...ause 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 **d the
society of La Force were engaged in the preparation of some
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A Tale of Two Cities
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 lockup 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
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A Tale of Two Cities
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 c