A Tale of Two Cities

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


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.

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.



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 sips 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 dun 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.