the boy, and said, caressing him, ‘It is for thine own dear sake.

Thou wilt be faithful, little Charles?’ The child answered her

bravely, ‘Yes!’ I kissed her hand, and she took him in her arms,

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and went away caressing him. I never saw her more.

“As she had mentioned her husband’s name in the faith that I

knew it, I added no mention of it to my letter. I sealed my letter,

and, not trusting it out of my own hands, delivered it myself that

day.

“That night, the last night of the year, towards nine o’clock, a

man in a black dress rang at my gate, demanded to see me, and

softly followed my servant, Ernest Defarge, a youth, up-stairs.

When my servant came into the room where I sat with my wifeO

my wife, beloved of my heart! My fair young English wife!we

saw the man, who was supposed to be at the gate. standing silent

behind him.

“An urgent case in the Rue St. Honore, he said. It would not

detain me, he had a coach in waiting.

“It brought me here, it brought me to my grave. When I was

clear of the house, a black muffler was drawn tightly over my

mouth from behind, and my arms were pinioned. The two

brothers crossed the road from a dark corner, and identified me

with a single gesture. The Marquis took from his pocket the letter

I had written, showed it to me, burnt it in the light of a lantern that

was held, and extinguished the ashes with his foot. Not a word was

spoken. I was brought here, I was brought to my living grave.

“If it had pleased God to put it in the hard heart of either of the

brothers, in all these frightful years, to grant me any tidings of my

dearest wifeso much as to let me know by a word whether alive

or deadI might have thought that He had not quite abandoned

them. But, now I believe that the mark of the red cross is fatal to

them, and that they have no part in His mercies. And them and

their descendants, to the last of their race, I, Alexandre Manette,

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unhappy prisoner, do this last night of the year 1767, in my

unbearable agony, denounce to the times when all these things

shall be answered for. I denounce them to Heaven and to earth.”

A terrible sound arose when the reading of this document was

done. A sound of craving and eagerness that had nothing

articulate in it but blood. The narrative called up the most

revengeful passions of the time, and there was not a head in the

nation but must have dropped before it.

Little need, in the presence of that tribunal and that auditory,

to show how the Defarges had not made the paper public, with the

other captured Bastille memorials borne in procession, and had

kept it, biding their time. Little need to show that this detested

family name had long been anathematised by Saint Antoine, and

was wrought into the fatal register. The man never trod ground

whose virtues and services would have sustained him in that place

that day, against such denunciation.