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Title: A Tale of Two Cities

A Story of the French Revolution

Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: November 28, 2009 [EBook #98]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A TALE OF TWO CITIES ***

Produced by Judith Boss, and David Widger

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

A STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

By Charles Dickens

Contents

!!!! Book the First—Recalled to Life

I. The Period

II. The Mail

III. The Night Shadows

IV. The Preparation

V. The Wine-shop

VI. The Shoemaker

!!!! Book the Second—the Golden Thread

I. Five Years Later

II. A Sight

III. A Disappointment

IV. Congratulatory

V. The Jackal

VI. Hundreds of People

VII. Monseigneur in Town

VIII. Monseigneur in the Country

IX. The Gorgon's Head

X. Two Promises

XI. A Companion Picture

XII. The Fellow of Delicacy

XIII. The Fellow of No Delicacy

XIV. The Honest Tradesman

XV. Knitting

XVI. Still Knitting

XVII. One Night

XVIII. Nine Days

XIX. An Opinion

XX. A Plea

XXI. Echoing Footsteps

XXII. The Sea Still Rises

XXIII.

Fire Rises

XXIV. Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

!!!! Book the Third—the Track of a Storm

I. In Secret

II. The Grindstone

III. The Shadow

IV. Calm in Storm

V. The Wood-Sawyer

VI. Triumph

VII. A Knock at the Door

VIII. A Hand at Cards

IX. The Game Made

X. The Substance of the Shadow

XI. Dusk

XII. Darkness

XIII. Fifty-two

XIV. The Knitting Done

XV. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever

Book the First—Recalled to Life

I. The Period

It was the best of times,

it was the worst of times,

it was the age of wisdom,

it was the age of foolishness,

it was the epoch of belief,

it was the epoch of incredulity,

it was the season of Light,

it was the season of Darkness,

it was the spring of hope,

it was the winter of despair,

we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we

were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that

some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative

degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there

were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries

it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in

general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations

were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained

her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had

heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing

up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of

years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally

deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately

come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which,

strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet

received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident,

rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the

guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements

as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body

burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of

monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough

that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was

put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to

make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely

enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were

sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by

pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of

the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently,

and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain

any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting.

Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night;

families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to

upholsterers' warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the

light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his

character of "the Captain," gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was

waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the

other four, "in consequence of the failure of his ammunition:" after which the mail was robbed in

peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on

Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his

retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law

fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off

diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St.

Giles's, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers

fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In

the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition;

now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday

who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the dozen, and

now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious

murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one

thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer

worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces,

trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one

thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures

—the creatures of this chronicle among the rest—along the roads that lay before them.

II. The Mail

It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons

with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it

lumbered up Shooter's Hill. He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the

passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking exercise, under the circumstances,

but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the horses

had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the coach across the road, with the

mutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however,

in combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of

the argument, that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and

returned to their duty.

With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering

and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the

driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with a wary "Wo-ho! so-ho-then!" the near leader

violently shook his head and everything upon it—like an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the

coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a

nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an

evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way

through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an

unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-

lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses

steamed into it, as if they had made it all.

Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three

were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could

have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under

almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his two

companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for

anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter, when every

posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in "the Captain's" pay, ranging from the

landlord to the lowest stable non-descript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard of

the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one thousand seven hundred and

seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter's Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail,

beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him, where a loaded

blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.

The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected the passengers, the

passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the

coachman was sure of nothing but the horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience

have taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the journey.

"Wo-ho!" said the coachman. "So, then! One more pull and you're at the top and be damned to you,

for I have had trouble enough to get you to it!—Joe!"

"Halloa!" the guard replied.

"What o'clock do you make it, Joe?"

"Ten minutes, good, past eleven."

"My blood!" ejaculated the vexed coachman, "and not atop of Shooter's yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with

you!"

The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative, made a decided scramble for

it, and the three other horses followed suit. Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-

boots of its passengers squashing along by its side. They had stopped when the coach stopped, and

they kept close company with it. If any one of the three had had the hardihood to propose to another

to walk on a little ahead into the mist and darkness, he would have put himself in a fair way of

getting shot instantly as a highwayman.

The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses stopped to breathe again, and the

guard got down to skid the wheel for the descent, and open the coach-door to let the passengers in.

"Tst! Joe!" cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from his box.

"What do you say, Tom?"

They both listened.

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