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Mr. Cruncher?’
‘Respectin’ a future spear o’ life, miss,’ returned Mr.
Cruncher, ‘I hope so. Respectin’ any present use o’ this
here blessed old head o’ mind, I think not. Would you do
me the favour, miss, to take notice o’ two promises and
wows wot it is my wishes fur to record in this here crisis?’
‘Oh, for gracious sake!’ cried Miss Pross, still wildly
crying, ‘record them at once, and get them out of the
way, like an excellent man.’
‘First,’ said Mr. Cruncher, who was all in a tremble,
and who spoke with an ashy and solemn visage, ‘them
poor things well out o’ this, never no more will I do it,
never no more!’
‘I am quite sure, Mr. Cruncher,’ returned Miss Pross,
‘that you never will do it again, whatever it is, and I beg
you not to think it necessary to mention more particularly
what it is.’

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that no personal influence could possibly save him, that he
was virtually sentenced by the millions, and that units
could avail him nothing.
Nevertheless, it was not easy, with the face of his
beloved wife fresh before him, to compose his mind to
what it must bear. His hold on life was strong, and it was
very, very hard, to loosen; by gradual efforts and degrees
unclosed a little here, it clenched the tighter there; and
when he brought his strength to bear on that hand and it
yielded, this was closed again. There was a hurry, too, in
all his thoughts, a turbulent and heated working of his
heart, that contended against resignation. If, for a moment,
he did feel resigned, then his wife and child who had to
live after him, seemed to protest and to make it a selfish
thing.
But, all this was at first. Before long, the consideration
that there was no disgrace in the fate he must meet, and
that numbers went the same road wrongfully, and trod it
firmly every day, sprang up to stimulate him. Next
followed the thought that much of the future peace of
mind enjoyable by the dear ones, depended on his quiet
fortitude. So, by degrees he calmed into the better state,
when he could raise his thoughts much higher, and draw
comfort down.

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‘This lasted twenty-six hours from the time when I first
saw her. I had come and gone twice, and was again sitting
by her, when she began to falter. I did what little could be
done to assist that opportunity, and by-and-bye she sank
into a lethargy, and lay like the dead.
‘It was as if the wind and rain had lulled at last, after a
long and fearful storm. I released her arms, and called the
woman to assist me to compose her figure and the dress
she had to. It was then that I knew her condition to be
that of one in whom the first expectations of being a
mother have arisen; and it was then that I lost the little
hope I had had of her.
‘‘Is she dead?’ asked the Marquis, whom I will still
describe as the elder brother, coming booted into the
room from his horse.
‘‘Not dead,’ said I; ‘but like to die.’
‘‘What strength there is in these common bodies!’ he
said, looking down at her with some curiosity.
‘‘There is prodigious strength,’ I answered him, ‘in
sorrow and despair.’

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Mr. Cruncher knuckled his forehead, as Sydney Carton
and the spy returned from the dark room. ‘Adieu, Mr.
Barsad,’ said the former; ‘our arrangement thus made, you
have nothing to fear from me.’
He sat down in a chair on the hearth, over against Mr.
Lorry. When they were alone, Mr. Lorry asked him what
he had done?
‘Not much. If it should go ill with the prisoner, I have
ensured access to him, once.’
Mr. Lorry’s countenance fell.
‘It is all I could do,’ said Carton. ‘To propose too
much, would be to put this man’s head under the axe,
and, as he himself said, nothing worse could happen to
him if he were denounced. It was obviously the weakness
of the position. There is no help for it.’
‘But access to him,’ said Mr. Lorry, ‘if it should go ill
before the Tribunal, will not save him.’
‘I never said it would.’
Mr. Lorry’s eyes gradually sought the fire; his sympathy
with his darling, and the heavy disappointment of his
second arrest, gradually weakened them; he was an old
man now, overborne with anxiety of late, and his tears
fell.

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Her father, cheering her, showed a compassionate
superiority to this woman’s weakness, which was
wonderful to see. No garret, no shoemaking, no One
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Hundred and Five, North Tower, now! He had
accomplished the task he had set himself, his promise was
redeemed, he had saved Charles. Let them all lean upon
him.
Their housekeeping was of a very frugal kind: not only
because that was the safest way of life, involving the least
offence to the people, but because they were not rich, and
Charles, throughout his imprisonment, had had to pay
heavily for his bad food, and for his guard, and towards the
living of the poorer prisoners. Partly on this account, and
partly to avoid a domestic spy, they kept no servant;

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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

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sat upon their horses outside the gate. Looking about him
while in this state of suspense, Charles Darnay observed
that the gate was held by a mixed guard of soldiers and
patriots, the latter far outnumbering the former; and that
while ingress into the city for peasants’ carts bringing in
supplies, and for similar traffic and traffickers, was easy
enough, egress, even for the homeliest people, was very
difficult. A numerous medley of men and women, not to
mention beasts and vehicles of various sorts, was waiting
to issue forth; but, the previous identification was so strict,
that they filtered through the barrier very slowly. Some of
these people knew their turn for examination to be so far
off, that they lay down on the ground to sleep or smoke,
while others talked together, or loitered about. The red
cap and tri-colour cockade were universal, both among
men and women.
When he had sat in his saddle some half-hour, taking
note of these things, Darnay found himself confronted by
the same man in authority, who directed the guard to
open the barrier. Then he delivered to the escort, drunk
and sober, a receipt for the escorted, and requested him to
dismount. He did so, and the two patriots, leading his
tired horse, turned and rode away without entering the
city.

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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

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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 breadand-
cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!’
The polite rejection of the three lumps of bread-andcheese
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,

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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.
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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 downstairs
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.

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‘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,
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as if to restrain him from flying at the objects of his brief
devotion and tearing them to pieces.

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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!’
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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:

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‘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.’

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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

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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.’

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens(4)

‘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
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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

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens(3)

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.
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‘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.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens(2)

‘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—‘
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‘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.’

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Book the First—Recalled to Life
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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.
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