A Tale of Two Cities

The Marquis approaches his chateau, which sits in an impoverished stretch of countryside:

Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor peas and beans, patches of most coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat. On inanimate nature, as on the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly—a dejected disposition to give up, and wither away (118).

The sun is setting, and momentarily shades the Marquis’s hands and face red. The carriage stops when it reaches the Marquis’s town. The villagers here are worn-out and desperate, in part because of the many taxes levied on them, and their “submissive faces […] droop before him” (119). The Marquis asks for one particular man, whom his carriage passed along the road, to be brought forward. The man is a mender of roads, and he explains that he was staring at the Marquis’s carriage because a man was hanging onto its underside. The Marquis rudely questions the mender of roads about this man, and instructs the town’s postmaster, Monsieur Gabelle, to check the area where the man supposedly jumped off.

Meanwhile, the Marquis’s carriage travels on, but is stopped as it passes a cemetery by a woman praying there; she explains that her husband recently died of “want,” and begs for a “morsel of stone or wood” (122) to mark his grave, so that she herself can be buried next to him in time. The Marquis’s servants push her away, and the carriage continues on to the chateau, where the Marquis asks if “Monsieur Charles” (123) has arrived.

When the Marquis arrives at his chateau—a “stony business altogether” (123)—he goes directly to his rooms and sits down to dinner, which has been set for two in expectation of his nephew’s arrival. At one point, the Marquis thinks he sees something outside the window; however, when the servant pulls back the blinds, nothing is there.

Shortly afterwards, the Marquis’s nephew arrives: it is Charles Darnay. He explains that his visit was delayed by “various business” (126)—that is, his trial for treason—and implies that his uncle was involved in the charges against him; in fact, Darnay says, he would likely be in a French prison at this moment if the Marquis weren’t out of favor at court. The Marquis doesn’t explicitly confirm any of this, but he does complain that the French aristocracy no longer has the unlimited power it used to: “In the next room (my bedroom), one fellow, to our knowledge, was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter” (127). When Darnay laments that these actions have earned them the hatred of the peasantry, the Marquis is pleased: “Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery […] will keep the dogs obedient to the whip” (128).

Darnay refuses to be put off and says that he is determined to carry out his mother’s final wishes by making amends for the wrong his family has done. To that end, he says he “renounces” (129) both France and his inheritance, which he intends to return to the French people; meanwhile, he will work to support himself. The Marquis mocks Darnay’s plans to live in England and asks whether he has met “a doctor” and “his daughter” who have sought “refuge” (131) there. When Darnay says that he has, the Marquis smiles strangely.

Both Darnay and the Marquis retire to bed. As the sun rises the next morning, “the water of the château fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the stone faces crimsoned” (132). The village and the chateau slowly wake up and begin to go about their daily routines, but then something interrupts them: there is a commotion in the chateau, a crowd gathers in town, and Gabelle leaves the village on urgent business. This, the narrator says, is because “there was one stone face too many, up at the château” (134).The Marquis was stabbed to death during the night, and the killer left a note reading: “Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques” (134).