A Tale of Two Cities

A week after the storming of the Bastille, Madame Defarge is sitting in the wine-shop “contemplating” (230) the change that has taken place in Saint Antoine:

There were several knots of loungers, squalid and miserable, but now with a manifest sense of power enthroned on their distress […] Every lean bare arm, that had been without work before, had this work always read for it now, that it could strike. The fingers of the knitting women were vicious, with the experience that they could tear (230-31).

Defarge enters the shop and announces that a man named Foulon, who once said that the lower classes could eat grass, has been captured after trying to fake his own death. Defarge and Madame Defarge rally the neighborhood and set off for the place where Foulon is being held prisoner; the women in particular, led by Madame Defarge and her friend “the Vengeance” are eager to punish Foulon for the suffering he has caused their families.

The crowd arrives at the Hôtel de Ville, cheering at the sight of Foulon tied up. After taunting him, they stuff his mouth full of grass and hang him, afterwards placing his head on a pike. Not long afterwards, the crowd manages to seize and execute Foulon’s son-in-law, who was being escorted to Paris under guard. Full of optimism, the people then return to their “scanty and insufficient suppers” together: “Fathers and mothers who had had their full share in the worst of the day, played gently with their meagre children; and lovers, with such a world around them and before them, loved and hoped” (235). Madame Defarge tells her husband that the revolution has nearly arrived. 

The lands near the Marquis’s chateau are increasingly depleted, and many of the guards and soldiers posted at the local prison are gone. In fact, the French aristocracy has begun to flee the country:

The last drop of blood having been extracted from the flints, and the last screw of the rack having been turned so often that its purchase crumbled, and it now turned and turned with nothing to bite, Monseigneur began to run away from a phenomenon so low and unaccountable (236).

However, the mender of roads is still at work in the area and is approached one day by a “shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that [are] clumsy […] steeped in the mud and dust of many highways” (237). They greet one another as “Jacques” and discuss an unspecified event that will take place that night; the mender provides the traveler with directions and agrees to wake him from his nap at sunset.

That evening, the mender returns home to the village, where a crowd has gathered “looking expectantly at the sky in one direction only” (239). As the night deepens, lights appear in the chateau: a group of men has set the building on fire. A messenger from the chateau goes to fetch help at the prison, but the soldiers refuse to help. Meanwhile, the villager goes to Gabelle’s house, pounding on the door and placing “an ill-omened lamp […] before his posting-house gate” (242) in preparation for stringing Gabelle himself up. Gabelle manages to survive the night, but similar scenes are playing out across the rest of France, sometimes ending in victory for the rebels and sometimes in victory for the government’s forces: “But the fierce figures were steadily wending East, West, North, and South, be that as it would; and whosever hung, fire burned” (242). 

Three years pass, and England watches anxiously as the revolution in France grows: by the summer of 1792, Louis XVI has been deposed, and many aristocrats have fled. Once in England, they often gather at Tellson’s, since the bank has a French branch.

In mid-August, Darnay visits Tellson’s and learns that Lorry is traveling to Paris that night to safeguard the bank’s business there. Lorry, however, feels certain that his age and nationality will protect him, and in any case plans to take Jerry Cruncher with him as a bodyguard. As Darnay and Lorry talk, the French aristocrats around them discuss “extravagant plots […] for the restoration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself” (247).

A message addressed to “Monsieur heretofore the Marquis St. Evrémonde” (247) interrupts these conversations; the name is Darnay’s, but he hasn’t told it to anyone but Doctor Manette. The gathered nobles explain to Lorry that the prior Marquis’s nephew abandoned his title and inheritance out of sympathy with the “new doctrines” (248). Privately frustrated with the nobles’ disdainful tone, Darnay says he knows the addressee and offers to deliver the message. Once out of sight, he opens it: it is from Gabelle, who has been arrested for acting on behalf of an “emigrant” (250)—that is, Darnay, who had instructed him to stop collecting taxes and rent from the villagers. He therefore asks Darnay to come to France and speak on his behalf.

Darnay is immediately overwhelmed by guilt; he feels responsible for Gabelle, and fears he was so anxious to cut ties with his family that he didn’t arrange matters in France properly. He also judges himself for having watched the Revolution unfold in France without intervening. Sure that his past actions on behalf of the peasantry will protect him, Darnay decides he must return to France: “The Loadstone Rock was drawing him, and he must sail on, until he struck. He knew of no rock; he saw hardly any danger” (252).

Darnay decides not to anyone of his decision until he has left. Instead, he writes letters to Lucie and Doctor Manette, explaining why he has left and asking Manette to take care of the family in his absence. After a long day during which he struggles not to confide in his wife, Darnay leaves these letters to a porter for safekeeping and rides to Dover.