released, or (in a few cases) to be sent back to their cells.
That, presented by his conductors to this Tribunal, he had
announced himself by name and profession as having been
for eighteen years a secret and unaccused prisoner in the
Bastille; that, one of the body so sitting in judgment had
risen and identified him, and that this man was Defarge.
That, hereupon he had ascertained, through the
registers on the table, that his son-in-law was among the
living prisoners, and had pleaded hard to the Tribunal—of
whom some members were asleep and some awake, some
dirty with murder and some clean, some sober and some
not—for his life and liberty. That, in the first frantic
greetings lavished on himself as a notable sufferer under
the overthrown system, it had been accorded to him to
have Charles Darnay brought before the lawless Court,
and examined. That, he seemed on the point of being at
once released, when the tide in his favour met with some
unexplained check (not intelligible to the Doctor), which
led to a few words of secret conference. That, the man
sitting as President had then informed Doctor Manette
that the prisoner must remain in custody, but should, for
his sake, be held inviolate in safe custody. That,
immediately, on a signal, the prisoner was removed to the
interior of the prison again; but, that he, the Doctor, had
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then so strongly pleaded for permission to remain and
assure himself that his son-in-law was, through no malice
or mischance, delivered to the concourse whose
murderous yells outside the gate had often drowned the
proceedings, that he had obtained the permission, and had
remained in that Hall of Blood until the danger was over.
The sights he had seen there, with brief snatches of
food and sleep by intervals, shall remain untold. The mad
joy over the prisoners who were saved, had astounded him
scarcely less than the mad ferocity against those who were
cut to pieces. One prisoner there was, he said, who had
been discharged into the street free, but at whom a
mistaken savage had thrust a pike as he passed out. Being
besought to go to him and dress the wound, the Doctor
had passed out at the same gate, and had found him in the
arms of a company of Samaritans, who were seated on the
bodies of their victims. With an inconsistency as
monstrous as anything in this awful nightmare, they had
helped the healer, and tended the wounded man with the
gentlest solicitude— had made a litter for him and
escorted him carefully from the spot— had then caught up
their weapons and plunged anew into a butchery so
dreadful, that the Doctor had covered his eyes with his
hands, and swooned away in the midst of it.
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As Mr. Lorry received these confidences, and as he
watched the face of his friend now sixty-two years of age,
a misgiving arose within him that such dread experiences
would revive the old danger.
But, he had never seen his friend in his present aspect:
he had never at all known him in his present character.
For the first time the Doctor felt, now, that his suffering
was strength and power. For the first time he felt that in
that sharp fire, he had slowly forged the iron which could
break the prison door of his daughter’s husband, and
deliver him. ‘It all tended to a good end, my friend; it was
not mere waste and ruin. As my beloved child was helpful
in restoring me to myself, I will be helpful now in
restoring the dearest part of herself to her; by the aid of
Heaven I will do it!’ Thus, Doctor Manette. And when
Jarvis Lorry saw the kindled eyes, the resolute face, the
calm strong look and bearing of the man whose life always
seemed to him to have been stopped, like a clock, for so
many years, and then set going again with an energy
which had lain dormant during the cessation of its
usefulness, he believed.
Greater things than the Doctor had at that time to
contend with, would have yielded before his persevering
purpose. While he kept himself in his place, as a physician,
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whose business was with all degrees of mankind, bond and
free, rich and poor, bad and good, he used his personal
influence so wisely, that he was soon the inspecting
physician of three prisons, and among them of La Force.
He could now assure Lucie that her husband was no
longer confined alone, but was mixed with the general
body of prisoners; he saw her husband weekly, and
brought sweet messages to her, straight from his lips;
sometimes her husband himself sent a letter to her (though
never by the Doctor’s hand), but she was not permitted to
write to him: for, among the many wild suspicions of plots
in the prisons, the wildest of all pointed at emigrants who
were known to have made friends or permanent
connections abroad.
This new life of the Doctor’s was an anxious life, no
doubt; still, the sagacious Mr. Lorry saw that there was a
new sustaining pride in it. Nothing unbecoming tinged
the pride; it was a natural and worthy one; but he
observed it as a curiosity. The Doctor knew, that up to
that time, his imprisonment had been associated in the
minds of his daughter and his friend, with his personal
affliction, deprivation, and weakness. Now that this was
changed, and he knew himself to be invested through that
old trial with forces to which they both looked for
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Charles’s ultimate safety and deliverance, he became so far
exalted by the change, that he took the lead and direction,
and required them as the weak, to trust to him as the
strong. The preceding relative positions of himself and
Lucie were reversed, yet only as the liveliest gratitude and
affection could reverse them, for he could have had no
pride but in rendering some service to her who had
rendered so much to him. ‘All curious to see,’ thought
Mr. Lorry, in his amiably shrewd way, ‘but all natural and
right; so, take the lead, my dear friend, and keep it; it
couldn’t be in better hands.’
But, though the Doctor tried hard, and never ceased
trying, to get Charles Darnay set at liberty, or at least to
get him brought to trial, the public current of the time set
too strong and fast for him. The new era began; the king
was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared for
victory or death against the world in arms; the black flag
waved night and day from the great towers of Notre
Dame; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise
against the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying
soils of France, as if the dragon’s teeth had been sown
broadcast, and had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain,
on rock, in gravel, and alluvial mud, under the bright sky
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of the South and under the clouds of the North, in fell and
forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds and among
the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the
fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the
sea-shore. What private solicitude could rear itself against
the deluge of the Year One of Liberty—the deluge rising
from below, not falling from above, and with the
windows of Heaven shut, not opened!
There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of
relenting rest, no measurement of time. Though days and
nights circled as regularly as when time was young, and
the evening and morning were the first day, other count
of time there was none. Hold of it was lost in the raging
fever of a nation, as it is in the fever of one patient. Now,
breaking the unnatural silence of a whole city, the
executioner showed the people the head of the king—and
now, it seemed almost in the same breath, the head of his
fair wife which had had eight weary months of imprisoned
widowhood and misery, to turn it grey.
And yet, observing the strange law of contradiction
which obtains in all such cases, the time was long, while it
flamed by so fast. A revolutionary tribunal in the capital,
and forty or fifty thousand revolutionary committees all
over the land; a law of the Suspected, which struck away
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all security for liberty or life, and delivered over any good
and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons
gorged with people who had committed no offence, and
could obtain no hearing; these things became the
established order and nature of appointed things, and
seemed to be ancient usage before they were many weeks
old. Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it
had been before the general gaze from the foundations of
the world—the figure of the sharp female called La
Guillotine.
It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure
for headache, it infallibly prevented the hair from turning
grey, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it
was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed
La Guillotine, looked through the little window and
sneezed into the sack. It was the sign of the regeneration
of the human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it
were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded,
and it was bowed down to and believed in where the
Cross was denied.
It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it
most polluted, were a rotten red. It was taken to pieces,
like a toy-puzzle for a young Devil, and was put together
again when the occasion wanted it. It hushed the
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eloquent, struck down the powerful, abolished the
beautiful and good. Twenty-two friends of high public
mark, twenty-one living and one dead, it had lopped the
heads off, in one morning, in as many minutes. The name
of the strong man of Old Scripture had descended to the
chief functionary who worked it; but, so armed, he was
stronger than his namesake, and blinder, and tore away the
gates of God’s own Temple every day.
Among these terrors, and the brood belonging to them,
the Doctor walked with a steady head: confident in his
power, cautiously persistent in his end, never doubting
that he would save Lucie’s husband at last. Yet the current
of the time swept by, so strong and deep, and carried the
time away so fiercely, that Charles had lain in prison one
year and three months when the Doctor was thus steady
and confident. So much more wicked and distracted had
the Revolution grown in that December month, that the
rivers of the South were encumbered with the bodies of
the violently drowned by night, and prisoners were shot in
lines and squares under the southern wintry sun. Still, the
Doctor walked among the terrors with a steady head. No
man better known than he, in Paris at that day; no man in
a stranger situation. Silent, humane, indispensable in
hospital and prison, using his art equally among assassins
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and victims, he was a man apart. In the exercise of his
skill, the appearance and the story of the Bastille Captive
removed him from all other men. He was not suspected or
brought in question, any more than if he had indeed been
recalled to life some eighteen years before, or were a Spirit
moving among mortals.
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V
The Wood-Sawyer
One year and three months. During all that time Lucie
was never sure, from hour to hour, but that the Guillotine
would strike off her husband’s head next day. Every day,
through the stony streets, the tumbrils now jolted heavily,
filled with Condemned. Lovely girls; bright women,
brown-haired, black-haired, and grey; youths; stalwart
men and old; gentle born and peasant born; all red wine
for La Guillotine, all daily brought into light from the dark
cellars of the loathsome prisons, and carried to her through
the streets to slake her devouring thirst. Liberty, equality,
fraternity, or death;—the last, much the easiest to bestow,
O Guillotine!
If the suddenness of her calamity, and the whirling
wheels of the time, had stunned the Doctor’s daughter
into awaiting the result in idle despair, it would but have
been with her as it was with many. But, from the hour
when she had taken the white head to her fresh young
bosom in the garret of Saint Antoine, she had been true to
her duties. She was truest to them in the season of trial, as
all the quietly loyal and good will always be.
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As soon as they were established in their new residence,
and her father had entered on the routine of his
avocations, she arranged the little household as exactly as if
her husband had been there. Everything had its appointed
place and its appointed time. Little Lucie she taught, as
regularly, as if they had all been united in their English
home. The slight devices with which she cheated herself
into the show of a belief that they would soon be
reunited— the little preparations for his speedy return, the
setting aside of his chair and his books—these, and the
solemn prayer at night for one dear prisoner especially,
among the many unhappy souls in prison and the shadow
of death—were almost the only outspoken reliefs of her
heavy mind.
She did not greatly alter in appearance. The plain dark
dresses, akin to mourning dresses, which she and her child
wore, were as neat and as well attended to as the brighter
clothes of happy days. She lost her colour, and the old and
intent expression was a constant, not an occasional, thing;
otherwise, she remained very pretty and comely.
Sometimes, at night on kissing her father, she would burst
into the grief she had repressed all day, and would say that
her sole reliance, under Heaven, was on him. He always
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resolutely answered: ‘Nothing can happen to him without
my knowledge, and I know that I can save him, Lucie.’
They had not made the round of their changed life
many weeks, when her father said to her, on coming
home one evening:
‘My dear, there is an upper window in the prison, to
which Charles can sometimes gain access at three in the
afternoon. When he can get to it—which depends on
many uncertainties and incidents—he might see you in the
street, he thinks, if you stood in a certain place that I can
show you. But you will not be able to see him, my poor
child, and even if you could, it would be unsafe for you to
make a sign of recognition.’
‘O show me the place, my father, and I will go there
every day.’
From that time, in all weathers, she waited there two
hours. As the clock struck two, she was there, and at four
she turned resignedly away. When it was not too wet or
inclement for her child to be with her, they went
together; at other times she was alone; but, she never
missed a single day.
It was the dark and dirty corner of a small winding
street. The hovel of a cutter of wood into lengths for
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burning, was the only house at that end; all else was wall.
On the third day of her being there, he noticed her.
‘Good day, citizeness.’
‘Good day, citizen.’
This mode of address was now prescribed by decree. It
had been established voluntarily some time ago, among
the more thorough patriots; but, was now law for
everybody.
‘Walking here again, citizeness?’
‘You see me, citizen!’
The wood-sawyer, who was a little man with a
redundancy of gesture (he had once been a mender of
roads), cast a glance at the prison, pointed at the prison,
and putting his ten fingers before his face to represent bars,
peeped through them jocosely.
‘But it’s not my business,’ said he. And went on sawing
his wood.
Next day he was looking out for her, and accosted her
the moment she appeared.
‘What? Walking here again, citizeness?’
‘Yes, citizen.’
‘Ah! A child too! Your mother, is it not, my little
citizeness?’
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‘Do I say yes, mamma?’ whispered little Lucie, drawing
close to her.
‘Yes, dearest.’
‘Yes, citizen.’
‘Ah! But it’s not my business. My work is my business.
See my saw! I call it my Little Guillotine. La, la, la; La, la,
la! And off his head comes!’
The billet fell as he spoke, and he threw it into a
basket.
‘I call myself the Samson of the firewood guillotine. See
here again! Loo, loo, loo; Loo, loo, loo! And off HER
head comes! Now, a child. Tickle, tickle; Pickle, pickle!
And off ITS head comes. All the family!’
Lucie shuddered as he threw two more billets into his
basket, but it was impossible to be there while the woodsawyer
was at work, and not be in his sight. Thenceforth,
to secure his good will, she always spoke to him first, and
often gave him drink-money, which he readily received.
He was an inquisitive fellow, and sometimes when she
had quite forgotten him in gazing at the prison roof and
grates, and in lifting her heart up to her husband, she
would come to herself to find him looking at her, with his
knee on his bench and his saw stopped in its work. ‘But
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it’s not my business!’ he would generally say at those
times, and would briskly fall to his sawing again.
In all weathers, in the snow and frost of winter, in the
bitter winds of spring, in the hot sunshine of summer, in
the rains of autumn, and again in the snow and frost of
winter, Lucie passed two hours of every day at this place;
and every day on leaving it, she kissed the prison wall. Her
husband saw her (so she learned from her father) it might
be once in five or six times: it might be twice or thrice
running: it might be, not for a week or a fortnight
together. It was enough that he could and did see her
when the chances served, and on that possibility she
would have waited out the day, seven days a week.
These occupations brought her round to the December
month, wherein her father walked among the terrors with
a steady head. On a lightly-snowing afternoon she arrived
at the usual corner. It was a day of some wild rejoicing,
and a festival. She had seen the houses, as she came along,
decorated with little pikes, and with little red caps stuck
upon them; also, with tricoloured ribbons; also, with the
standard inscription (tricoloured letters were the
favourite), Republic One and Indivisible. Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity, or Death!
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The miserable shop of the wood-sawyer was so small,
that its whole surface furnished very indifferent space for
this legend. He had got somebody to scrawl it up for him,
however, who had squeezed Death in with most
inappropriate difficulty. On his house-top, he displayed
pike and cap, as a good citizen must, and in a window he
had stationed his saw inscribed as his ‘Little Sainte
Guillotine’— for the great sharp female was by that time
popularly canonised. His shop was shut and he was not
there, which was a relief to Lucie, and left her quite alone.
But, he was not far off, for presently she heard a
troubled movement and a shouting coming along, which
filled her with fear. A moment afterwards, and a throng of
people came pouring round the corner by the prison wall,
in the midst of whom was the wood-sawyer hand in hand
with The Vengeance. There could not be fewer than five
hundred people, and they were dancing like five thousand
demons. There was no other music than their own
singing. They danced to the popular Revolution song,
keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of teeth
in unison. Men and women danced together, women
danced together, men danced together, as hazard had
brought them together. At first, they were a mere storm of
coarse red caps and coarse woollen rags; but, as they filled
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the place, and stopped to dance about Lucie, some ghastly
apparition of a dance-figure gone raving mad arose among
them. They advanced, retreated, struck at one another’s
hands, clutched at one another’s heads, spun round alone,
caught one another and spun round in pairs, until many of
them dropped. While those were down, the rest linked
hand in hand, and all spun round together: then the ring
broke, and in separate rings of two and four they turned
and turned until they all stopped at once, began again,
struck, clutched, and tore, and then reversed the spin, and
all spun round another way. Suddenly they stopped again,
paused, struck out the time afresh, formed into lines the
width of the public way, and, with their heads low down
and their hands high up, swooped screaming off. No fight
could have been half so terrible as this dance. It was so
emphatically a fallen sport—a something, once innocent,
delivered over to all devilry—a healthy pastime changed
into a means of angering the blood, bewildering the
senses, and steeling the heart. Such grace as was visible in
it, made it the uglier, showing how warped and perverted
all things good by nature were become. The maidenly
bosom bared to this, the pretty almost-child’s head thus
distracted, the delicate foot mincing in this slough of
blood and dirt, were types of the disjointed time.
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This was the Carmagnole. As it passed, leaving Lucie
frightened and bewildered in the doorway of the woodsawyer’s
house, the feathery snow fell as quietly and lay as
white and soft, as if it had never been.
‘O my father!’ for he stood before her when she lifted
up the eyes she had momentarily darkened with her hand;
‘such a cruel, bad sight.’
‘I know, my dear, I know. I have seen it many times.
Don’t be frightened! Not one of them would harm you.’
‘I am not frightened for myself, my father. But when I
think of my husband, and the mercies of these people—‘
‘We will set him above their mercies very soon. I left
him climbing to the window, and I came to tell you.
There is no one here to see. You may kiss your hand
towards that highest shelving roof.’
‘I do so, father, and I send him my Soul with it!’
‘You cannot see him, my poor dear?’
‘No, father,’ said Lucie, yearning and weeping as she
kissed her hand, ‘no.’
A footstep in the snow. Madame Defarge. ‘I salute you,
citizeness,’ from the Doctor. ‘I salute you, citizen.’ This in
passing. Nothing more. Madame Defarge gone, like a
shadow over the white road.
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‘Give me your arm, my love. Pass from here with an
air of cheerfulness and courage, for his sake. That was well
done;’ they had left the spot; ‘it shall not be in vain.
Charles is summoned for to-morrow.’
‘For to-morrow!’
‘There is no time to lose. I am well prepared, but there
are precautions to be taken, that could not be taken until
he was actually summoned before the Tribunal. He has
not received the notice yet, but I know that he will
presently be summoned for to-morrow, and removed to
the Conciergerie; I have timely information. You are not
afraid?’
She could scarcely answer, ‘I trust in you.’
‘Do so, implicitly. Your suspense is nearly ended, my
darling; he shall be restored to you within a few hours; I
have encompassed him with every protection. I must see
Lorry.’
He stopped. There was a heavy lumbering of wheels
within hearing. They both knew too well what it meant.
One. Two. Three. Three tumbrils faring away with their
dread loads over the hushing snow.
‘I must see Lorry,’ the Doctor repeated, turning her
another way.
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The staunch old gentleman was still in his trust; had
never left it. He and his books were in frequent requisition
as to property confiscated and made national. What he
could save for the owners, he saved. No better man living
to hold fast by what Tellson’s had in keeping, and to hold
his peace.
A murky red and yellow sky, and a rising mist from the
Seine, denoted the approach of darkness. It was almost
dark when they arrived at the Bank. The stately residence
of Monseigneur was altogether blighted and deserted.
Above a heap of dust and ashes in the court, ran the
letters: National Property. Republic One and Indivisible.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death!
Who could that be with Mr. Lorry—the owner of the
riding-coat upon the chair—who must not be seen? From
whom newly arrived, did he come out, agitated and
surprised, to take his favourite in his arms? To whom did
he appear to repeat her faltering words, when, raising his
voice and turning his head towards the door of the room
from which he had issued, he said: ‘Removed to the
Conciergerie, and summoned for to-morrow?’
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VI
Triumph
The dread tribunal of five Judges, Public Prosecutor,
and determined Jury, sat every day. Their lists went forth
every evening, and were read out by the gaolers of the
various prisons to their prisoners. The standard gaoler-joke
was, ‘Come out and listen to the Evening Paper, you
inside there!’
‘Charles Evremonde, called Darnay!’
So at last began the Evening Paper at La Force.
When a name was called, its owner stepped apart into a
spot reserved for those who were announced as being thus
fatally recorded. Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, had
reason to know the usage; he had seen hundreds pass away
so.
His bloated gaoler, who wore spectacles to read with,
glanced over them to assure himself that he had taken his
place, and went through the list, making a similar short
pause at each name. There were twenty-three names, but
only twenty were responded to; for one of the prisoners so
summoned had died in gaol and been forgotten, and two
had already been guillotined and forgotten. The list was
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read, in the vaulted chamber where Darnay had seen the
associated prisoners on the night of his arrival. Every one
of those had perished in the massacre; every human
creature he had since cared for and parted with, had died
on the scaffold.
There were hurried words of farewell and kindness, but
the parting was soon over. It was the incident of every
day, and the society of La Force were engaged in the
preparation of some games of forfeits and a little concert,
for that evening. They crowded to the grates and shed
tears there; but, twenty places in the projected
entertainments had to be refilled, and the time was, at best,
short to the lock-up hour, when the common rooms and
corridors would be delivered over to the great dogs who
kept watch there through the night. The prisoners were
far from insensible or unfeeling; their ways arose out of the
condition of the time. Similarly, though with a subtle
difference, a species of fervour or intoxication, known,
without doubt, to have led some persons to brave the
guillotine unnecessarily, and to die by it, was not mere
boastfulness, but a wild infection of the wildly shaken
public mind. In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have
a secret attraction to the disease— a terrible passing
inclination to die of it. And all of us have like wonders
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hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to
evoke them.
The passage to the Conciergerie was short and dark;
the night in its vermin-haunted cells was long and cold.
Next day, fifteen prisoners were put to the bar before
Charles Darnay’s name was called. All the fifteen were
condemned, and the trials of the whole occupied an hour
and a half.
‘Charles Evremonde, called Darnay,’ was at length
arraigned.
His judges sat upon the Bench in feathered hats; but
the rough red cap and tricoloured cockade was the headdress
otherwise prevailing. Looking at the Jury and the
turbulent audience, he might have thought that the usual
order of things was reversed, and that the felons were
trying the honest men. The lowest, cruelest, and worst
populace of a city, never without its quantity of low,
cruel, and bad, were the directing spirits of the scene:
noisily commenting, applauding, disapproving,
anticipating, and precipitating the result, without a check.
Of the men, the greater part were armed in various ways;
of the women, some wore knives, some daggers, some ate
and drank as they looked on, many knitted. Among these
last, was one, with a spare piece of knitting under her arm
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as she worked. She was in a front row, by the side of a
man whom he had never seen since his arrival at the
Barrier, but whom he directly remembered as Defarge. He
noticed that she once or twice whispered in his ear, and
that she seemed to be his wife; but, what he most noticed
in the two figures was, that although they were posted as
close to himself as they could be, they never looked
towards him. They seemed to be waiting for something
with a dogged determination, and they looked at the Jury,
but at nothing else. Under the President sat Doctor
Manette, in his usual quiet dress. As well as the prisoner
could see, he and Mr. Lorry were the only men there,
unconnected with the Tribunal, who wore their usual
clothes, and had not assumed the coarse garb of the
Carmagnole.
Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, was accused by the
public prosecutor as an emigrant, whose life was forfeit to
the Republic, under the decree which banished all
emigrants on pain of Death. It was nothing that the decree
bore date since his return to France. There he was, and
there was the decree; he had been taken in France, and his
head was demanded.
‘Take off his head!’ cried the audience. ‘An enemy to
the Republic!’
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The President rang his bell to silence those cries, and
asked the prisoner whether it was not true that he had
lived many years in England?
Undoubtedly it was.
Was he not an emigrant then? What did he call
himself?
Not an emigrant, he hoped, within the sense and spirit
of the law.
Why not? the President desired to know.
Because he had voluntarily relinquished a title that was
distasteful to him, and a station that was distasteful to him,
and had left his country—he submitted before the word
emigrant in the present acceptation by the Tribunal was in
use—to live by his own industry in England, rather than
on the industry of the overladen people of France.
What proof had he of this?
He handed in the names of two witnesses; Theophile
Gabelle, and Alexandre Manette.
But he had married in England? the President reminded
him.
True, but not an English woman.
A citizeness of France?
Yes. By birth.
Her name and family?
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‘Lucie Manette, only daughter of Doctor Manette, the
good physician who sits there.’
This answer had a happy effect upon the audience.
Cries in exaltation of the well-known good physician rent
the hall. So capriciously were the people moved, that tears
immediately rolled down several ferocious countenances
which had been glaring at the prisoner a moment before,
as if with impatience to pluck him out into the streets and
kill him.
On these few steps of his dangerous way, Charles
Darnay had set his foot according to Doctor Manette’s
reiterated instructions. The same cautious counsel directed
every step that lay before him, and had prepared every
inch of his road.
The President asked, why had he returned to France
when he did, and not sooner?
He had not returned sooner, he replied, simply because
he had no means of living in France, save those he had
resigned; whereas, in England, he lived by giving
instruction in the French language and literature. He had
returned when he did, on the pressing and written
entreaty of a French citizen, who represented that his life
was endangered by his absence. He had come back, to
save a citizen’s life, and to bear his testimony, at whatever
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personal hazard, to the truth. Was that criminal in the eyes
of the Republic?
The populace cried enthusiastically, ‘No!’ and the
President rang his bell to quiet them. Which it did not, for
they continued to cry ‘No!’ until they left off, of their
own will.
The President required the name of that citizen. The
accused explained that the citizen was his first witness. He
also referred with confidence to the citizen’s letter, which
had been taken from him at the Barrier, but which he did
not doubt would be found among the papers then before
the President.
The Doctor had taken care that it should be there—had
assured him that it would be there—and at this stage of the
proceedings it was produced and read. Citizen Gabelle was
called to confirm it, and did so. Citizen Gabelle hinted,
with infinite delicacy and politeness, that in the pressure of
business imposed on the Tribunal by the multitude of
enemies of the Republic with which it had to deal, he had
been slightly overlooked in his prison of the Abbaye—in
fact, had rather passed out of the Tribunal’s patriotic
remembrance—until three days ago; when he had been
summoned before it, and had been set at liberty on the
Jury’s declaring themselves satisfied that the accusation
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against him was answered, as to himself, by the surrender
of the citizen Evremonde, called Darnay.
Doctor Manette was next questioned. His high
personal popularity, and the clearness of his answers, made
a great impression; but, as he proceeded, as he showed that
the Accused was his first friend on his release from his long
imprisonment; that, the accused had remained in England,
always faithful and devoted to his daughter and himself in
their exile; that, so far from being in favour with the
Aristocrat government there, he had actually been tried for
his life by it, as the foe of England and friend of the
United States—as he brought these circumstances into
view, with the greatest discretion and with the
straightforward force of truth and earnestness, the Jury and
the populace became one. At last, when he appealed by
name to Monsieur Lorry, an English gentleman then and
there present, who, like himself, had been a witness on
that English trial and could corroborate his account of it,
the Jury declared that they had heard enough, and that
they were ready with their votes if the President were
content to receive them.
At every vote (the Jurymen voted aloud and
individually), the populace set up a shout of applause. All
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the voices were in the prisoner’s favour, and the President
declared him free.
Then, began one of those extraordinary scenes with
which the populace sometimes gratified their fickleness, or
their better impulses towards generosity and mercy, or
which they regarded as some set-off against their swollen
account of cruel rage. No man can decide now to which
of these motives such extraordinary scenes were referable;
it is probable, to a blending of all the three, with the
second predominating. No sooner was the acquittal
pronounced, than tears were shed as freely as blood at
another time, and such fraternal embraces were bestowed
upon the prisoner by as many of both sexes as could rush
at him, that after his long and unwholesome confinement
he was in danger of fainting from exhaustion; none the less
because he knew very well, that the very same people,
carried by another current, would have rushed at him with
the very same intensity, to rend him to pieces and strew
him over the streets.
His removal, to make way for other accused persons
who were to be tried, rescued him from these caresses for
the moment. Five were to be tried together, next, as
enemies of the Republic, forasmuch as they had not
assisted it by word or deed. So quick was the Tribunal to
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compensate itself and the nation for a chance lost, that
these five came down to him before he left the place,
condemned to die within twenty-four hours. The first of
them told him so, with the customary prison sign of
Death—a raised finger—and they all added in words,
‘Long live the Republic!’
The five had had, it is true, no audience to lengthen
their proceedings, for when he and Doctor Manette
emerged from the gate, there was a great crowd about it,
in which there seemed to be every face he had seen in
Court—except two, for which he looked in vain. On his
coming out, the concourse made at him anew, weeping,
embracing, and shouting, all by turns and all together,
until the very tide of the river on the bank of which the
mad scene was acted, seemed to run mad, like the people
on the shore.
They put him into a great chair they had among them,
and which they had taken either out of the Court itself, or
one of its rooms or passages. Over the chair they had
thrown a red flag, and to the back of it they had bound a
pike with a red cap on its top. In this car of triumph, not
even the Doctor’s entreaties could prevent his being
carried to his home on men’s shoulders, with a confused
sea of red caps heaving about him, and casting up to sight
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from the stormy deep such wrecks of faces, that he more
than once misdoubted his mind being in confusion, and
that he was in the tumbril on his way to the Guillotine.
In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they
met and pointing him out, they carried him on.
Reddening the snowy streets with the prevailing
Republican colour, in winding and tramping through
them, as they had reddened them below the snow with a
deeper dye, they carried him thus into the courtyard of the
building where he lived. Her father had gone on before,
to prepare her, and when her husband stood upon his feet,
she dropped insensible in his arms.
As he held her to his heart and turned her beautiful
head between his face and the brawling crowd, so that his
tears and her lips might come together unseen, a few of
the people fell to dancing. Instantly, all the rest fell to
dancing, and the courtyard overflowed with the
Carmagnole. Then, they elevated into the vacant chair a
young woman from the crowd to be carried as the
Goddess of Liberty, and then swelling and overflowing out
into the adjacent streets, and along the river’s bank, and
over the bridge, the Carmagnole absorbed them every one
and whirled them away.
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After grasping the Doctor’s hand, as he stood victorious
and proud before him; after grasping the hand of Mr.
Lorry, who came panting in breathless from his struggle
against the waterspout of the Carmagnole; after kissing
little Lucie, who was lifted up to clasp her arms round his
neck; and after embracing the ever zealous and faithful
Pross who lifted her; he took his wife in his arms, and
carried her up to their rooms.
‘Lucie! My own! I am safe.’
‘O dearest Charles, let me thank God for this on my
knees as I have prayed to Him.’
They all reverently bowed their heads and hearts.
When she was again in his arms, he said to her:
‘And now speak to your father, dearest. No other man
in all this France could have done what he has done for
me.’
She laid her head upon her father’s breast, as she had
laid his poor head on her own breast, long, long ago. He
was happy in the return he had made her, he was
recompensed for his suffering, he was proud of his
strength. ‘You must not be weak, my darling,’ he
remonstrated; ‘don’t tremble so. I have saved him.’
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VII
A Knock at the Door
‘I have saved him.’ It was not another of the dreams in
which he had often come back; he was really here. And
yet his wife trembled, and a vague but heavy fear was
upon her.
All the air round was so thick and dark, the people
were so passionately revengeful and fitful, the innocent
were so constantly put to death on vague suspicion and
black malice, it was so impossible to forget that many as
blameless as her husband and as dear to others as he was to
her, every day shared the fate from which he had been
clutched, that her heart could not be as lightened of its
load as she felt it ought to be. The shadows of the wintry
afternoon were beginning to fall, and even now the
dreadful carts were rolling through the streets. Her mind
pursued them, looking for him among the Condemned;
and then she clung closer to his real presence and trembled
more.
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