A Tale of Two Cities

The wicket opened on a stone staircase, leading upward.  When they
had ascended forty steps (the prisoner of half an hour already
counted them), the gaoler opened a low black door, and they passed
into a solitary cell.  It struck cold and damp, but was not dark.

"Yours," said the gaoler.

"Why am I confined alone?"

"How do I know!"

"I can buy pen, ink, and paper?"

"Such are not my orders.  You will be visited, and can ask then.
At present, you may buy your food, and nothing more."

There were in the cell, a chair, a table, and a straw mattress.
As the gaoler made a general inspection of these objects, and of the
four walls, before going out, a wandering fancy wandered through the
mind of the prisoner leaning against the wall opposite to him, that
this gaoler was so unwholesomely bloated, both in face and person,
as to look like a man who had been drowned and filled with water.
When the gaoler was gone, he thought in the same wandering way,
"Now am I left, as if I were dead."  Stopping then, to look down at
the mattress, he turned from it with a sick feeling, and thought,
"And here in these crawling creatures is the first condition of the
body after death."

"Five paces by four and a half, five paces by four and a half, five
paces by four and a half."  The prisoner walked to and fro in his
cell, counting its measurement, and the roar of the city arose like
muffled drums with a wild swell of voices added to them.  "He made
shoes, he made shoes, he made shoes."  The prisoner counted the
measurement again, and paced faster, to draw his mind with him from
that latter repetition.  "The ghosts that vanished when the wicket
closed.  There was one among them, the appearance of a lady dressed
in black, who was leaning in the embrasure of a window, and she had a
light shining upon her golden hair, and she looked like * * * * Let
us ride on again, for God's sake, through the illuminated villages
with the people all awake! * * * * He made shoes, he made shoes,
he made shoes. * * * * Five paces by four and a half."  With such scraps
tossing and rolling upward from the depths of his mind, the prisoner
walked faster and faster, obstinately counting and counting; and the
roar of the city changed to this extent--that it still rolled in like
muffled drums, but with the wail of voices that he knew, in the swell
that rose above them.



II

The Grindstone


Tellson's Bank, established in the Saint Germain Quarter of Paris,
was in a wing of a large house, approached by a courtyard and shut
off from the street by a high wall and a strong gate.  The house
belonged to a great nobleman who had lived in it until he made a
flight from the troubles, in his own cook's dress, and got across the
borders.  A mere beast of the chase flying from hunters, he was still
in his metempsychosis no other than the same Monseigneur, the
preparation of whose chocolate for whose lips had once occupied three
strong men besides the cook in question.

Monseigneur gone, and the three strong men absolving themselves from
the sin of having drawn his high wages, by being more than ready and
willing to cut his throat on the altar of the dawning Republic one and
indivisible of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, Monseigneur's
house had been first sequestrated, and then confiscated.  For, all
things moved so fast, and decree followed decree with that fierce
precipitation, that now upon the third night of the autumn month of
September, patriot emissaries of the law were in possession of
Monseigneur's house, and had marked it with the tri-colour, and were
drinking brandy in its state apartments.

A place of business in London like Tellson's place of business in
Paris, would soon have driven the House out of its mind and into the
Gazette.  For, what would staid British responsibility and
respectability have said to orange-trees in boxes in a Bank courtyard,
and even to a Cupid over the counter?  Yet such things were.
Tellson's had whitewashed the Cupid, but he was still to be seen on
the ceiling, in the coolest linen, aiming (as he very often does) at
money from morning to night.  Bankruptcy must inevitably have come of
this young Pagan, in Lombard-street, London, and also of a curtained
alcove in the rear of the immortal boy, and also of a looking-glass
let into the wall, and also of clerks not at all old, who danced in
public on the slightest provocation.  Yet, a French Tellson's could
get on with these things exceedingly well, and, as long as the times
held together, no man had taken fright at them, and drawn out his money.

What money would be drawn out of Tellson's henceforth, and what would
lie there, lost and forgotten; what plate and jewels would tarnish in
Tellson's hiding-places, while the depositors rusted in prisons, and
when they should have violently perished; how many accounts with
Tellson's never to be balanced in this world, must be carried over
into the next; no man could have said, that night, any more than
Mr. Jarvis Lorry could, though he thought heavily of these questions.
He sat by a newly-lighted wood fire (the blighted and unfruitful year
was prematurely cold), and on his honest and courageous face there