Monseigneur swarming within a yard or two of it, boastful of what
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he would do to avenge himself on the rascal-people before long. It
was too much the way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a
refugee, and it was much too much the way of native British
orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the one
only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown
as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had
led to itas if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of
the misused and perverted resources that should have made them
prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and
had not in plain words recorded what they saw. Such vapouring,
combined with the extravagant plots of Monseigneur for the
restoration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself,
and worn out heaven and earth as well as itself, was hard to be
endured without some remonstrance by any sane man who knew
the truth. And it was such vapouring all about his ears, like a
troublesome confusion of blood in his own head, added to a latent
uneasiness in his mind, which had already made Charles Darnay
restless, and which still kept him so.
Among the talkers, was Stryver, of the King’s Bench Bar, far on
his way to state promotion, and, therefore, loud on the theme:
broaching to Monseigneur, his devices for blowing the people up
and exterminating them from the face of the earth, and doing
without them: and for accomplishing many similar objects akin in
their nature to the abolition of eagles by sprinkling salt on the tails
of the race. Him, Darnay heard, with a particular feeling of
objection; and Darnay stood divided between going away that he
might hear no more, and remaining to interpose his word, when
the thing that was to be, went on to shape itself out.
The House approached Mr. Lorry, and laying a soiled and
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unopened letter before him, asked if he had yet discovered any
traces of the person to whom it was addressed? The House laid
the letter down so close to Darnay that he saw the directionthe
more quickly because it was his own right name. The address,
turned into English, ran:
“Very pressing. To Monsieur heretofore the Marquis St.
Evremonde, of France. Confided to the cares of Messrs. Tellson
and Co., Bankers, London, England.”
On the marriage morning, Dr. Manette had made it his one
urgent and express request to Charles Darnay, that the secret of
his name should beunless he, the Doctor, dissolved the
obligationkept inviolate between them. Nobody else knew it to
be his name; his own wife had no suspicion of the fact; Mr. Lorry
could have none.
“No,” said Mr. Lorry, in reply to the House; “I have referred it, I
think, to everybody now here, and no one can tell me where this
gentleman is to be found.”
The hands of the clock verging upon the hour of closing the