A Tale of Two Cities

C >> Charles Dickens >> A Tale of Two Cities


"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.



XXIV

Drawn to the Loadstone Rock


In 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, and is in Tellson's confidence.
As to the uncertain travelling, the long journey, and the winter
weather, if I were not prepared to submit myself to a few inconveniences
for the sake of Tellson's, after all these years, who ought to be?"

"I wish I were going myself," said Charles Darnay, somewhat restlessly,
and like one thinking aloud.

"Indeed! You are a pretty fellow to object and advise!" exclaimed
Mr. Lorry. "You wish you were going yourself? And you a Frenchman
born? You are a wise counsellor."

"My dear Mr. Lorry, it is because I am a Frenchman born, that the
thought (which I did not mean to utter here, however) has passed
through my mind often. One cannot help thinking, having had some
sympathy for the miserable people, and having abandoned something to
them," he spoke here in his former thoughtful manner, "that one might
be listened to, and might have the power to persuade to some restraint.
Only last night, after you had left us, when I was talking to Lucie--"

"When you were talking to Lucie," Mr. Lorry repeated. "Yes. I wonder
you are not ashamed to mention the name of Lucie! Wishing you were
going to France at this time of day!"

"However, I am not going," said Charles Darnay, with a smile. "It is
more to the purpose that you say you are."

"And I am, in plain reality. The truth is, my dear Charles," Mr. Lorry
glanced at the distant House, and lowered his voice, "you can have no
conception of the difficulty with which our business is transacted,
and of the peril in which our books and papers over yonder are involved.
The Lord above knows what the compromising consequences would be to
numbers of people, if some of our documents were seized or destroyed;
and they might be, at any time, you know, for who can say that Paris
is not set afire to-day, or sacked to-morrow! Now, a judicious selection
from these with the least possible delay, and the burying of them,
or otherwise getting of them out of harm's way, is within the power
(without loss of precious time) of scarcely any one but myself,
if any one. And shall I hang back, when Tellson's knows this and says
this--Tellson's, whose bread I have eaten these sixty years--because
I am a little stiff about the joints? Why, I am a boy, sir, to half
a dozen old codgers here!"

"How I admire the gallantry of your youthful spirit, Mr. Lorry."

"Tut! Nonsense, sir!--And, my dear Charles," said Mr. Lorry, glancing
at the House again, "you are to remember, that getting things out of
Paris at this present time, no matter what things, is next to an
impossibility. Papers and precious matters were this very day brought
to us here (I speak in strict confidence; it is not business-like to
whisper it, even to you), by the strangest bearers you can imagine,
every one of whom had his head hanging on by a single hair as he
passed the Barriers. At another time, our parcels would come and go,
as easily as in business-like Old England; but now, everything
is stopped."

"And do you really go to-night?"

"I really go to-night, for the case has become too pressing to
admit of delay."

"And do you take no one with you?"

"All sorts of people have been proposed to me, but I will have
nothing to say to any of them. I intend to take Jerry. Jerry has
been my bodyguard on Sunday nights for a long time past and I am used
to him. Nobody will suspect Jerry of being anything but an English
bull-dog, or of having any design in his head but to fly at anybody
who touches his master."

"I must say again that I heartily admire your gallantry and
youthfulness."

"I must say again, nonsense, nonsense! When I have executed this
little commission, I shall, perhaps, accept Tellson's proposal to retire
and live at my ease. Time enough, then, to think about growing old."

This dialogue had taken place at Mr. Lorry's usual desk, with Monseigneur
swarming within a yard or two of it, boastful of what he would do to
avenge himself on the rascal-people before long. It was too much the
way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it was much
too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible
Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies
that had not been sown--as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted
to be done, that had led to it--as if observers of the wretched
millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that
should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming,
years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw. Such
vapouring, combined with the extravagant plots of Monseigneur for the
restoration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself,
and worn out Heaven and earth as well as itself, was hard to be endured
without some remonstrance by any sane man who knew the truth. And it
was such vapouring all about his ears, like a troublesome confusion of
blood in his own head, added to a latent uneasiness in his mind, which
had already made Charles Darnay restless, and which still kept him so.

Among the talkers, was Stryver, of the King's Bench Bar, far on his
way to state promotion, and, therefore, loud on the theme: broaching
to Monseigneur, his devices for blowing the people up and
exterminating them from the face of the earth, and doing without them:
and for accomplishing many similar objects akin in their nature to
the abolition of eagles by sprinkling salt on the tails of the race.
Him, Darnay heard with a particular feeling of objection; and Darnay
stood divided between going away that he might hear no more, and
remaining to interpose his word, when the thing that was to be, went
on to shape itself out.

The House approached Mr. Lorry, and laying a soiled and unopened
letter before him, asked if he had yet discovered any traces of the
person to whom it was addressed? The House laid the letter down so
close to Darnay that he saw the direction--the more quickly because
it was his own right name. The address, turned into English, ran:

"Very pressing. To Monsieur heretofore the Marquis St. Evremonde,
of France. Confided to the cares of Messrs. Tellson and Co., Bankers,
London, England."

On the marriage morning, Doctor Manette had made it his one urgent
and express request to Charles Darnay, that the secret of this name
should be--unless he, the Doctor, dissolved the obligation--kept
inviolate between them. Nobody else knew it to be his name; his own
wife had no suspicion of the fact; Mr. Lorry could have none.

"No," said Mr. Lorry, in reply to the House; "I have referred it,
I think, to everybody now here, and no one can tell me where this
gentleman is to be found."

The hands of the clock verging upon the hour of closing the Bank,
there was a general set of the current of talkers past Mr. Lorry's
desk. He held the letter out inquiringly; and Monseigneur looked at
it, in the person of this plotting and indignant refugee; and
Monseigneur looked at it in the person of that plotting and indignant
refugee; and This, That, and The Other, all had something disparaging
to say, in French or in English, concerning the Marquis who was not
to be found.

"Nephew, I believe--but in any case degenerate successor--of the
polished Marquis who was murdered," said one. "Happy to say, I never
knew him."

"A craven who abandoned his post," said another--this Monseigneur
had been got out of Paris, legs uppermost and half suffocated, in a
load of hay--"some years ago."

"Infected with the new doctrines," said a third, eyeing the direction
through his glass in passing; "set himself in opposition to the last
Marquis, abandoned the estates when he inherited them, and left them
to the ruffian herd. They will recompense him now, I hope,
as he deserves."

"Hey?" cried the blatant Stryver. "Did he though? Is that the sort
of fellow? Let us look at his infamous name. D--n the fellow!"

Darnay, unable to restrain himself any longer, touched Mr. Stryver on
the shoulder, and said:

"I know the fellow."

"Do you, by Jupiter?" said Stryver. "I am sorry for it."

"Why?"

"Why, Mr. Darnay? D'ye hear what he did? Don't ask, why,
in these times."

"But I do ask why?"

"Then I tell you again, Mr. Darnay, I am sorry for it. I am sorry to
hear you putting any such extraordinary questions. Here is a fellow,
who, infected by the most pestilent and blasphemous code of devilry
that ever was known, abandoned his property to the vilest scum of the
earth that ever did murder by wholesale, and you ask me why I am
sorry that a man who instructs youth knows him? Well, but I'll
answer you. I am sorry because I believe there is contamination in
such a scoundrel. That's why."

Mindful of the secret, Darnay with great difficulty checked himself,
and said: "You may not understand the gentleman."

"I understand how to put _you_ in a corner, Mr. Darnay," said Bully
Stryver, "and I'll do it. If this fellow is a gentleman, I _don't_
understand him. You may tell him so, with my compliments. You may
also tell him, from me, that after abandoning his worldly goods and
position to this butcherly mob, I wonder he is not at the head of them.
But, no, gentlemen," said Stryver, looking all round, and snapping his
fingers, "I know something of human nature, and I tell you that you'll
never find a fellow like this fellow, trusting himself to the mercies
of such precious _protégés_. No, gentlemen; he'll always show 'em
a clean pair of heels very early in the scuffle, and sneak away."

With those words, and a final snap of his fingers, Mr. Stryver
shouldered himself into Fleet-street, amidst the general approbation
of his hearers. Mr. Lorry and Charles Darnay were left alone at the
desk, in the general departure from the Bank.

"Will you take charge of the letter?" said Mr. Lorry. "You know
where to deliver it?"

"I do."

"Will you undertake to explain, that we suppose it to have been
addressed here, on the chance of our knowing where to forward it,
and that it has been here some time?"

"I will do so. Do you start for Paris from here?"

"From here, at eight."

"I will come back, to see you off."

Very ill at ease with himself, and with Stryver and most other men,
Darnay made the best of his way into the quiet of the Temple,
opened the letter, and read it. These were its contents:


"Prison of the Abbaye, Paris.

"June 21, 1792.
"MONSIEUR HERETOFORE THE MARQUIS.

"After having long been in danger of my life at the hands of the
village, I have been seized, with great violence and indignity, and
brought a long journey on foot to Paris. On the road I have suffered
a great deal. Nor is that all; my house has been destroyed--razed
to the ground.