night to help them out of it, and they passed on once more into
solitude and loneliness: jingling through the untimely cold and
wet, among impoverished fields that had yielded no fruits of the
earth that year, diversified by the blackened remains of burnt
houses, and by the sudden emergence from ambuscade, and sharp
reining up across their way, of patriot patrols on the watch on all
the roads.
Daylight at last found them before the wall of Paris. The barrier
was closed and strongly guarded when they rode up to it.
“Where are the papers of this prisoner?” demanded a resolute-
looking man in authority, who was summoned out by the guard.
Naturally struck by the disagreeable word, Charles Darnay
requested the speaker to take notice that he was a free traveller
and French citizen, in charge of an escort which the disturbed
state of the country had imposed upon him, and which he had paid
for.
“Where,” repeated the same personage, without taking any
heed of him whatever, “are the papers of this prisoner?”
The drunken patriot had them in his cap, and produced them.
Casting his eyes over Gabelle’s letter, the same personage in
authority showed some disorder and surprise and looked at
Darnay with a close attention.
He left escort and escorted without saying a word, however,
and went into the guard-room; meanwhile they sat upon their
horses outside the gate. Looking about him while in this state of
suspense, Charles Darnay observed that the gate was held by a
mixed guard of soldiers and patriots, the latter far outnumbering
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the former; and that while ingress into the city for peasants’ carts
bringing in supplies, and for similar traffic and traffickers, was
easy enough, egress, even for the homeliest people, was very
difficult. A numerous medley of men and women, not to mention
beasts and vehicles of various sorts, was waiting to issue forth; but
the previous identification was so strict, that they filtered through
the barrier very slowly. Some of these people knew their turn for
examination to be so far off, that they lay down on the ground to
sleep or smoke, while others talked together, or loitered about.
The red cap and tricolour cockade were universal, both among
men and women.
When he had sat in his saddle some half-hour, taking note of
these things, Darnay found himself confronted by the same man in
authority, who directed the guard to open the barrier. Then he
delivered to the escort, drunk and sober, a receipt for the escorted
and requested him to dismount. He did so, and the two patriots,
leading his tired horse, turned and rode away without entering the
city.
He accompanied his conductor into a guard-room, smelling of
common wine and tobacco, where certain soldiers and patriots,
asleep and awake, drunk and sober, and in various neutral states
between sleeping and waking, drunkenness and sobriety, were
standing and lying about. The light in the guardhouse, half
derived from the waning oil lamps of the night, and half from the
overcast day, was in a correspondingly uncertain condition. Some
registers were lying open on a desk, and an officer of a coarse,
dark aspect, presided over these.
“Citizen Defarge,” said he to Darnay’s conductor, as he took a
slip of paper to write on. “Is this the emigrant Evremonde?”
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“This is the man.”
“Your age, Evremonde?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Married, Evremonde?”
“Yes.”
“Where married?”
“In England.”
“Without doubt. Where is your wife, Evremonde?”
“In England.”
“Without doubt. You are consigned, Evremonde, to the prison
of La Force.”
“Just Heaven!” exclaimed Darnay. “Under what law, and for
what offence?”
The officer looked up from his slip of paper for a moment.
“We have new laws, Evremonde, and new offences, since you
were here.” He said it with a hard smile, and went on writing.
“I entreat you to observe that I have come here voluntarily, in
response to that written appeal of a fellow countryman which lies
before you. I demand no more than the opportunity to do so
without delay. Is not that my right?”
“Emigrants have no rights, Evremonde,” was the stolid reply.
The officer wrote until he had finished, read over to himself what
he had written, sanded it, and handed it to Defarge, with the
words, “In secret.”
Defarge motioned with the paper to the prisoner that he must
accompany him. The prisoner obeyed, and a guard of two armed
patriots attended them.
“Is it you,” said Defarge, in a low voice, as they went down the
guardhouse steps and turned into Paris, “who married the
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daughter of Doctor Manette, once a prisoner in the Bastille that is
no more?”
“Yes,” replied Darnay, looking at him with surprise.
“My name is Defarge, and I keep a wine-shop in the Quarter
Saint Antoine. Possibly you have heard of me.”
“My wife came to your house to reclaim her father? Yes!”
The word ‘wife’ seemed to serve as a gloomy reminder to
Defarge, to say with sudden impatience, “In the name of that
sharp female newly-born, and called La Guillotine, why did you
come to France?”
“You heard me say why, a minute ago. Do you not believe it is
the truth?”
“A bad truth for you,” said Defarge, speaking with knitted
brows, and looking straight before him.
“Indeed I am lost here. All here is so unprecedented, so
changed, so sudden and unfair, that I am absolutely lost. Will you
render me a little help?”
“None.” Defarge spoke, always looking straight before him.
“Will you answer me a single question?”
“Perhaps. According to its nature. You can say what it is.”
“In this prison that I am going to so unjustly, shall I have some
free communication with the world outside?”
“You will see.”
“I am not to be buried there, prejudiced, and without any
means of presenting my case?”
“You will see. But, what then? Other people have been
similarly buried in worse prisons, before now.”
“But never by me, Citizen Defarge.”
Defarge glanced darkly at him for answer, and walked on in a
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steady and set silence. The deeper he sank into this silence, the
fainter hope there was—or so Darnay thought—of his softening in
any slight degree. He, therefore, made haste to say:
“It is of the utmost importance to me (you know, Citizen, even
better than I do, of how much importance), that I should be able to
communicate to Mr. Lorry of Tellson’s Bank, an English
gentleman who is now in Paris, the simple fact without comment,
that I have been thrown into the prison of La Force. Will you
cause that to be done for me?”
“I will do,” Defarge doggedly rejoined, “nothing for you. My
duty is to my country and the People. I am the sworn servant of
both, against you. I will do nothing for you.”
Charles Darnay felt it hopeless to entreat him further, and his
pride was touched besides. As they walked on in silence, he could
not but see how used the people were to the spectacle of prisoners
passing along the streets. The very children scarcely noticed him.
A few passers turned their heads, and a few shook their fingers at
him as an aristocrat; otherwise that a man in good clothes should
be going to prison, was no more remarkable than that a labourer
in working clothes should be going to work. In one narrow, dark,
and dirty street through which they passed, an excited orator,
mounted on a stool, was addressing an excited audience on the
crimes against the people, of the king and the royal family. The
few words that he caught from this man’s lips, first made it known
to Charles Darnay that the king was in prison, and that the foreign
ambassadors had one and all left Paris. On the road (except at
Beauvais) he had heard absolutely nothing. The escort and the
universal watchfulness had completely isolated him.
That he had fallen among far greater dangers than those which
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had developed themselves when he left England, he of course
knew now. That perils had thickened about him fast, and might
thicken faster and faster yet, he of course knew now. He could not
but admit to himself that he might not have made this journey, if
he could have foreseen the events of a few days. And yet his
misgivings were not so dark as, imagined by the light of this later
time, they would appear. Troubled as the future was, it was the
unknown future, and in its obscurity there was ignorant hope. The
horrible massacre, days and nights long, which, within a few
rounds of the clock, was to set a great mark of blood upon the
blessed garnering time of harvest, was as far out of his knowledge
as if it had been a hundred thousand years away. The ‘sharp
female newly-born, and called La Guillotine,’ was hardly known to
him, or to the generality of people, by name. The frightful deeds
that were to be soon done, were probably unimagined at that time
in the brains of the doers. How could they have a place in the
shadowy conceptions of a gentle mind?
Of unjust treatment in detention and hardship, and in cruel
separation from his wife and child, he foreshadowed the
likelihood, or the certainty; but, beyond this, he dreaded nothing
distinctly. With this on his mind, which was enough to carry him
into a dreary prison courtyard, he arrived at the prison of La
Force.
A man with a bloated face opened the strong wicket, to whom
Defarge presented “The Emigrant Evremonde.”
“What the Devil! How many more of them!” exclaimed the man
with the bloated face.
Defarge took his receipt without noticing the exclamation, and
withdrew, with his two fellow-patriots.
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“What the Devil, I say again!” exclaimed the gaoler, left with his
wife. “How many more!”
The gaoler’s wife, being provided with no answer to the
question, merely replied, “One must have patience, my dear!”
Three turnkeys who entered responsive to a bell she rang, echoed
the sentiment, and one added, “For the love of Liberty”; which
sounded in that place like an inappropriate conclusion.
The prison of La Force was a gloomy prison, dark and filthy,
and with a horrible smell of foul sleep in it. Extraordinary how
soon the noisome flavour of imprisoned sleep, becomes manifest
in all such places that are ill cared for!
“In secret, too,” grumbled the gaoler, looking at the written
paper. “As if I was not already full to bursting!”
He stuck the paper on a file, in an ill-humour, and Charles
Darnay awaited his further pleasure for half an hour: sometimes,
pacing to and fro in the strong arched room: sometimes, resting on
a stone seat: in either case detained to be imprinted on the
memory of the chief and his subordinates.
“Come!” said the chief, at length taking up his keys, “come with
me, Emigrant.”
Through the dismal prison twilight, his new charge
accompanied him by corridor and staircase, many doors clanging
and locking behind them, until they came into a large, low, vaulted
chamber, crowded with prisoners of both sexes. The women were
seated at a long table, reading and writing, knitting, sewing, and
embroidering; the men were for the most part standing behind
their chairs, or lingering up and down the room.
In the instinctive association of prisoners with shameful crime
and disgrace, the newcomer recoiled from this company. But the
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crowning unreality of his long unreal ride, was, their all at once
rising to receive him, with every refinement of manner known to
the time, and with all the engaging graces and courtesies of life.
So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison
manners and gloom, so spectral did they become in the
inappropriate squalor and misery through which they were seen,
that Charles Darnay seemed to stand in company of the dead.
Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost
of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of
wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal
from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed
by the death they had died in coming there.
It struck him motionless. The gaoler standing at his side, and
the other gaolers moving about, who would have been well enough
as to appearance in the ordinary exercise of their functions, looked
so extravagantly coarse contrasted with sorrowing mothers and
blooming daughters who were there—with the apparitions of the
coquette, the young beauty, and the mature woman delicately
bred—that the inversion of all experience and likelihood which the
scene of shadows presented, was heightened to its utmost. Surely,
ghosts all. Surely, the long unreal ride some progress of disease
that had brought him to these gloomy shades!
“In the name of the assembled companions in misfortune,” said
a gentleman of courtly appearance and address, coming forward,
“I have the honour of giving you welcome to La Force, and of
condoling with you on the calamity that has brought you among
us. May it soon terminate happily! It would be an impertinence
elsewhere, but it is not so here, to ask your name and condition?”
Charles Darnay roused himself, and gave the required
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information, in words as suitable as he could find.
“But I hope,” said the gentleman, following the chief gaoler
with his eyes, who moved across the room, “that you are not in
secret?”
“I do not understand the meaning of the term, but I have heard
them say so.”
“Ah, what a pity! We so much regret it! But take courage;
