Book III - Chapter VI. Triumph

by Charles Dickens

　　The dread tribunal of five Judges, Public Prosecutor, and determinedJury, sat every day. Their lists went forth every evening, and wereread out by the gaolers of the various prisons to their prisoners.The standard gaoler-joke was, "Come out and listen to the Evening Paper,you inside there!"

　　"Charles Evremonde, called Darnay!"

　　So at last began the Evening Paper at La Force.

　　When a name was called, its owner stepped apart into a spot reservedfor those who were announced as being thus fatally recorded. CharlesEvremonde, called Darnay, had reason to know the usage; he had seenhundreds pass away so.

　　His bloated gaoler, who wore spectacles to read with, glanced overthem to assure himself that he had taken his place, and went throughthe list, making a similar short pause at each name. There weretwenty-three names, but only twenty were responded to; for one of theprisoners so summoned had died in gaol and been forgotten, and twohad already been guillotined and forgotten. The list was read, inthe vaulted chamber where Darnay had seen the associated prisoners onthe night of his arrival. Every one of those had perished in themassacre; 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 partingwas soon over. It was the incident of every day, and the society ofLa Force were engaged in the preparation of some games of forfeitsand a little concert, for that evening. They crowded to the gratesand shed tears there; but, twenty places in the projectedentertainments had to be refilled, and the time was, at best, shortto the lock-up hour, when the common rooms and corridors would bedelivered over to the great dogs who kept watch there through thenight. The prisoners were far from insensible or unfeeling; theirways arose out of the condition of the time. Similarly, though witha subtle difference, a species of fervour or intoxication, known,without doubt, to have led some persons to brave the guillotineunnecessarily, and to die by it, was not mere boastfulness, but awild infection of the wildly shaken public mind. In seasons ofpestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease--a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have likewonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.

　　The passage to the Conciergerie was short and dark; the night in itsvermin-haunted cells was long and cold. Next day, fifteen prisonerswere put to the bar before Charles Darnay's name was called. All thefifteen were condemned, and the trials of the whole occupied an hourand a half.

　　"Charles Evremonde, called Darnay," was at length arraigned.

　　His judges sat upon the Bench in feathered hats; but the rough redcap and tricoloured cockade was the head-dress otherwise prevailing.Looking at the Jury and the turbulent audience, he might have thoughtthat the usual order of things was reversed, and that the felons weretrying the honest men. The lowest, cruelest, and worst populace of acity, never without its quantity of low, cruel, and bad, were thedirecting spirits of the scene: noisily commenting, applauding,disapproving, anticipating, and precipitating the result, without acheck. Of the men, the greater part were armed in various ways; ofthe women, some wore knives, some daggers, some ate and drank as theylooked on, many knitted. Among these last, was one, with a sparepiece of knitting under her arm as she worked. She was in a frontrow, by the side of a man whom he had never seen since his arrival atthe Barrier, but whom he directly remembered as Defarge. He noticedthat she once or twice whispered in his ear, and that she seemed tobe his wife; but, what he most noticed in the two figures was, thatalthough they were posted as close to himself as they could be, theynever looked towards him. They seemed to be waiting for somethingwith a dogged determination, and they looked at the Jury, but atnothing else. Under the President sat Doctor Manette, in his usualquiet dress. As well as the prisoner could see, he and Mr. Lorrywere the only men there, unconnected with the Tribunal, who wore theirusual clothes, and had not assumed the coarse garb of the Carmagnole.

　　Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, was accused by the publicprosecutor 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 theprisoner whether it was not true that he had lived many years in England?

　　Undoubtedly it was.

　　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 distastefulto him, and a station that was distasteful to him, and had left hiscountry--he submitted before the word emigrant in the presentacceptation by the Tribunal was in use--to live by his own industryin England, rather than on the industry of the overladen people ofFrance.

　　What proof had he of this?

　　He handed in the names of two witnesses; Theophile Gabelle, andAlexandre 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 physicianwho sits there."

　　This answer had a happy effect upon the audience. Cries inexaltation of the well-known good physician rent the hall. Socapriciously were the people moved, that tears immediately rolleddown several ferocious countenances which had been glaring at theprisoner a moment before, as if with impatience to pluck him out intothe streets and kill him.

　　On these few steps of his dangerous way, Charles Darnay had set hisfoot according to Doctor Manette's reiterated instructions. The samecautious counsel directed every step that lay before him, and hadprepared every inch of his road.

　　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 nomeans of living in France, save those he had resigned; whereas, inEngland, he lived by giving instruction in the French language andliterature. He had returned when he did, on the pressing and writtenentreaty of a French citizen, who represented that his life wasendangered 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 hisbell 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 accusedexplained that the citizen was his first witness. He also referredwith confidence to the citizen's letter, which had been taken fromhim at the Barrier, but which he did not doubt would be found amongthe papers then before the President.

　　The Doctor had taken care that it should be there--had assured himthat it would be there--and at this stage of the proceedings it wasproduced and read. Citizen Gabelle was called to confirm it, and didso. Citizen Gabelle hinted, with infinite delicacy and politeness,that in the pressure of business imposed on the Tribunal by themultitude of enemies of the Republic with which it had to deal, hehad been slightly overlooked in his prison of the Abbaye--in fact,had rather passed out of the Tribunal's patriotic remembrance--untilthree days ago; when he had been summoned before it, and had been setat liberty on the Jury's declaring themselves satisfied that theaccusation against him was answered, as to himself, by the surrenderof 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 heproceeded, as he showed that the Accused was his first friend on hisrelease from his long imprisonment; that, the accused had remained inEngland, always faithful and devoted to his daughter and himself intheir exile; that, so far from being in favour with the Aristocratgovernment there, he had actually been tried for his life by it, asthe foe of England and friend of the United States--as he broughtthese circumstances into view, with the greatest discretion and withthe straightforward force of truth and earnestness, the Jury and thepopulace became one. At last, when he appealed by name to MonsieurLorry, an English gentleman then and there present, who, like himself,had been a witness on that English trial and could corroborate hisaccount of it, the Jury declared that they had heard enough, and thatthey were ready with their votes if the President were content toreceive them.

　　At every vote (the Jurymen voted aloud and individually), thepopulace set up a shout of applause. All the voices were in theprisoner's favour, and the President declared him free.

　　Then, began one of those extraordinary scenes with which the populacesometimes gratified their fickleness, or their better impulsestowards generosity and mercy, or which they regarded as some set-offagainst their swollen account of cruel rage. No man can decide nowto which of these motives such extraordinary scenes were referable;it is probable, to a blending of all the three, with the secondpredominating. No sooner was the acquittal pronounced, than tearswere shed as freely as blood at another time, and such fraternalembraces were bestowed upon the prisoner by as many of both sexes ascould rush at him, that after his long and unwholesome confinement hewas in danger of fainting from exhaustion; none the less because heknew very well, that the very same people, carried by another current,would have rushed at him with the very same intensity, to rend him topieces and strew him over the streets.

　　His removal, to make way for other accused persons who were to betried, rescued him from these caresses for the moment. Five were tobe tried together, next, as enemies of the Republic, forasmuch asthey had not assisted it by word or deed. So quick was the Tribunalto compensate itself and the nation for a chance lost, that thesefive came down to him before he left the place, condemned to diewithin twenty-four hours. The first of them told him so, with thecustomary prison sign of Death--a raised finger--and they all addedin words, "Long live the Republic!"

　　The five had had, it is true, no audience to lengthen theirproceedings, for when he and Doctor Manette emerged from the gate,there was a great crowd about it, in which there seemed to be everyface 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 thevery 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 theyhad taken either out of the Court itself, or one of its rooms orpassages. Over the chair they had thrown a red flag, and to the backof it they had bound a pike with a red cap on its top. In this carof triumph, not even the Doctor's entreaties could prevent his beingcarried to his home on men's shoulders, with a confused sea of redcaps heaving about him, and casting up to sight from the stormy deepsuch wrecks of faces, that he more than once misdoubted his mindbeing in confusion, and that he was in the tumbril on his way to theGuillotine.

　　In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and pointinghim out, they carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with theprevailing Republican colour, in winding and tramping through them,as they had reddened them below the snow with a deeper dye, theycarried him thus into the courtyard of the building where he lived.Her father had gone on before, to prepare her, and when her husbandstood upon his feet, she dropped insensible in his arms.

　　As he held her to his heart and turned her beautiful head between hisface and the brawling crowd, so that his tears and her lips mightcome together unseen, a few of the people fell to dancing. Instantly,all the rest fell to dancing, and the courtyard overflowed with theCarmagnole. Then, they elevated into the vacant chair a young womanfrom the crowd to be carried as the Goddess of Liberty, and thenswelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets, and along theriver's bank, and over the bridge, the Carmagnole absorbed them everyone and whirled them away.

　　After grasping the Doctor's hand, as he stood victorious and proudbefore him; after grasping the hand of Mr. Lorry, who came panting inbreathless from his struggle against the waterspout of the Carmagnole;after kissing little Lucie, who was lifted up to clasp her arms roundhis neck; and after embracing the ever zealous and faithful Pross wholifted her; he took his wife in his arms, and carried her up to theirrooms.

　　"Lucie! My own! I am safe."

　　"O dearest Charles, let me thank God for this on my knees as I haveprayed to Him."

　　They all reverently bowed their heads and hearts. When she was againin his arms, he said to her:

　　"And now speak to your father, dearest. No other man in all thisFrance could have done what he has done for me."

　　She laid her head upon her father's breast, as she had laid his poorhead on her own breast, long, long ago. He was happy in the returnhe had made her, he was recompensed for his suffering, he was proudof his strength. "You must not be weak, my darling," he remonstrated;"don't tremble so. I have saved him."