《A Tale of Two Cities》 Book3 CHAPTER
VI Triumph
by Charles Dickens
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 Evrémonde,
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 Evrémonde, 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 here 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 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
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 Evrémonde,
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 head-dress 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 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 Evrémonde,
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!'
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: Théophile 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?
`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 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 of 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 against him
was answered, as to himself, by the surrender of the citizen Evrémonde 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 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 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 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 court-yard 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 court-yard
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.
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. Then she was again in his arms, he said
to hem:
`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. |
