A TALE OF TWO CITIES

A STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

By Charles Dickens

CONTENTS

Book the First—Recalled to Life

• Chapter I: The Period
• Chapter II: The Mail
• Chapter III: The Night Shadows
• Chapter IV: The Preparation
• Chapter V: The Wine-shop
• Chapter VI: The Shoemaker

Book the Second—The Golden Thread

• Chapter I: Five Years Later
• Chapter II: A Sight
• Chapter III: A Disappointment
• Chapter IV: Congratulatory
• Chapter V: The Jackal
• Chapter VI: Hundreds of People
• Chapter VII: Monseigneur in Town
• Chapter VIII: Monseigneur in the Country
• Chapter IX: The Gorgon's Head
• Chapter X: Two Promises
• Chapter XI: A Companion Picture
• Chapter XII: The Fellow of Delicacy
• Chapter XIII: The Fellow of No Delicacy
• Chapter XIV: The Honest Tradesman
• Chapter XV: Knitting
• Chapter XVI: Still Knitting
• Chapter XVII: One Night
• Chapter XVIII: Nine Days
• Chapter XIX: An Opinion
• Chapter XX: A Plea
• Chapter XXI: Echoing Footsteps
• Chapter XXII: The Sea Still Rises
• Chapter XXIII: Fire Rises
• Chapter XXIV: Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

Book the Third—The Track of a Storm

• Chapter I: In Secret
• Chapter II: The Grindstone
• Chapter III: The Shadow
• Chapter IV: Calm in Storm
• Chapter V: The Wood-sawyer
• Chapter VI: Triumph
• Chapter VII: A Knock at the Door
• Chapter VIII: A Hand at Cards
• Chapter IX: The Game Made
• Chapter X: The Substance of the Shadow
• Chapter XI: Dusk
• Chapter XII: Darkness
• Chapter XIII: Fifty-two
• Chapter XIV: The Knitting Done
• Chapter XV: The Footsteps Die Out Forever

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Book the First—Recalled to Life

CHAPTER I: The Period

It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times. It was an age of wisdom, and just as much an age of foolishness. People lived through a season of belief and a season of doubt, a stretch of light and a stretch of darkness. It was a spring of hope, and at the very same time a winter of despair. We seemed to have everything in front of us, and yet nothing at all. Some of us felt certain we were headed for heaven; others were just as sure we were headed the opposite way. In short, that period resembled our own time so closely that its loudest voices insisted—whether praising it or condemning it—that it could only be described in extremes.

England's throne held a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face; France's throne held a king with a large jaw and a queen with a pretty face. In both countries, the powerful men who controlled the nation's wealth and privilege were absolutely convinced that the current order of things would last forever.

The year was 1775. England, like our own time, believed itself blessed with signs and visions from beyond. A woman named Mrs. Southcott, who claimed prophetic powers, had just turned twenty-five, and a soldier in the Life Guards had predicted her arrival by announcing that London and Westminster were doomed to be swallowed up. Even the famous "Cock-lane ghost"—a supposed spirit that had rapped out messages to frightened Londoners—had been exposed as a fraud only twelve years earlier, though new mystics kept making the same tired, unoriginal claims. Far more significant messages, however, had reached the English king and people from a very real source: a gathering of British colonists in America. Strange as it may seem, these messages would matter more to human history than anything ever claimed by the ghost's followers.

France, less caught up in matters of the spirit than her neighbor across the water, was gliding smoothly downhill—printing paper money and spending it freely. Guided by her churchmen, France also entertained herself with acts of shocking cruelty, such as sentencing a young man to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out, and his body burned alive—all because he had failed to kneel in the rain to honor a passing procession of monks he'd merely glimpsed from fifty or sixty yards away. It's likely that even then, trees were growing in the forests of France and Norway that Fate had already marked to be cut down and turned into planks for a certain grim wooden device—fitted with a sack and a blade—that would become infamous in history. It's likely, too, that in rough sheds near farms outside Paris, plain wooden carts already sat waiting, splattered with mud, sniffed at by pigs, and roosted in by chickens—carts that Death had already claimed as the very carts that would carry condemned prisoners to their execution during the coming Revolution. But the Woodman and the Farmer worked quietly and constantly, and no one heard their footsteps; to even suspect that such disaster was coming would have been considered close to treason.

England, meanwhile, had little enough order to boast about. Armed robberies and highway holdups happened nightly in London itself. Families were warned publicly not to leave town without first moving their furniture into storage for safekeeping. A respectable shopkeeper by day might be a highwayman by night; one such man, recognized by a fellow tradesman he was robbing, simply shot him dead and rode off. A mail coach was ambushed by seven robbers; the guard killed three of them before the remaining four killed him too, once he ran out of ammunition—after which the coach was robbed without further trouble. Even the Lord Mayor of London, a figure of enormous importance, was stopped and robbed in plain sight of his own attendants. Prisoners in London's jails fought pitched battles with their guards, and law officers fired loaded guns into the crowds of inmates. Thieves snatched jeweled crosses from noblemen's necks at royal court events. Soldiers searching for smuggled goods in a poor London neighborhood exchanged gunfire with an angry mob—and no one thought any of this especially unusual. Through it all, the hangman stayed constantly busy: executing rows of criminals one week, hanging a burglar caught only days before, branding people's hands by the dozen, or burning banned pamphlets outside a courthouse. One day he might execute a vicious murderer; the next, a desperate thief who had stolen a few coins from a farm boy.

All of this—and a thousand things like it—took place in and around the year 1775. While the Woodman and the Farmer worked on unnoticed, the two large-jawed rulers and their two queens carried on with great pomp, treating their royal privileges as beyond question. And so the year 1775 swept along both the great and the countless ordinary people—including the characters of this story—down the roads that lay ahead of them.

CHAPTER II: The Mail

Late on a Friday night in November, the Dover road stretched out before the first character in this story—beyond, that is, the Dover mail coach itself, as it struggled up Shooter's Hill. He walked alongside the coach through the mud, just as the other passengers did—not because any of them wanted the exercise, but because the hill, the harness, the mud, and the coach's own weight were so much for the horses that they had already stopped three times, and once had even tried to drag the coach backward toward Blackheath. Only the combined efforts of reins, whip, driver, and guard convinced the horses—who seemed almost human in their stubbornness—to give up their rebellion and get back to work.

Heads drooping and tails trembling, the horses churned through the thick mud, stumbling as though their legs might give out. Each time the driver paused them with a careful "Whoa! So-ho, then!" the horse nearest the front would toss its head and harness violently, as if flatly refusing to pull the coach any farther. Every time it did this, the nervous passenger inside would startle, unsettled by the sound.

Steam-like mist filled every low spot in the road and had crept up the hill like a restless, unhappy spirit, searching for peace it would never find. Cold and clammy, this mist rolled through the air in slow ripples, one wave following another like an unhealthy sea. It was thick enough to block out everything but the coach's own lamplight and a few yards of road, and the hot breath of the tired horses steamed into it as though the animals themselves were creating the fog.

Besides the passenger already mentioned, two others trudged alongside the coach. All three were bundled up to their cheekbones and past their ears, wearing heavy riding boots. None of them could have said what the other two looked like, and each man kept himself just as hidden in silence and suspicion as he was hidden under his layers of clothing. In those days, travelers were reluctant to trust strangers quickly, since anyone on the road might be a robber—or working with one. Considering that every inn along the way, from the owner down to the lowest stable hand, might secretly be in the pay of some highwayman known as "the Captain," this was a very real danger. So thought the guard of the Dover mail that Friday night in November 1775, as he stood at his post behind the coach, stamping his feet against the cold and keeping watch over the weapons chest in front of him—loaded with a large gun, several pistols, and a sword.

The mood aboard the Dover mail was typical: the guard suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected each other and the guard, and everyone suspected everyone else. Only the driver felt sure of one thing—his horses—and that certainty was that they were in terrible