at best, short to the lockup 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 diseasea terrible passing inclination to die of it.

And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, 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

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

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 two 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.