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
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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 two 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.
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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 name of two witness; 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.
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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 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
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answered, as to himself, by the surrender of the citizen
Evremonde, 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 three,
with the second predominating. No sooner was the acquittal
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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
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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 hands round his neck; and after embracing the ever
zealous and faithful Pross who lifted her; he took his wife in his
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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. When she
was again in his arms, he said to her— “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.”
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Chapter XXXVII
A KNOCK AT THE DOOR
Ihave saved him.” It was not another of the dreams in which
he had often come back; he was really here. And yet his wife
trembled, and a vague but heavy fear was upon her.
All the air round was so thick and dark, the people were so
passionately revengeful and fitful, the innocent were so constantly
put to death on vague suspicion and black malice, it was so
impossible to forget that many as blameless as her husband and as
dear to others as he was to her, every day shared the fate from
which he had been clutched, that her heart could not be as
lightened of its load as she felt it ought to be. The shadows of the
wintry afternoon were beginning to fall, and even now the
dreadful carts were rolling through the streets. Her mind pursued
them, looking for him among the condemned; and then she clung
