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 Deatha 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

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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 court-yard

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 court-yard

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.