defarge came in breathless, pulled off a red cap he wore, and looked
around him! “Listen, everywhere!” said madame again. “Listen to him!”
Defarge stood, panting, against a background of eager eyes and open
mouths, formed outside the door; all those within the wine-shop had sprung
to their feet.
“Say then, my husband. What is it?”
“News from the other world!”
“How, then?” cried madame, contemptuously. “The other world?”
“Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished people
that they might eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell?”
“Everybody!” from all throats.
“The news is of him. He is among us!”
“Among us!” from the universal throat again. “And dead?”
“Not dead! He feared us so much—and with reason—that he caused
himself to be represented as dead, and had a grand mock-funeral. But they
have found him alive, hiding in the country, and have brought him in. I have
seen him but now, on his way to the Hotel de Ville, a prisoner. I have said
that he had reason to fear us. Say all! Had he reason?”
Wretched old sinner of more than threescore years and ten, if he had
never known it yet, he would have known it in his heart of hearts if he could
have heard the answering cry.
A moment of profound silence followed. Defarge and his wife looked
steadfastly at one another. The Vengeance stooped, and the jar of a drum
was heard as she moved it at her feet behind the counter.
“Patriots!” said Defarge, in a determined voice, “are we ready?”
Instantly Madame Defarge’s knife was in her girdle; the drum was
beating in the streets, as if it and a drummer had flown together by magic;
and The Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about
her head like all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to house,
rousing the women.

Original

The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which they
looked from windows, caught up what arms they had, and came pouring
down into the streets; but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From
such household occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their
children, from their aged and their sick crouching on the bare ground
famished and naked, they ran out with streaming hair, urging one another,
and themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions. Villain
Foulon taken, my sister! Old Foulon taken, my mother! Miscreant Foulon
taken, my daughter! Then, a score of others ran into the midst of these,
beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and screaming, Foulon alive! Foulon
who told the starving people they might eat grass! Foulon who told my old
father that he might eat grass, when I had no bread to give him! Foulon who
told my baby it might suck grass, when these breasts were dry with want! O
mother of God, this Foulon! O Heaven our suffering! Hear me, my dead
baby and my withered father: I swear on my knees, on these stones, to
avenge you on Foulon! Husbands, and brothers, and young men, Give us
the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, Give us the heart of
Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend Foulon to pieces, and
dig him into the ground, that grass may grow from him! With these cries,
numbers of the women, lashed into blind frenzy, whirled about, striking and
tearing at their own friends until they dropped into a passionate swoon, and
were only saved by the men belonging to them from being trampled under
foot.

Nevertheless, not a moment was lost; not a moment! This Foulon was at
the Hotel de Ville, and might be loosed. Never, if Saint Antoine knew his
own sufferings, insults, and wrongs! Armed men and women flocked out of
the Quarter so fast, and drew even these last dregs after them with such a
force of suction, that within a quarter of an hour there was not a human
creature in Saint Antoine’s bosom but a few old crones and the wailing
children.
No. They were all by that time choking the Hall of Examination where
this old man, ugly and wicked, was, and overflowing into the adjacent open
space and streets. The Defarges, husband and wife, The Vengeance, and
Jacques Three, were in the first press, and at no great distance from him in
the Hall.
“See!” cried madame, pointing with her knife. “See the old villain bound
with ropes. That was well done to tie a bunch of grass upon his back. Ha,
ha! That was well done. Let him eat it now!” Madame put her knife under
her arm, and clapped her hands as at a play.
The people immediately behind Madame Defarge, explaining the cause
of her satisfaction to those behind them, and those again explaining to
others, and those to others, the neighbouring streets resounded with the
clapping of hands. Similarly, during two or three hours of drawl, and the
winnowing of many bushels of words, Madame Defarge’s frequent
expressions of impatience were taken up, with marvellous quickness, at a
distance: the more readily, because certain men who had by some wonderful
exercise of agility climbed up the external architecture to look in from the
windows, knew Madame Defarge well, and acted as a telegraph between
her and the crowd outside the building.
At length the sun rose so high that it struck a kindly ray as of hope or
protection, directly down upon the old prisoner’s head. The favour was too
much to bear; in an instant the barrier of dust and chaff that had stood
surprisingly long, went to the winds, and Saint Antoine had got him!
It was known directly, to the furthest confines of the crowd. Defarge had
but sprung over a railing and a table, and folded the miserable wretch in a
deadly embrace—Madame Defarge had but followed and turned her hand in
one of the ropes with which he was tied—The Vengeance and Jacques
Three were not yet up with them, and the men at the windows had not yet
swooped into the Hall, like birds of prey from their high perches—when the

cry seemed to go up, all over the city, “Bring him out! Bring him to the
lamp!”
Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on
his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at, and
stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by
hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always entreating
and beseeching for mercy; now full of vehement agony of action, with a
small clear space about him as the people drew one another back that they
might see; now, a log of dead wood drawn through a forest of legs; he was
hauled to the nearest street corner where one of the fatal lamps swung, and
there Madame Defarge let him go—as a cat might have done to a mouse—
and silently and composedly looked at him while they made ready, and
while he besought her: the women passionately screeching at him all the
time, and the men sternly calling out to have him killed with grass in his
mouth. Once, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him
shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him
shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and held him, and his head was soon
upon a pike, with grass enough in the mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance
at the sight of.
Nor was this the end of the day’s bad work, for Saint Antoine so shouted
and danced his angry blood up, that it boiled again, on hearing when the
day closed in that the son-in-law of the despatched, another of the people’s
enemies and insulters, was coming into Paris under a guard five hundred
strong, in cavalry alone. Saint Antoine wrote his crimes on flaring sheets of
paper, seized him—would have torn him out of the breast of an army to
bear Foulon company—set his head and heart on pikes, and carried the
three spoils of the day, in Wolf-procession through the streets.
Not before dark night did the men and women come back to the children,
wailing and breadless. Then, the miserable bakers’ shops were beset by long
files of them, patiently waiting to buy bad bread; and while they waited
with stomachs faint and empty, they beguiled the time by embracing one
another on the triumphs of the day, and achieving them again in gossip.
Gradually, these strings of ragged people shortened and frayed away; and
then poor lights began to shine in high windows, and slender fires were
made in the streets, at which neighbours cooked in common, afterwards
supping at their doors.

Scanty and insufficient suppers those, and innocent of meat, as of most
other sauce to wretched bread. Yet, human fellowship infused some
nourishment into the flinty viands, and struck some sparks of cheerfulness
out of them. Fathers and mothers who had had their full share in the worst
of the day, played gently with their meagre children; and lovers, with such a
world around them and before them, loved and hoped.
It was almost morning, when Defarge’s wine-shop parted with its last
knot of customers, and Monsieur Defarge said to madame his wife, in husky
tones, while fastening the door:
“At last it is come, my dear!”
“Eh well!” returned madame. “Almost.”
Saint Antoine slept, the Defarges slept: even The Vengeance slept with
her starved grocer, and the drum was at rest. The drum’s was the only voice
in Saint Antoine that blood and hurry had not changed. The Vengeance, as
custodian of the drum, could have wakened him up and had the same
speech out of him as before the Bastille fell, or old Foulon was seized; not
so with the hoarse tones of the men and women in Saint Antoine’s bosom.

CHAPTER XXIII.
Fire Rises

T
here was a change on the village where the fountain fell, and where
the mender of roads went forth daily to hammer out of the stones on
the highway such morsels of bread as might serve for patches to hold
his poor ignorant soul and his poor reduced body together. The prison on
the crag was not so dominant as of yore; there were soldiers to guard it, but
not many; there were officers to guard the soldiers, but not one of them
knew what his men would do—beyond this: that it would probably not be
what he was ordered.
Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation. Every
green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of grain, was as shrivelled and
poor as the miserable people. Everything was bowed down, dejected,
oppressed, and broken. Habitations, fences, domesticated animals, men,
women, children, and the soil that bore them—all worn out.
Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual gentleman) was a national
blessing, gave a chivalrous tone to things, was a polite example of luxurious
and shining life, and a great deal more to equal purpose; nevertheless,
Monseigneur as a class had, somehow or other, brought things to this.
Strange that Creation, designed expressly for Monseigneur, should be so
soon wrung dry and squeezed out! There must be something short-sighted
in the eternal arrangements, surely! Thus it was, however; and the last drop
of blood having been extracted from the flints, and the last screw of the rack
having been turned so often that its purchase crumbled, and it now turned
and turned with nothing to bite, Monseigneur began to run away from a
phenomenon so low and unaccountable.
But, this was not the change on the village, and on many a village like it.
For scores of years gone by, Monseigneur had squeezed it and wrung it, and
had seldom graced it with his presence except for the pleasures of the chase
—now, found in hunting the people; now, found in hunting the beasts, for

whose preservation Monseigneur made edifying spaces of barbarous and
barren wilderness. No. The change consisted in the appearance of strange
faces of low caste, rather than in the disappearance of the high caste,
chiselled, and otherwise beautified and beautifying features of
Monseigneur.
For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in the dust,
not often troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and to dust he must
return, being for the most part too much occupied in thinking how little he
had for supper and how much more he would eat if he had it—in these
times, as he raised his eyes from his lonely labour, and viewed the prospect,
he would see some rough figure approaching on foot, the like of which was
once a rarity in those parts, but was now a frequent presence. As it
advanced, the mender of roads would discern without surprise, that it was a
shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that
were clumsy even to the eyes of a mender of roads, grim, rough, swart,
steeped in the mud and dust of many highways, dank with the marshy
moisture of many low grounds, sprinkled with the thorns and leaves and
moss of many byways through woods.
Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in the July weather, as
he sat on his heap of stones under a bank, taking such shelter as he could
get from a shower of hail.
The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at the mill,
and at the prison on the crag. When he had identified these objects in what
benighted mind he had, he said, in a dialect that was just intelligible:
“How goes it, Jacques?”
“All well, Jacques.”
“Touch then!”
They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones.
“No dinner?”
“Nothing but supper now,” said the mender of roads, with a hungry face.
“It is the fashion,” growled the man. “I meet no dinner anywhere.”
He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and steel,
pulled at it until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly held it from him and
dropped something into it from between his finger and thumb, that blazed
and went out in a puff of smoke.

“Touch then.” It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it this time,
after observing these operations. They again joined hands.
“To-night?” said the mender of roads.
“To-night,” said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.
“Where?”
“Here.”
He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at
one another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge of
bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village.
“Show me!” said the traveller then, moving to the brow of the hill.
“See!” returned the mender of roads, with extended finger. “You go down
here, and straight through the street, and past the fountain—”
“To the Devil with all that!” interrupted the other, rolling his eye over the
landscape. “I go through no streets and past no fountains. Well?”
“Well! About two leagues beyond the summit of that hill above the
village.”
“Good. When do you cease to work?”
“At sunset.”
“Will you wake me, before departing? I have walked two nights without
resting. Let me finish my pipe, and I shall sleep like a child. Will you wake
me?”
“Surely.”
The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast, slipped off his
great wooden shoes, and lay down on his back on the heap of stones. He
was fast asleep directly.
As the road-mender plied his dusty labour, and the hail-clouds, rolling
away, revealed bright bars and streaks of sky which were responded to by
silver gleams upon the landscape, the little man (who wore a red cap now,
in place of his blue one) seemed fascinated by the figure on the heap of
stones. His eyes were so often turned towards it, that he used his tools
mechanically, and, one would have said, to very poor account. The bronze
face, the shaggy black hair and beard, the coarse woollen red cap, the rough
medley dress of home-spun stuff and hairy skins of beasts, the powerful
frame attenuated by spare living, and the sullen and desperate compression

of the lips in sleep, inspired the mender of roads with awe. The traveller had
travelled far, and his feet were footsore, and his ankles chafed and bleeding;
his great shoes, stuffed with leaves and grass, had been heavy to drag over
the many long leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he himself
was into sores. Stooping down beside him, the road-mender tried to get a
peep at secret weapons in his breast or where not; but, in vain, for he slept
with his arms crossed upon him, and set as resolutely as his lips. Fortified
towns with their stockades, guard-houses, gates, trenches, and drawbridges,
seemed to the mender of roads, to be so much air as against this figure. And
when he lifted his eyes from it to the horizon and looked around, he saw in
his small fancy similar figures, stopped by no obstacle, tending to centres
all over France.
The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of
brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the paltering lumps of
dull ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun changed them,
until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was glowing. Then, the
mender of roads having got his tools together and all things ready to go
down into the village, roused him.
“Good!” said the sleeper, rising on his elbow. “Two leagues beyond the
summit of the hill?”
“About.”
“About. Good!”
The mender of roads went home, with the dust going on before him
according to the set of the wind, and was soon at the fountain, squeezing
himself in among the lean kine brought there to drink, and appearing even
to whisper to them in his whispering to all the village. When the village had
taken its poor supper, it did not creep to bed, as it usually did, but came out
of doors again, and remained there. A curious contagion of whispering was
upon it, and also, when it gathered together at the fountain in the dark,
another curious contagion of looking expectantly at the sky in one direction
only. Monsieur Gabelle, chief functionary of the place, became uneasy;
went out on his house-top alone, and looked in that direction too; glanced
down from behind his chimneys at the darkening faces by the fountain
below, and sent word to the sacristan who kept the keys of the church, that
there might be need to ring the tocsin by-and-bye.

The night deepened. The trees environing the old chateau, keeping its
solitary state apart, moved in a rising wind, as though they threatened the
pile of building massive and dark in the gloom. Up the two terrace flights of
steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a swift messenger
rousing those within; uneasy rushes of wind went through the hall, among
the old spears and knives, and passed lamenting up the stairs, and shook the
curtains of the bed where the last Marquis had slept. East, West, North, and
South, through the woods, four heavy-treading, unkempt figures crushed
the high grass and cracked the branches, striding on cautiously to come
together in the courtyard. Four lights broke out there, and moved away in
different directions, and all was black again.
But, not for long. Presently, the chateau began to make itself strangely
visible by some light of its own, as though it were growing luminous. Then,
a flickering streak played behind the architecture of the front, picking out
transparent places, and showing where balustrades, arches, and windows
were. Then it soared higher, and grew broader and brighter. Soon, from a
score of the great windows, flames burst forth, and the stone faces
awakened, stared out of fire.
A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who were left
there, and there was a saddling of a horse and riding away. There was
spurring and splashing through the darkness, and bridle was drawn in the
space by the village fountain, and the horse in a foam stood at Monsieur
Gabelle’s door. “Help, Gabelle! Help, every one!” The tocsin rang
impatiently, but other help (if that were any) there was none. The mender of
roads, and two hundred and fifty particular friends, stood with folded arms
at the fountain, looking at the pillar of fire in the sky. “It must be forty feet
high,” said they, grimly; and never moved.
The rider from the chateau, and the horse in a foam, clattered away
through the village, and galloped up the stony steep, to the prison on the
crag. At the gate, a group of officers were looking at the fire; removed from
them, a group of soldiers. “Help, gentlemen—officers! The chateau is on
fire; valuable objects may be saved from the flames by timely aid! Help,
help!” The officers looked towards the soldiers who looked at the fire; gave
no orders; and answered, with shrugs and biting of lips, “It must burn.”
As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street, the village
was illuminating. The mender of roads, and the two hundred and fifty

particular friends, inspired as one man and woman by the idea of lighting
up, had darted into their houses, and were putting candles in every dull little
pane of glass. The general scarcity of everything, occasioned candles to be
borrowed in a rather peremptory manner of Monsieur Gabelle; and in a
moment of reluctance and hesitation on that functionary’s part, the mender
of roads, once so submissive to authority, had remarked that carriages were
good to make bonfires with, and that post-horses would roast.
The chateau was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roaring and raging
of the conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight from the infernal
regions, seemed to be blowing the edifice away. With the rising and falling
of the blaze, the stone faces showed as if they were in torment. When great
masses of stone and timber fell, the face with the two dints in the nose
became obscured: anon struggled out of the smoke again, as if it were the
face of the cruel Marquis, burning at the stake and contending with the fire.
The chateau burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire, scorched
and shrivelled; trees at a distance, fired by the four fierce figures, begirt the
blazing edifice with a new forest of smoke. Molten lead and iron boiled in
the marble basin of the fountain; the water ran dry; the extinguisher tops of
the towers vanished like ice before the heat, and trickled down into four
rugged wells of flame. Great rents and splits branched out in the solid walls,
like crystallisation; stupefied birds wheeled about and dropped into the
furnace; four fierce figures trudged away, East, West, North, and South,
along the night-enshrouded roads, guided by the beacon they had lighted,
towards their next destination. The illuminated village had seized hold of
the tocsin, and, abolishing the lawful ringer, rang for joy.
Not only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire, and bell-
ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to do with the
collection of rent and taxes—though it was but a small instalment of taxes,
and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got in those latter days—became
impatient for an interview with him, and, surrounding his house, summoned
him to come forth for personal conference. Whereupon, Monsieur Gabelle
did heavily bar his door, and retire to hold counsel with himself. The result
of that conference was, that Gabelle again withdrew himself to his housetop
behind his stack of chimneys; this time resolved, if his door were broken in
(he was a small Southern man of retaliative temperament), to pitch himself
head foremost over the parapet, and crush a man or two below.

Probably, Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there, with the distant
chateau for fire and candle, and the beating at his door, combined with the
joy-ringing, for music; not to mention his having an ill-omened lamp slung
across the road before his posting-house gate, which the village showed a
lively inclination to displace in his favour. A trying suspense, to be passing
a whole summer night on the brink of the black ocean, ready to take that
plunge into it upon which Monsieur Gabelle had resolved! But, the friendly
dawn appearing at last, and the rush-candles of the village guttering out, the
people happily dispersed, and Monsieur Gabelle came down bringing his
life with him for that while.
Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there were other
functionaries less fortunate, that night and other nights, whom the rising sun
found hanging across once-peaceful streets, where they had been born and
bred; also, there were other villagers and townspeople less fortunate than
the mender of roads and his fellows, upon whom the functionaries and
soldiery turned with success, and whom they strung up in their turn. But,
the fierce figures were steadily wending East, West, North, and South, be
that as it would; and whosoever hung, fire burned. The altitude of the
gallows that would turn to water and quench it, no functionary, by any
stretch of mathematics, was able to calculate successfully.

CHAPTER XXIV.
Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

I
n such risings of fire and risings of sea—the firm earth shaken by the
rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but was always on the
flow, higher and higher, to the terror and wonder of the beholders on
the shore—three years of tempest were consumed. Three more birthdays of
little Lucie had been woven by the golden thread into the peaceful tissue of
the life of her home.
Many a night and many a day had its inmates listened to the echoes in the
corner, with hearts that failed them when they heard the thronging feet. For,
the footsteps had become to their minds as the footsteps of a people,
tumultuous under a red flag and with their country declared in danger,
changed into wild beasts, by terrible enchantment long persisted in.
Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the phenomenon of
his not being appreciated: of his being so little wanted in France, as to incur
considerable danger of receiving his dismissal from it, and this life together.
Like the fabled rustic who raised the Devil with infinite pains, and was so
terrified at the sight of him that he could ask the Enemy no question, but
immediately fled; so, Monseigneur, after boldly reading the Lord’s Prayer
backwards for a great number of years, and performing many other potent
spells for compelling the Evil One, no sooner beheld him in his terrors than
he took to his noble heels.
The shining Bull’s Eye of the Court was gone, or it would have been the
mark for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never been a good eye to see
with—had long had the mote in it of Lucifer’s pride, Sardanapalus’s luxury,
and a mole’s blindness—but it had dropped out and was gone. The Court,
from that exclusive inner circle to its outermost rotten ring of intrigue,
corruption, and dissimulation, was all gone together. Royalty was gone; had
been besieged in its Palace and “suspended,” when the last tidings came
over.

The August of the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two was
come, and Monseigneur was by this time scattered far and wide.
As was natural, the head-quarters and great gathering-place of
Monseigneur, in London, was Tellson’s Bank. Spirits are supposed to haunt
the places where their bodies most resorted, and Monseigneur without a
guinea haunted the spot where his guineas used to be. Moreover, it was the
spot to which such French intelligence as was most to be relied upon, came
quickest. Again: Tellson’s was a munificent house, and extended great
liberality to old customers who had fallen from their high estate. Again:
those nobles who had seen the coming storm in time, and anticipating
plunder or confiscation, had made provident remittances to Tellson’s, were
always to be heard of there by their needy brethren. To which it must be
added that every new-comer from France reported himself and his tidings at
Tellson’s, almost as a matter of course. For such variety of reasons,
Tellson’s was at that time, as to French intelligence, a kind of High
Exchange; and this was so well known to the public, and the inquiries made
there were in consequence so numerous, that Tellson’s sometimes wrote the
latest news out in a line or so and posted it in the Bank windows, for all
who ran through Temple Bar to read.
On a steaming, misty afternoon, Mr. Lorry sat at his desk, and Charles
Darnay stood leaning on it, talking with him in a low voice. The penitential
den once set apart for interviews with the House, was now the news-
Exchange, and was filled to overflowing. It was within half an hour or so of
the time of closing.
“But, although you are the youngest man that ever lived,” said Charles
Darnay, rather hesitating, “I must still suggest to you—”
“I understand. That I am too old?” said Mr. Lorry.
“Unsettled weather, a long journey, uncertain means of travelling, a
disorganised country, a city that may not be even safe for you.”
“My dear Charles,” said Mr. Lorry, with cheerful confidence, “you touch
some of the reasons for my going: not for my staying away. It is safe
enough for me; nobody will care to interfere with an old fellow of hard
upon fourscore when there are so many people there much better worth
interfering with. As to its being a disorganised city, if it were not a
disorganised city there would be no occasion to send somebody from our
House here to our House there, who knows the city and the business, of old,