The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0068/00688.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 15KB | 287 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00688}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Tale Of Two Cities
Chapter VI}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{every
president
called
charles
darnay
france
carried
citizen
doctor
england}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       (A) Tale Of Two Cities
Book:        Book The Third: The Track of a Storm
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter VI

Triumph

     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 Evremonde, 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 Evremonde,
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 were 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 Evremonde, 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 asthe 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 Evremonde, 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: Theophile 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 off, 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