Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
“A multitude of people, and yet a solitude,” said Darnay, when
they had listened for a while.
“Is it not impressive, Mr. Darnay?” asked Lucie. “Sometimes, I
have sat here of an evening, until I have fancied—but even the
shade of a foolish fancy makes me shudder tonight, when all is so
black and solemn—”
“Let us shudder too. We may know what it is.”
“It will seem nothing to you. Such whims are only impressive as
we originate them, I think; they are not to be communicated. I
have sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I
have made the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that
are coming by-and-by into our lives.”
“There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be
so,” Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way.
The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became
more and more rapid. The corner echoed and re-echoed with the
tread of feet; some, as it seemed, under the windows; some, as it
seemed, in the room; some coming, some going, some breaking off,
some stopping altogether; all in the distant streets, and not one
within sight.
“Are all these footsteps destined to come to all of us, Miss
Manette, or are we to divide them among us?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Darnay; I told you it was a foolish fancy, but
you asked for it. When I have yielded myself to it, I have been
alone, and then I have imagined them the footsteps of the people
who are to come into my life, and my father’s.”
“I take them into mine!” said Carton. “I ask no questions and
make no stipulations. There is a great crowd bearing down upon
us, Miss Manette, and I see them—by the Lightning.” He added
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
the last words, after there had been a vivid flash which had shown
him lounging in the window.
“And I hear them!” he added again, after a peal of thunder.
“Here they come, fast, fierce, and furious!”
It was the rush and roar of rain that he typified, and it stopped
him, for no voice could be heard in it. A memorable storm of
thunder and lightning broke with that sweep of water, and there
was not a moment’s interval in crash, and fire, and rain, until after
the moon rose at midnight.
The great bell of Saint Paul’s was striking One in the cleared
air, when Mr. Lorry, escorted by Jerry, high-booted and bearing a
lantern, set forth on his return passage to Clerkenwell. There were
solitary patches of road on the way between Soho and
Clerkenwell, and Mr. Lorry, mindful of footpads, always retained
Jerry for this service: though it was usually performed a good two
hours earlier.
“What a night it has been! Almost a night, Jerry,” said Mr.
Lorry, “to bring the dead out of their graves.”
“I never see the night myself, master—nor yet I don’t expect
to—what would do that,” answered Jerry.
“Good night, Mr. Carton,” said the man of business. “Good
night, Mr. Darnay. Shall we ever see such a night again, together!”
Perhaps. Perhaps, see the great crowd of people with its rush
and roar, bearing down upon them, too.
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
Chapter XIII
MONSEIGNEUR IN TOWN
Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court,
held his fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in
Paris. Monseigneur was in his inner room, his
sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to the crowd of
worshippers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur was about
to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many
things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to
be rather rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning’s chocolate
could not so much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without
the aid of four strong men besides the Cook.
Yes, it took four men, all four a-blaze with gorgeous decoration,
and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold
watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion
set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to
Monseigneur’s lips. One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the
sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with
the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented
the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured
the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense
with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high
place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot
upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on
by only three men; he must have died of two.
Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night, where
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
the Comedy and the Grand Opera were charmingly represented.
Monseigneur was out at a little supper most nights, with
fascinating company. So polite and so impressible was
Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the Grand Opera had far more
influence with him in the tiresome articles of state affairs and state
secrets, than the needs of all France. A happy circumstance for
France, as the like always is for all countries similarly favoured!—
always was for England (by way of example), in the regretted days
of the merry Stuart who sold it.
Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public
business, which was, to let everything go on its own way; of
particular public business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble
idea that it must all go his way—tend to his own power and pocket.
Of his pleasures, general and particular, Monseigneur had the
other truly noble idea, that the world was made for them. The text
of his order (altered from the original by only a pronoun, which is
not much) ran: “The earth and the fullness thereof are mine, saith
Monseigneur.”
Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar
embarrassments crept into his affairs, both private and public; and
he had, as to both classes of affairs, allied himself perforce with a
Farmer-General. As to finances public, because Monseigneur
could not make anything at all of them, and must consequently let
them out to somebody who could; as to finances private, because
Farmer-Generals were rich, and Monseigneur, after generations of
great luxury and expense, was growing poor. Hence Monseigneur
had taken his sister from a convent, while there was yet time to
ward off the impending veil, the cheapest garment she could wear,
and had bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich Farmer-General,
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
poor in family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate
cane with a golden apple on the top of it, was now among the
company in the outer rooms, much prostrated before by
mankind—always excepting superior mankind of the blood of
Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked down upon him
with the loftiest contempt.
A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood
in his stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-
women waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing
but plunder and forage where he could, the Farmer-General—
howsoever his matrimonial relations conduced to social morality
was at least the greatest reality among the personages who
attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.
For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and
adorned with every device of decoration that the taste and skill of
the time could achieve, were, in truth, not a sound business;
considered with any reference to the scarecrows in the rags and
nightcaps elsewhere (and not so far off, either, but that the
watching towers of Notre Dame, almost equidistant from the two
extremes, could see them both), they would have been an
exceedingly uncomfortable business—if that could have been
anybody’s business, at the house of Monseigneur. Military officers
destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a
ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics,
of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and
looser lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying
horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or
remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all
public employments from which anything was to be got; these
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
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
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
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;
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
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 wave of the hand on another,
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
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 the face made, it was a handsome face, and
a remarkable one.
Its owner went downstairs into the courtyard, got into his
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
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 though the 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.
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
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.
