Recalled to Life (Book the First)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. In France, a youth was sentenced to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France, there were growing trees, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; and the hangman, ever busy, was stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals.

On a Friday night late in November, the Dover mail lumbered up Shooter's Hill in the mud and the mist, the passengers walking beside it. A horseman galloped up behind them out of the dark, and the guard, fearing a highwayman, levelled his blunderbuss. The rider was Jerry Cruncher, an odd-job man and messenger from Tellson's Bank in London, with a message for one of the passengers, Mr. Jarvis Lorry, a confidential clerk of the bank. Mr. Lorry read it by the coach lamp: "Wait at Dover for Mam'selle." And he gave Jerry his answer: "Recalled to life." Jerry, riding back to London, thought it a very strange answer. "You'd be in a blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!"

All night, as the coach jolted on, Mr. Lorry dozed and dreamed that he was digging someone out of a grave: a man of about forty-five, whose hair was white, who had been buried alive for almost eighteen years. "Buried how long?" "Almost eighteen years." "You know that you are recalled to life?" "They tell me so." "I hope you care to live?" "I can't say."

At the Royal George Hotel in Dover he met a young lady of seventeen, Miss Lucie Manette, slight and pretty, with a quantity of golden hair and blue eyes, who had been brought up in England as an orphan, and whose affairs Tellson's managed. He told her, with great difficulty and much business-like circumlocution, that her father, a French physician, Doctor Manette, whom she had believed long dead, was alive. He had been secretly imprisoned in the Bastille for eighteen years, no one knew why, and had now been released. He had been taken to the house of an old servant of his in Paris, and they were going there to bring him to England. Lucie was struck motionless, and fainted; and her nurse, Miss Pross, a wild-looking, red-haired woman of great strength and devotion, sent Mr. Lorry flying across the room.

In the wine-shop of Monsieur Defarge in the Saint Antoine quarter of Paris, a large cask of wine had been dropped and broken in the street. Everyone nearby ran to drink it: men knelt and scooped it up in their hands, women dipped their handkerchiefs into it and squeezed them into their babies' mouths, others made little mud-embankments to stop it running. The wine was red, and it stained the street and the hands and the faces and the feet of the people. One tall joker dipped his finger in the muddy wine-lees and scrawled upon a wall: BLOOD. The time was to come when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.

Defarge, the wine-shop keeper, was a bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty, good-humoured and implacable. His wife, Madame Defarge, sat behind the counter, a stout woman with a watchful eye, a steady face and great composure of manner, and she was knitting. Three men came in, one after another, and each addressed Defarge as "Jacques," and went out. Then Mr. Lorry and Lucie came, and Defarge took them up a steep, dark, filthy staircase to a garret at the top of the house, which he unlocked with a key. Through a chink in the wall, the three Jacques were watching.

In the garret, in the dim light, on a low bench, sat a white-haired man, very busy, making shoes.

"Good day!" said Defarge. "You are still hard at work, I see?" After a long silence, the white head was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded, as if it were at a distance: "Yes — I am working." The voice was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago. It was so sunk and suppressed that it was like a voice underground. "What is your name?" "One Hundred and Five, North Tower."

He could not remember anything else. He did not know Mr. Lorry, his old friend, nor Defarge, his former servant. Lucie came near him, and he looked at her, and slowly, wonderingly, reached out and touched her golden hair, and took from his breast a little packet tied round his neck, with a few long golden hairs in it, which he had wound, years ago, round his finger, from his wife's head. "She had laid her head upon my shoulder, that night when I was summoned out. And when I was brought to the North Tower they found these upon my sleeve." He looked at Lucie's hair and at the hairs in the packet. "It is the same. How can it be!" And Lucie put her arms around his neck and rocked him on her breast like a child, and told him who she was. "If you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once was sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it!"

Mr. Lorry, waiting, asked Defarge about the men who had been watching through the chink in the wall. "I show him to a chosen few," said Defarge, "to whom the sight is likely to do good." Every one of them was called Jacques.

That night they took him away, in a coach, out of Paris, toward England. He sat in the coach in the darkness; and he asked for his shoemaking tools, and they gave them to him.