VI. Triumph
The dread tribunal of five Judges, Public Prosecutor, and determinedJury, sat every day. Their lists went forth every evening, and wereread out by the gaolers of the various prisons to their prisoners. Thestandard gaoler-joke was, ”Come out and listen to the Evening Paper, youinside there!”
”Charles Evremonde, called Darnay!”
So at last began the Evening Paper at La Force.
When a name was called, its owner stepped apart into a spot reservedfor those who were announced as being thus fatally recorded. CharlesEvremonde, called Darnay, had reason to know the usage; he had seenhundreds pass away so.
His bloated gaoler, who wore spectacles to read with, glanced over themto assure himself that he had taken his place, and went through thelist, making a similar short pause at each name. There were twenty-threenames, but only twenty were responded to; for one of the prisoners sosummoned had died in gaol and been forgotten, and two had already beenguillotined and forgotten. The list was read, in the vaulted chamberwhere Darnay had seen the associated prisoners on the night of hisarrival. Every one of those had perished in the massacre; every humancreature he had since cared for and parted with, had died on thescaffold.
There were hurried words of farewell and kindness, but the parting wassoon over. It was the incident of every day, and the society of La Forcewere engaged in the preparation of some games of forfeits and a littleconcert, for that evening. They crowded to the grates and shed tearsthere; but, twenty places in the projected entertainments had to berefilled, and the time was, at best, short to the lock-up hour, when thecommon rooms and corridors would be delivered over to the great dogswho kept watch there through the night. The prisoners were far frominsensible or unfeeling; their ways arose out of the condition of thetime. Similarly, though with a subtle difference, a species of fervouror intoxication, known, without doubt, to have led some persons tobrave the guillotine unnecessarily, and to die by it, was not mereboastfulness, but a wild infection of the wildly shaken public mind. Inseasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to thedisease--a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us havelike wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evokethem.
The passage to the Conciergerie was short and dark; the night in itsvermin-haunted cells was long and cold. Next day, fifteen prisoners wereput to the bar before Charles Darnay's name was called. All the fifteenwere 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 capand tricoloured cockade was the head-dress otherwise prevailing. Lookingat the Jury and the turbulent audience, he might have thought that theusual order of things was reversed, and that the felons were trying thehonest men. The lowest, cruelest, and worst populace of a city, neverwithout its quantity of low, cruel, and bad, were the directingspirits of the scene: noisily commenting, applauding, disapproving,anticipating, and precipitating the result, without a check. Of the men,the greater part were armed in various ways; of the women, some woreknives, some daggers, some ate and drank as they looked on, manyknitted. Among these last, was one, with a spare piece of knitting underher arm as she worked. She was in a front row, by the side of a man whomhe had never seen since his arrival at the Barrier, but whom he directlyremembered as Defarge. He noticed that she once or twice whispered inhis ear, and that she seemed to be his wife; but, what he most noticedin the two figures was, that although they were posted as close tohimself as they could be, they never looked towards him. They seemed tobe waiting for something with a dogged determination, and they looked atthe 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 men there, unconnected with the Tribunal, whowore their usual clothes, and had not assumed the coarse garb of theCarmagnole.
Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, was accused by the public prosecutoras an emigrant, whose life was forfeit to the Republic, under the decreewhich banished all emigrants on pain of Death. It was nothing that thedecree bore date since his return to France. There he was, and there wasthe decree; he had been taken in France, and his head was demanded.
”Take off his head!” cried the audience. ”An enemy to the Republic!”
The President rang his bell to silence those cries, and asked theprisoner whether it was not true that he had lived many years inEngland?
Undoubtedly it was.
Was he not an emigrant then? What did he call himself?
Not an emigrant, he hoped, within the sense and spirit of the law.
Why not? the President desired to know.
Because he had voluntarily relinquished a title that was distastefulto him, and a station that was distasteful to him, and had lefthis country--he submitted before the word emigrant in the presentacceptation by the Tribunal was in use--to live by his own industry inEngland, rather than on the industry of the overladen people of France.
What proof had he of this?
He handed in the names of two witnesses; Theophile Gabelle, andAlexandre Manette.
But he had married in England? the President reminded him.
True, but not an English woman.
A citizeness of France?
Yes. By birth.
Her name and family?
”Lucie Manette, only daughter of Doctor Manette, the good physician whosits there.”
This answer had a happy effect upon the audience. Cries in exaltationof the well-known good physician rent the hall. So capriciously werethe people moved, that tears immediately rolled down several ferociouscountenances which had been glaring at the prisoner a moment before, asif with impatience to pluck him out into the streets and kill him.
On these few steps of his dangerous way, Charles Darnay had set his footaccording to Doctor Manette's reiterated instructions. The same cautiouscounsel directed every step that lay before him, and had prepared everyinch of his road.
The President asked, why had he returned to France when he did, and notsooner?
He had not returned sooner, he replied, simply because he had no meansof living in France, save those he had resigned; whereas, in England,he lived by giving instruction in the French language and literature.He had returned when he did, on the pressing and written entreaty ofa French citizen, who represented that his life was endangered by hisabsence. He had come back, to save a citizen's life, and to bear histestimony, at whatever personal hazard, to the truth. Was that criminalin the eyes of the Republic?
The populace cried enthusiastically, ”No!” and the President rang hisbell to quiet them. Which it did not, for they continued to cry ”No!”until they left off, of their own will.
The President required the name of that citizen. The accused explainedthat the citizen was his first witness. He also referred with confidenceto the citizen's letter, which had been taken from him at the Barrier,but which he did not doubt would be found among the papers then beforethe President.
The Doctor had taken care that it should be there--had assured him thatit would be there--and at this stage of the proceedings it was producedand read. Citizen Gabelle was called to confirm it, and did so. CitizenGabelle hinted, with infinite delicacy and politeness, that in thepressure of business imposed on the Tribunal by the multitude ofenemies of the Republic with which it had to deal, he had been slightlyoverlooked in his prison of the Abbaye--in fact, had rather passed outof the Tribunal's patriotic remembrance--until three days ago; when hehad been summoned before it, and had been set at liberty on the Jury'sdeclaring themselves satisfied that the accusation against him wasanswered, as to himself, by the surrender of the citizen Evremonde,called Darnay.
Doctor Manette was next questioned. His high personal popularity,and the clearness of his answers, made a great impression; but, as heproceeded, as he showed that the Accused was his first friend on hisrelease from his long imprisonment; that, the accused had remained inEngland, always faithful and devoted to his daughter and himself intheir exile; that, so far from being in favour with the Aristocratgovernment there, he had actually been tried for his life by it, asthe foe of England and friend of the United States--as he brought thesecircumstances into view, with the greatest discretion and with thestraightforward force of truth and earnestness, the Jury and thepopulace became one. At last, when he appealed by name to MonsieurLorry, an English gentleman then and there present, who, like himself,had been a witness on that English trial and could corroborate hisaccount of it, the Jury declared that they had heard enough, and thatthey were ready with their votes if the President were content toreceive them.
At every vote (the Jurymen voted aloud and individually), the populaceset up a shout of applause. All the voices were in the prisoner'sfavour, and the President declared him free.
Then, began one of those extraordinary scenes with which the populacesometimes gratified their fickleness, or their better impulses towardsgenerosity and mercy, or which they regarded as some set-off againsttheir swollen account of cruel rage. No man can decide now to which ofthese motives such extraordinary scenes were referable; it is probable,to a blending of all the three, with the second predominating. No soonerwas the acquittal pronounced, than tears were shed as freely as bloodat another time, and such fraternal embraces were bestowed upon theprisoner by as many of both sexes as could rush at him, that afterhis long and unwholesome confinement he was in danger of fainting fromexhaustion; none the less because he knew very well, that the very samepeople, carried by another current, would have rushed at him withthe very same intensity, to rend him to pieces and strew him over thestreets.
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 triedtogether, next, as enemies of the Republic, forasmuch as they had notassisted it by word or deed. So quick was the Tribunal to compensateitself and the nation for a chance lost, that these five came down tohim before he left the place, condemned to die within twenty-fourhours. The first of them told him so, with the customary prison signof Death--a raised finger--and they all added in words, ”Long live theRepublic!”
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 greatcrowd about it, in which there seemed to be every face he had seen inCourt--except two, for which he looked in vain. On his coming out, theconcourse made at him anew, weeping, embracing, and shouting, all byturns and all together, until the very tide of the river on the bank ofwhich the mad scene was acted, seemed to run mad, like the people on theshore.
They put him into a great chair they had among them, and which they hadtaken 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 theyhad bound a pike with a red cap on its top. In this car of triumph, noteven the Doctor's entreaties could prevent his being carried to his homeon 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, thathe more than once misdoubted his mind being in confusion, and that hewas in the tumbril on his way to the Guillotine.
In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and pointinghim out, they carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with theprevailing Republican colour, in winding and tramping through them, asthey had reddened them below the snow with a deeper dye, they carriedhim thus into the courtyard of the building where he lived. Her fatherhad gone on before, to prepare her, and when her husband stood upon hisfeet, she dropped insensible in his arms.
As he held her to his heart and turned her beautiful head between hisface and the brawling crowd, so that his tears and her lips might cometogether unseen, a few of the people fell to dancing. Instantly, all therest fell to dancing, and the courtyard overflowed with the Carmagnole.Then, they elevated into the vacant chair a young woman from thecrowd to be carried as the Goddess of Liberty, and then swelling andoverflowing out into the adjacent streets, and along the river's bank,and over the bridge, the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirledthem away.
After grasping the Doctor's hand, as he stood victorious and proudbefore him; after grasping the hand of Mr. Lorry, who came panting inbreathless from his struggle against the waterspout of the Carmagnole;after kissing little Lucie, who was lifted up to clasp her arms roundhis neck; and after embracing the ever zealous and faithful Pross wholifted her; he took his wife in his arms, and carried her up to theirrooms.
”Lucie! My own! I am safe.”
”O dearest Charles, let me thank God for this on my knees as I haveprayed to Him.”
They all reverently bowed their heads and hearts. When she was again inhis arms, he said to her:
”And now speak to your father, dearest. No other man in all this Francecould have done what he has done for me.”
She laid her head upon her father's breast, as she had laid his poorhead on her own breast, long, long ago. He was happy in the return hehad made her, he was recompensed for his suffering, he was proud of hisstrength. ”You must not be weak, my darling,” he remonstrated; ”don'ttremble so. I have saved him.”