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Book the Third: The Track of a Storm
Chapter VI.
Triumph
The dread tribunal of five Judges, Public
Prosecutor, and determined Jury, sat every
day.
Their lists went forth every evening, and
were read 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 reserved for those who
were announced as being thus fatally
recorded.
Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, had
reason to know the usage; he had seen
hundreds pass away so.
His bloated gaoler, who wore spectacles to
read with, glanced over them to assure
himself that he had taken his place, and
went through the list, making a similar
short pause 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 day, and the
society of La Force were engaged in the
preparation of some 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 lock-up
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 ***, 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
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 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.
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 names of two witnesses;
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.
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 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 the three, with the second
predominating.
No sooner was the acquittal 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 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
courtyard 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 courtyard 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 arms round his
neck; and after embracing the ever zealous
and faithful Pross who lifted her; he took
his wife in his 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."