Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0066/00665.txt

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$Pretitle{}
$Title{(A) Tale Of Two Cities
Chapter VII}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Dickens, Charles}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{monseigneur
little
marquis
monsieur
way
chocolate
face
horses
look
ran
see
pictures
see
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}
$Date{}
$Log{See The Farmer's Servants*0066501.scf
See After The Show*0066502.scf
}
Title:       (A) Tale Of Two Cities
Book:        Book The Second: The Golden Thread
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter VII

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 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 in 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 fulness 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, 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.

[See The Farmer's Servants: Six body-women waited on his wife.]

     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 down-stairs.  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.

[See After The Show: He 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 down-stairs.

     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 down-stairs into the court-yard, 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 broken 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 hidden 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.