We are celebrating the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Dickens. Gopa and Sivaram therefore selected this novel. It relies on Thomas Carlyle's account of the French Revolution and depicts the contrasting fortunes of citizens in the capitals of neighbouring countries, London and Paris.
London was lawless and its
common citizens were poor, lorded over by the nobility; the
citizens of Paris were equally down-trodden, but are now caught in the throes of
a violent revolt that will change the landscape of France forever,
but not before a bloodthirsty period of head-chopping.
Mathew, Gopa, Kavita
As
is true of Dickens' novels the characters are vivid. But there is little
of Dickens' humour in this work, which came late in his
life. Perhaps Dr Manette is the most striking person; he evolves
from the mental trauma of solitary imprisonment to become heroic in stature.
KumKum
Madame Defarge
symbolises the extreme violence and bloody vengeance the French
Revolution heaped on the aristocracy, sweeping along many unwitting
individuals implicated by false testimony.
Kavita
The
language is complex; Dickens seems to have revelled in long sentences
and his style has the stolidity of the Victorians, but it has aged
quickly. Lacking an editor, Dickens does not hesitate to pile detail
on top of details; a judicious reader is forced to skip.
Priya
Google
celebrated the Dickens anniversary with a doodle depicting a collage
of his characters:
Here
are the readers at the end:
Kavita, Priya, Zakia, Gopa, KumKum, Mathew, Sunil, Joe
Click
below to read more ...
A Tale of Two
Cities by Charles Dickens
Reading
on June 14, 2012
Charles Dickens by Ary Scheffer (1855)
Present:
Priya,
KumKum, Zakia, Joe, Mathew, Sunil, Kavita, Gopa
Absent:
Thommo
(our paisano on a Nano drive), Talitha (away to USA), Bobby (struck
by a bug), Sivaram (undergoing Ayurvedic treatment).
The
next session is Poetry, on July
13, 2012.
The
next novel for reading is
Three
men in a Boat by
Jerome K. Jerome
on Aug
10, 2012.
The novel selection after that is up to Sunil and Mathew - by end June,
please.
KumKum
said she was sad she'd miss the next two sessions as she is going to
visit her children and grand-children in USA. KRG sessions and her
garden are only two things she'll miss when she's abroad. How about
joining on Skype, several asked? If someone brought a laptop and
linked up, Joe and KumKum could be having coffee in Boston at 8am
when KRG readers were meeting at 5:30pm IST in the CYC on July 13.
It's worth a try if someone will bring a laptop and sign onto Skype
and initiate a video session with Joe whose id on Skype is jocle11.
He'll
be waiting (unless he's washing the few clothes he takes along, said
KumKum). “No more bunking then,” said Sunil with a laugh; even if
he's away in Kodagu supervising his coffee estates he'll need to sign
in at the appointed hour! The USB dongles work in Madikeri, said
KumKum from her experience of visiting friends there.
Gopa
Gopa
begged to go first as she was the one who chose the novel. When she
let on she'd read from the opening page, there were knowing smiles,
because it's been the favourite con used by those who have not
completed the assigned novel, having read only a summary, to choose
something from Chapter 1. But no, it was the second time she was
reading the entire novel. The sonorous rhetorical devices of
antithesis and anaphora could make this crafted sentence the opening
gambit of many a novel.
Gopa
noted that in France and England, kings and queens thought they had
the right to rule absolutely. The parliamentary system was already
the norm in England but the oppression of common people continued and
was to reach its zenith when the Industrial Revolution came. 1775 was
an age of Revelation too; Mathew referred to one Miss Southcote who was
convinced she was a prophetess and wrote down her prophecies in
rhyme, one of them predicting the swallowing up of London and
Westminster, he said. Here is a web link:
Dickens
is writing about events that took place 100 years before his time.
Mathew
The
passage graphically describes the chateaux of the nobles being put to
the torch, as Gabelle, apprehensive he would be a victim himself
surveys the scene. So far the violence of the revolution had affected
the city of Paris mainly; now it was spreading to the countryside.
The incendiary scene is described with a Dickensian vehemence:
“molten lead,” “great rents and splits,” “stupefied birds.”
Joe
noted that French infrastructure must have been sorely lacking in
investment at the time, for there is but one mender of the roads in
the novel for all of France, and he recurs from chapter to chapter,
sometimes wearing a red cap, sometimes a blue cap; he is a kind of
mute, nameless observer of all that's going on.
Sunil
Sunil's
passage describes the pathetic condition of people in France, so
impoverished by oppression that they would even stoop to licking the
wine spilled on the road from a ruptured cask. The widespread
deprivation is painted with the power of Dickens' pen, lively in its
description of a land laid waste. The script of a horror movie could
not rival these demonic scenes of 'gaunt scarecrows,' 'scrags of
meat,' 'compressed lips,' 'murderous gunmaker's stock,' 'dim wicks,'
and rivulets running down street gutters.
Mathew
noted that the passage opens by saying “the time was to come” and
repeats the warning “the time was not come yet.” In a later
passage Defarge says the time was not come yet; this leads up to the
climax when the Bastille is stormed. Gopa saw a sinister figure in
Madame Defarge, eternally knitting away at her stool, keeping track of
the names of those who might be termed “enemies of the people.”
People in war time think it will all be settled soon, but there is no reckoning how many
are going to be killed .
Priya
thought of this writing as excellent reportage from the front lines
of war. There are differences in the kind of oppression going on in
France and England. This is a hundred years before the Industrial
Revolution as Mathew noted.
Joe
The novel has an
opening sentence that is often quoted for its lofty and antithetical
brilliance. It lapses thereafter into a long-drawn out and
repetitious account of a stagecoach journey from London to Dover.
After you have plodded through a quarter of the novel you have still
not found the reason why the author wished to torture his readers so.
Hundred word sentences are quite common. There is much verbosity in
them, and the descriptions show a distressing lack of point. The
casual reader suspects this author was paid by the sheer quantum of his
output. Did Dickens have an editor? The testimony of this novel is that he
needed such help to avoid the excesses of laboured writing. By way of
excuse one can say he wrote this novel when he was not on top of his
form, perhaps.
The one excellence
attributed to him is summed up by Somerset Maugham:
“David
Copperfield is filled with characters of the most astonishing
variety, vividness, and originality.”
Here's a quote
from the first chapter on the stagecoach journey about strangers:
A wonderful fact
to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that
profound secret and mystery to every other.
Joe
admitted he was known for selecting romantic passages. But where is
such a passage in this book, wondered Priya? It was where Carton
expresses his overflowing infatuation with Lucie. The passage fairly
drips with sentimentality of an almost comical kind. Joe read it in
such a manner as to heighten the hopelessness of this man confessing
his love-sickness in paragraph after paragraph of anguished
protestations, and simultaneously undermining it by putting forward his diffident
unworthiness. Carton lacked the killer instinct, thought Joe: he
should have gone and kissed the girl midway in his distraught rant.
Carton was all foreplay, and no tackle was Joe's verdict.
Dickens
must be left for folk who can tolerate such a presentation of women
as elevated spotless saints beyond the reach of feckless men
prostrating themselves before them. KumKum saw something to love in
Stryver, the lawyer for Darnay. Priya said she liked Joe's reading.
There
was some discussion of Amitav Ghosh and his novel Sea of Poppies.
How famine struck India, in the time of the second World War and
millions died in Bengal. Kavita thought Indian kings were less
oppressive. The talk veered off to how tapioca was brought to
Kerala from S. America to feed poor people in Kerala in the 1800s and
prevent famine. The kappa breakfast is now standard fare in
Kerala; it provides starch and energy for workers. Similar to that is
chhatu (gram flour) in Bihar and Bengal, consumed by workers
and rickshaw-puller in the old days with a little chilli and salt.
Ragi was the breakfast of our sleeping Prime Minister, Deve
Gowda, said Sunil.
KumKum
This
is a popular novel of Dickens. He first published the book in installments starting April 1859 in his own magazine called All the
Year Round – taking full advantage of his undisputed fame at
the time, and people’s desire to know what happened in Paris during
the French Revolution.
KumKum
admitted she was no fan of Charles Dickens. Years ago she read this
book in an abridged form. However, she thanked Gopa for selecting it
for this session.
A
Tale of Two Cities has lost most of the magic it had for the
Victorians. Dickens’ style is archaic, and his language too. It
tells a story which has very little appeal in our time. Yet, she
enjoyed reading the book as historical fiction, making an effort to
transport herself back to that era.
KumKum
found the going was not easy, but didn't give up. It took her a month
to finish the book, but she was happy she persevered. Some of the
characters, such as Madame Defarge, Jarvis Lorry, Mr. Stryver, Sydney
Carton, and Miss Pross etc. are among her favourites now. They
recurred often in the book and kept her entertained. Kavita said she
would read for a while and then go off and do something else. Most
other novels she would read straight through. Incidentally, if you go
to Librivox.org you can get the entire novel in audio in 420MB and
listening to the whole book takes 15 hours. One can read it
by sight in about half the time.
KumKum
liked this bit about the animated motion of the feet:
On
a day in August, when Mr. Stryver (after notifying to his jackal that
"he had thought better of that marrying matter") had
carried his delicacy into Devonshire, and when the sight and scent of
flowers in the City streets had some waifs of goodness in them for
the worst, of health for the sickliest, and of youth for the oldest,
Sydney's feet still trod those stones. From being irresolute and
purposeless, his feet became animated by an intention, and, in the
working out of that intention, they took him to the Doctor's door.
Joe
laughed and said Carton should have got the girl, except that he was
suffering from a self-defeating lack of confidence. Priya adverted to
the touching nature of the moonlight scene between father and
daughter, Dr Manette and Lucie. Well, he won her heart like no other
man could in her life.
Dickens
was an acute observer of life. Many unimportant events are woven into
the main story, along with descriptions of nature, and everyday
events interspersed. However, to some extent this rambling causes the
story to lose momentum at places in the text.
KumKum added: the romantic and the sentimental aspects of the story left her
unmoved, for these were written like fairy tales.
Priya
Priya
read the action-packed scene in which the two women, Mrs Pross and
Madame Defarge go for each other, the one jingoistically exclaiming
the superior strength that comes of her being an Englishwoman, and
the other filled with malevolence and keen to capture the fleeing
Lucie and her child. However in the heat of the struggle the reader laughs
at the use of such comic epithets as: “Woman imbecile and pig-like!”
Consider the outlandish similes uttered as the women heave and struggle
in hand-to-hand combat:
"If
those eyes of yours were bed-winches," returned Miss Pross, "and
I was an English four-poster, they shouldn't loose a splinter of me."
Did
Dickens not have the gift for invective? Gopa, however, marvelled at
the sagacity of Mrs Pross in dropping the door key in the river after
locking the house. KumKum noted that Vengeance sees Madame Defarge is
missing from her reserved seat at the public guillotine spectacle,
something that's never happened before. Priya imagined they would
bring out chocolates to celebrate each guillotining. Sunil was struck
by the viciousness Madame Defarge who even wanted to kill the
daughter of Lucie.
Zakia
The
passage Zakia chose exemplifies all that was unjust in the French
system that made it ripe for revolution. After injuring a child with
his carriage the Marquis has his coin flung back at him when he
offers a scant compensation. He cries out:
"You
dogs! I would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminate
you from the earth.“
Such
was the absolute power of the aristocracy over the common people.
Mathew said that the material Dickens used was drawn from Carlyle's
The
French Revolution: A History
We
read that Dickens compulsively read and re-read the book while
producing A
Tale of Two Cities.
Kavita
Kavita
read from the same chapter as Zakia, the section where the child is
actually run over and hurt by the Monseigneur's horse-carriage. The
fault is the pedestrian's and the aristocrat's concern is more for
the bruise it might have left on his horses:
"It
is extraordinary to me, 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.
How callous, said
Kavita. Gopa noted her own anxiety when she drives to her school in
Mattancherry, not to hit any goats. You have to be very careful, for
nobody on the streets takes any care; it is left to the vehicles to
save the pedestrians from their own negligence. Mathew seconded the
idea, because pedestrians consider zebra crossings as their
entitlement to walk, no matter what the oncoming traffic. KumKum said
they have absolute faith in the drivers, forgetting that a car's
brakes can fail. Sunil mentioned that near Bandipur in Tamil Nadu there was a
notorious place where children were pushed into oncoming traffic
deliberately, in order that the pusher could hustle and extract money
from the vehicle driver. Begging too is conducted as a racket in TN, bringing to mind Fagin's gang in Oliver
Twist.
Beggars' favourite place of business is outside five-star hotels,
because people coming from expensive dining would part with some
coppers easily on seeing people who may not get one square meal a
day (except that beggars no longer accept coppers).
Mathew
said he is on a transfer to Bihar (Patna) and people are inducing him
to go, saying you have no idea what luxury a Commissioner's life can be
until you've been Commissioner in Patna. But he's fighting it and would rather
stay on in Kochi, backwater though it be as postings go. Joe asked if
KRG could write a letter of support, stating the absolute necessity
and inestimable value of Mathew's services to our reading group, and
to the larger cause of literature in our fair city, Kochi.
Gopa
noted that the English banker makes money, whatever happens –
revolutions, bailouts, depressions, bull markets, bear markets, etc.
From what is described about Tellson's in the novel it seems that
they were running a hawala
business,
Joe thought. Someone said that was a legitimate form of banking to
support trade across frontiers in ancient times, and obviated the need
to carry gold, which would make the trader a person of interest to brigands en
route. Mathew added that what the hawala
dealer considers legal, the Customs authorities consider illegal.
From
there we digressed into the need for an identity proof such as a
ration card to open a bank account; and how this prevents Bengali and
Oriya gardeners who work in Kochi from keeping their money in a bank. They leave their ration cards behind at home so the family can
draw subsidised grain from the public distribution shops. Joe noted that KumKum has a policy of making
all domestic help, gardeners, etc. open bank accounts to save their
money (and to prevent predatory husbands from using the maid's money
for drinking). Gopa narrated her recollection of her father in Bombay
going far out of the city to obtain rice, the so-called levy rice
sold at cheap
prices. KumKum says Joe remembers the same thing in Calcutta where
his parents would drive to Jadavpur, then thought of as a mofussil
location, across the railway tracks, where peasant women would be
come to sell rice for four annas a seer.
Gopa
To end, Gopa
wanted to read a passage showing the contrast between England and
France as it is brought out in Dickens' novel. In England common
people of Anglo-Saxon descent were bold; but lawlessness was rampant
even in the streets of London. In France the peasants were
down-trodden and lacking in spirit. Mathew stated that England and
France had always been arch rivals, in the quest for power. In spite
of the events of the two World Wars in which they fought on the same
side, a smouldering jingoism remains.
Kavita told of her
experience in Paris when she went with her daughters and nobody would
deign to understand them if they inquired in English. One of her
daughters suggested she ask in Malayalam, which she did. Whereupon
the people immediately helped them, breaking into French English; any
language so long as it is not English seems okay with the Parisians.
Joe's experience from the sixties is that truly nobody understood
English on the Continent, except in Holland. The Germans only spoke
German, the French only spoke French. Now it's different, with
globalisation and multinational companies staffing their office with
people from all over the world; English has become the natural lingua franca.
Joe recalls a
column he used to read in the old days: Parlez vous Franglais.
It used to be serialised in The Economist. Franglais is “a mangled
combination of English and French, produced either by poor knowledge
of one or the other language, or for humorous effect.” For more
humour see:
Words
like “le weekend” have become naturalised in French, but other
words are maintained rigidly in newly-minted French words, for instance e-mail
is courriel, and
computer is
l'ordinateur.
In
any event Mathew said there's a well-known prediction (by Malcolm
Muggeridge, the late British satirist): “The last Englishman left
will be an Indian,”– in all probability, in Kolkata. KumKum thought it must have been Mr Bandey in the Cochin Club:
Numerous
comments referred to the persistence of British traditions in India
('egg and watercress sandwiches' – Priya). The High Range Club in
Munnar may be one such repository of colonial nostalgia:
The
Ootacamund Gymkhana Club may be another candidate in the South:
In
a recent article in the Indian Express there was a story of an Indian
professor and how he came to love Charles Dickens novels:
"Mild-mannered
Vijay Madge met Dickens through his dentist. 'It was the ’60s, at
that time even dentists read books,' he says. Unimpressed by his
patient’s dental reports and his English skills, the good doctor
urged him to read Dickens to 'catch the spirit of the English
language' ”
Professor
Madge was invited to join the Queen at a reception for Dickensians
from the world over for the 200th anniversary of his birth.
Monica
Dickens, author and great granddaughter of Charles Dickens died in
1992:
Readings
Gopa
Book
1 Ch 1 --Recalled to Life
The
Period – opening description
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.
Mathew
Book 2 Ch 23 – Fire Rises
Book 2 Ch 23 – Fire Rises
The
chateau is put to the torch
The
chateau burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire, scorched
and shrivelled; trees at a distance, fired by
the four fierce figures, begirt the blazing edifice with a new forest
of smoke. Molten lead and iron boiled in the marble basin of the
fountain; the water ran dry; the extinguisher tops of the towers
vanished like ice before the heat, and trickled down into four rugged
wells of flame. Great rents and splits branched out in the solid
walls, like crystallisation; stupefied birds wheeled about and
dropped into the furnace; four fierce figures trudged away, East,
West, North, and South, along the night- enshrouded roads, guided by
the beacon they had lighted, towards their next destination. The
illuminated village had seized hold of the tocsin, and, abolishing
the lawful ringer, rang for joy.
Not
only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire, and
bell-ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to do
with the collection of rent and taxes--though it was but a small
instalment of taxes, and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got in
those latter days--became impatient for an interview with him, and,
surrounding his house, summoned him to come forth for personal
conference. Whereupon, Monsieur Gabelle did heavily bar his door, and
retire to hold counsel with himself. The result of that conference
was, that Gabelle again withdrew himself to his housetop behind his
stack of chimneys; this time resolved, if his door were broken in (he
was a small Southern man of retaliative temperament), to pitch
himself head foremost over the parapet, and crush a man or two below.
Probably,
Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there, with the distant
chateau for fire and candle, and the beating at his door, combined
with the joy-ringing, for music; not to mention his having an
ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his posting-house gate,
which the village showed a lively inclination to displace in his
favour. A trying suspense, to be passing a whole summer night on the
brink of the black ocean, ready to take that plunge into it upon
which Monsieur Gabelle had resolved! But, the friendly dawn appearing
at last, and the rush-candles of the village guttering out, the
people happily dispersed, and Monsieur Gabelle came down bringing his
life with him for that while.
Within a hundred
miles, and in the light of other fires, there were other
functionaries less fortunate, that night and other nights, whom the
rising sun found hanging across once-peaceful streets, where they had
been born and bred; also, there were other villagers and townspeople
less fortunate than the mender of roads and his fellows, upon whom
the functionaries and soldiery turned with success, and whom they
strung up in their turn. But, the fierce figures were steadily
wending East, West, North, and South, be that as it would; and
whosoever hung, fire burned. The altitude of the gallows that would
turn to water and quench it, no functionary, by any stretch of
mathematics, was able to calculate successfully.
Sunil
Book 1, Ch 5
The Wine-shop
The
time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the
street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.
And
now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary gleam
had driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was
heavy-cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in
waiting on the saintly presence-nobles of great power all of them;
but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone
a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in
the fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every
corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window,
fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook. The mill
which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people
old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them,
and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and
coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere.
Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing
that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with
straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every
fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off;
Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and started up from
the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to
eat. Hunger was the inscription on the baker's shelves, written in
every small loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread; at the
sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that was offered for
sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting chestnuts in
the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every farthing
porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops
of oil.
Its
abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding
street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets
diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of
rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon
them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet
some wild-beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay.
Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not
wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with what they
suppressed; nor foreheads knitted into the likeness of the
gallows-rope they mused about enduring, or inflicting. The trade
signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were, all, grim
illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman painted up, only
the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of meagre loaves.
The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops, croaked
over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer, and were
gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was represented in a
flourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but, the cutler's
knives and axes were sharp and bright, the smith's hammers were
heavy, and the gunmaker's stock was murderous. The crippling stones
of the pavement, with their many little reservoirs of mud and water,
had no footways, but broke off abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to
make amends, ran down the middle of the street--when it ran at all:
which was only after heavy rains, and then it ran, by many eccentric
fits, into the houses. Across the streets, at wide intervals, one
clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and pulley; at night, when the
lamplighter had let these down, and lighted, and hoisted them again,
a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in a sickly manner overhead, as if
they were at sea. Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and crew were
in peril of tempest.
For, the time was
to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region should have watched
the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long, as to
conceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling up men by
those ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their
condition. But, the time was not come yet; and every wind that blew
over France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds,
fine of song and feather, took no warning.
Joe
Book
2 Ch XIII The Fellow of No Delicacy (829 words)
Carton
professes his hopeless love for Lucie
"If
it had been possible, Miss Manette, that you could have returned the
love of the man you see before yourself--flung away, wasted, drunken,
poor creature of misuse as you know him to be--he would have been
conscious this day and hour, in spite of his happiness, that he would
bring you to misery, bring you to sorrow and repentance, blight you,
disgrace you, pull you down with him. I know very well that you can
have no tenderness for me; I ask for none; I am even thankful that it
cannot be."
"Without
it, can I not save you, Mr. Carton? Can I not recall you-- forgive me
again!--to a better course? Can I in no way repay your confidence? I
know this is a confidence," she modestly said, after a little
hesitation, and in earnest tears, "I know you would say this to
no one else. Can I turn it to no good account for yourself, Mr.
Carton?"
He
shook his head.
"To
none. No, Miss Manette, to none. If you will hear me through a very
little more, all you can ever do for me is done. I wish you to know
that you have been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation I
have not been so degraded but that the sight of you with your father,
and of this home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows
that I thought had died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been
troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again,
and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I
thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving
afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and
fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in
nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to
know that you inspired it."
"Will
nothing of it remain? O Mr. Carton, think again! Try again!"
"No,
Miss Manette; all through it, I have known myself to be quite
undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the
weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled
me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire--a fire, however, inseparable
in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing,
doing no service, idly burning away."
"Since
it is my misfortune, Mr. Carton, to have made you more unhappy than
you were before you knew me—"
"Don't
say that, Miss Manette, for you would have reclaimed me, if anything
could. You will not be the cause of my becoming worse."
"Since
the state of your mind that you describe, is, at all events,
attributable to some influence of mine--this is what I mean, if I can
make it plain--can I use no influence to serve you? Have I no power
for good, with you, at all?"
"The
utmost good that I am capable of now, Miss Manette, I have come here
to realise. Let me carry through the rest of my misdirected life, the
remembrance that I opened my heart to you, last of all the world; and
that there was something left in me at this time which you could
deplore and pity."
"Which
I entreated you to believe, again and again, most fervently, with all
my heart, was capable of better things, Mr. Carton!"
"Entreat
me to believe it no more, Miss Manette. I have proved myself, and I
know better. I distress you; I draw fast to an end. Will you let me
believe, when I recall this day, that the last confidence of my life
was reposed in your pure and innocent breast, and that it lies there
alone, and will be shared by no one?"
"If
that will be a consolation to you, yes." …
For you, and for
any dear to you, I would do anything. If my career were of that
better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice
in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to
you. Try to hold me in your mind, at some quiet times, as ardent and
sincere in this one thing. The time will come, the time will not be
long in coming, when new ties will be formed about you--ties that
will bind you yet more tenderly and strongly to the home you so
adorn--the dearest ties that will ever grace and gladden you. O Miss
Manette, when the little picture of a happy father's face looks up in
yours, when you see your own bright beauty springing up anew at your
feet, think now and then that there is a man who would give his life,
to keep a life you love beside you!"
KumKum
Book
2 Ch XIII The Fellow of No Delicacy
The
irresolute Mr Carton
If
Sydney Carton ever shone anywhere, he certainly never shone in the
house of doctor manette. He had been there often, during a whole
year, and had always been the same moody and morose lounger there.
When he cared to talk, he talked well; but, the cloud of caring for
nothing, which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very
rarely pierced by the light within him. And yet he did care something
for the streets that environed that house, and for the senseless
stones that made their pavements. Many a night he vaguely and
unhappily wandered there, when wine had brought no transitory
gladness to him; many a dreary daybreak revealed his solitary figure
lingering there, and still lingering there when the first beams of
the sun brought into strong relief, removed beauties of architecture
in spires of churches and lofty buildings, as perhaps the quiet time
brought some sense of better things, else forgotten and unattainable,
into his mind. Of late, the neglected bed in the Temple Court had
known him more scantily than ever; and often when he had thrown
himself upon it no longer than a few minutes, he had got up
again, and haunted that neighbourhood.
On
a day in August, when Mr. Stryver (after notifying to his jackal that
“he had thought better of that marrying matter.
From
being irresolute and purposeless, his feet became animated by an
intention, and, in the working out of that intention, they took him
to the Doctor’s door.
He
was shown up-stairs, and found Lucie at her work, alone. She had
never been quite at her ease with him, and received him with some
little embarrassment as he seated himself near her table. But,
looking up at his face in the interchange of the first few
common-places, she observed a change in it.
“I
fear you are not well, Mr. Carton!”
Priya
Book
3 Ch XIV The Knitting Done
The
hand-to-hand combat between Miss Pross and Madame Defarge
Madame
Defarge's dark eyes followed her through this rapid movement, and
rested on her when it was finished. Miss Pross
had nothing beautiful about her; years had not tamed the wildness, or
softened the grimness, of her appearance; but, she too was a
determined woman in her different way, and she measured Madame
Defarge with her eyes, every inch.
"You
might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer," said Miss
Pross, in her breathing. "Nevertheless, you shall not get the
better of me. I am an Englishwoman."
Madame
Defarge looked at her scornfully, but still with something of Miss
Pross's own perception that they two were at bay. She saw a tight,
hard, wiry woman before her, as Mr. Lorry had seen in the same figure
a woman with a strong hand, in the years gone by. She knew full well
that Miss Pross was the family's devoted friend; Miss Pross knew full
well that Madame Defarge was the family's malevolent enemy.
"On
my way yonder," said Madame Defarge, with a slight movement of
her hand towards the fatal spot, "where they reserve my chair
and my knitting for me, I am come to make my compliments to her in
passing. I wish to see her."
"I
know that your intentions are evil," said Miss Pross, "and
you may depend upon it, I'll hold my own against them."
Each
spoke in her own language; neither understood the other's words; both
were very watchful, and intent to deduce from look and manner, what
the unintelligible words meant.
"It
will do her no good to keep herself concealed from me at this
moment," said Madame Defarge. "Good patriots will know what
that means. Let me see her. Go tell her that I wish to see her. Do
you hear?"
"If
those eyes of yours were bed-winches," returned Miss Pross, "and
I was an English four-poster, they shouldn't loose a splinter of me.
No, you wicked foreign woman; I am your match."
Madame
Defarge was not likely to follow these idiomatic remarks in detail;
but, she so far understood them as to perceive that she was set at
naught.
"Woman
imbecile and pig-like!" said Madame Defarge, frowning. "I
take no answer from you. I demand to see her. Either tell her that I
demand to see her, or stand out of the way of the door and let me go
to her!" This, with an angry explanatory wave of her right arm.
"I
little thought," said Miss Pross, "that I should ever want
to understand your nonsensical language; but I would give all I have,
except the clothes I wear, to know whether you suspect the truth, or
any part of it." Neither of them for a single moment released
the other's eyes. Madame Defarge had not moved from the spot where
she stood when Miss Pross first became aware of her; but, she now
advanced one step.
"I
am a Briton," said Miss Pross, "I am desperate. I don't
care an English Twopence for myself. I know that the longer I keep
you here, the greater hope there is for my Ladybird. I'll not leave a
handful of that dark hair upon your head, if you lay a finger on me!"
Thus
Miss Pross, with a shake of her head and a flash of her eyes between
every rapid sentence, and every rapid sentence a whole breath. Thus
Miss Pross, who had never struck a blow in her life.
….
Madame
Defarge made at the door. Miss Pross, on the instinct of the moment,
seized her round the waist in both her arms, and held her
tight. It was in vain for Madame Defarge to struggle and to strike;
Miss Pross, with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much
stronger than hate, clasped her tight, and even lifted her from the
floor in the struggle that they had. The two hands of Madame Defarge
buffeted and tore her face; but, Miss Pross, with her head down, held
her round the waist, and clung to her with more than the hold of a
drowning woman.
Soon,
Madame Defarge's hands ceased to strike, and felt at her encircled
waist. "It is under my arm," said Miss Pross, in smothered
tones, "you shall not draw it. I am stronger than you, I bless
Heaven for it. I hold you till one or other of us faints or dies!"
Madame
Defarge's hands were at her bosom. Miss Pross looked up, saw what it
was, struck at it, struck out a flash and a crash, and stood
alone--blinded with smoke.
All
this was in a second. As the smoke cleared, leaving an awful
stillness, it passed out on the air, like the soul of the furious
woman whose body lay lifeless on the ground.
Zakia
Book 2 Ch VII – Monseigneur in Town
Book 2 Ch VII – Monseigneur in Town
The
cowed condition of the peasantry under the crushing heels of the
nobles
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 broke
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 bidden 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.
Kavita
Book 2 Ch VII – Monseigneur in Town
Book 2 Ch VII – Monseigneur in Town
The
negligible value of human life
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.
Gopa
(once more)
Book 1 Recalled to Life. Ch 1 The Period
Book 1 Recalled to Life. Ch 1 The Period
The
contrast between France and England
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 mall 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 mall 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;
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