I’ve been reading Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities for the first time. A lot of people read this much earlier in life but, given I have never, I decided to jump into it on a whim. I had been meaning to read it for a while. I am a little over half way, and, to be frank, it’s not overwhelming me. But I am told that the great parts of this book come in the last third. I’m hanging in there.
But this scene I wish to highlight comes at just about the very center of the novel. I am sure that is significant but I am not sure what the significance is since I have no idea how the novel will end. As some of you may know, this is a story set during the French Revolution, but the actual storming and violence has not occurred yet. In the first half of the story Dickens provides the context and situation of characters in two cities, as the title indicates, London and Paris.
This scene is a tender situation between a Dr. Alexander Manette and his daughter Lucy. At the beginning of the novel Dr. Manette has been released after eighteen years of imprisonment in the Bastille, which was both a fortress and prison in Paris. He was vindictively imprisoned for revealing corruption by some aristocrats, which signals that he had virtues and ideals. He was imprisoned just before his daughter Lucy was born, and so the two had never met until Dr. Manette’s release. While imprisoned, Lucy’s mother died when Lucy was a child, and as an orphan she was taken to England. But she returned to France on the news of her father being released.
Dr.
Manette was severely traumatized while a prisoner in the Bastille. At his release he barely knew who he was and of
his past. Lucy takes him, brings him to
London, and nurses him back to health and functionality. Her tender love is perhaps at the core of the
novel. This scene takes place several
years after Dr. Manette has been in London.
He has regained his senses, though he is frail. A suitor, Charles Darnay, has asked the
doctor for the hand in marriage of his daughter, and he has agreed if she
accepts. She accepted, and this scene
occurs the night before the marriage is to take place as father and daughter
spend one last night together. This
scene comes from Book II, Chapter 17, “One Night.” I am quoting almost the entire chapter.
Never did the sun go down
with a brighter glory on the quiet corner in Soho, than one memorable evening
when the Doctor and his daughter sat under the plane-tree together. Never did
the moon rise with a milder radiance over great London, than on that night when
it found them still seated under the tree, and shone upon their faces through
its leaves.
Lucie was to be married
to-morrow. She had reserved this last evening for her father, and they sat
alone under the plane-tree.
“You are happy, my dear
father?”
“Quite, my child.”
They had said little,
though they had been there a long time. When it was yet light enough to work
and read, she had neither engaged herself in her usual work, nor had she read
to him. She had employed herself in both ways, at his side under the tree, many
and many a time; but, this time was not quite like any other, and nothing could
make it so.
“And I am very happy
to-night, dear father. I am deeply happy in the love that Heaven has so
blessed—my love for Charles, and Charles’s love for me. But, if my life were
not to be still consecrated to you, or if my marriage were so arranged as that
it would part us, even by the length of a few of these streets, I should be
more unhappy and self-reproachful now than I can tell you. Even as it is—”
Even as it was, she could
not command her voice.
In the sad moonlight, she
clasped him by the neck, and laid her face upon his breast. In the moonlight
which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself is—as the light called
human life is—at its coming and its going.
“Dearest dear! Can you
tell me, this last time, that you feel quite, quite sure, no new affections of
mine, and no new duties of mine, will ever interpose between us? I know it
well, but do you know it? In your own heart, do you feel quite certain?”
Her father answered, with
a cheerful firmness of conviction he could scarcely have assumed, “Quite sure,
my darling! More than that,” he added, as he tenderly kissed her: “my future is
far brighter, Lucie, seen through your marriage, than it could have been—nay,
than it ever was—without it.”
“If I could hope that, my
father!—”
“Believe it, love! Indeed
it is so. Consider how natural and how plain it is, my dear, that it should be
so. You, devoted and young, cannot fully appreciate the anxiety I have felt
that your life should not be wasted—”
She moved her hand
towards his lips, but he took it in his, and repeated the word.
“—wasted, my child—should
not be wasted, struck aside from the natural order of things—for my sake. Your
unselfishness cannot entirely comprehend how much my mind has gone on this;
but, only ask yourself, how could my happiness be perfect, while yours was
incomplete?”
“If I had never seen
Charles, my father, I should have been quite happy with you.”
He smiled at her
unconscious admission that she would have been unhappy without Charles, having
seen him; and replied:
“My child, you did see
him, and it is Charles. If it had not been Charles, it would have been another.
Or, if it had been no other, I should have been the cause, and then the dark
part of my life would have cast its shadow beyond myself, and would have fallen
on you.”
It was the first time,
except at the trial, of her ever hearing him refer to the period of his
suffering. It gave her a strange and new sensation while his words were in her
ears; and she remembered it long afterwards.
“See!” said the Doctor of
Beauvais, raising his hand towards the moon. “I have looked at her from my
prison-window, when I could not bear her light. I have looked at her when it
has been such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost, that
I have beaten my head against my prison-walls. I have looked at her, in a state
so dull and lethargic, that I have thought of nothing but the number of
horizontal lines I could draw across her at the full, and the number of
perpendicular lines with which I could intersect them.” He added in his inward
and pondering manner, as he looked at the moon, “It was twenty either way, I
remember, and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in.”
The strange thrill with
which she heard him go back to that time, deepened as he dwelt upon it; but,
there was nothing to shock her in the manner of his reference. He only seemed
to contrast his present cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance that
was over.
“I have looked at her,
speculating thousands of times upon the unborn child from whom I had been rent.
Whether it was alive. Whether it had been born alive, or the poor mother’s
shock had killed it. Whether it was a son who would some day avenge his father.
(There was a time in my imprisonment, when my desire for vengeance was unbearable.)
Whether it was a son who would never know his father’s story; who might even
live to weigh the possibility of his father’s having disappeared of his own
will and act. Whether it was a daughter who would grow to be a woman.”
She drew closer to him,
and kissed his cheek and his hand.
“I have pictured my
daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful of me—rather, altogether ignorant
of me, and unconscious of me. I have cast up the years of her age, year after
year. I have seen her married to a man who knew nothing of my fate. I have
altogether perished from the remembrance of the living, and in the next
generation my place was a blank.”
“My father! Even to hear
that you had such thoughts of a daughter who never existed, strikes to my heart
as if I had been that child.”
“You, Lucie? It is out of
the Consolation and restoration you have brought to me, that these remembrances
arise, and pass between us and the moon on this last night.—What did I say just
now?”
“She knew nothing of you.
She cared nothing for you.”
“So! But on other
moonlight nights, when the sadness and the silence have touched me in a
different way—have affected me with something as like a sorrowful sense of
peace, as any emotion that had pain for its foundations could—I have imagined
her as coming to me in my cell, and leading me out into the freedom beyond the
fortress. I have seen her image in the moonlight often, as I now see you;
except that I never held her in my arms; it stood between the little grated
window and the door. But, you understand that that was not the child I am
speaking of?”
“The figure was not;
the—the—image; the fancy?”
“No. That was another thing.
It stood before my disturbed sense of sight, but it never moved. The phantom
that my mind pursued, was another and more real child. Of her outward
appearance I know no more than that she was like her mother. The other had that
likeness too—as you have—but was not the same. Can you follow me, Lucie?
Hardly, I think? I doubt you must have been a solitary prisoner to understand
these perplexed distinctions.”
His collected and calm
manner could not prevent her blood from running cold, as he thus tried to anatomise
his old condition.
“In that more peaceful
state, I have imagined her, in the moonlight, coming to me and taking me out to
show me that the home of her married life was full of her loving remembrance of
her lost father. My picture was in her room, and I was in her prayers. Her life
was active, cheerful, useful; but my poor history pervaded it all.”
“I was that child, my
father, I was not half so good, but in my love that was I.”
“And she showed me her
children,” said the Doctor of Beauvais, “and they had heard of me, and had been
taught to pity me. When they passed a prison of the State, they kept far from
its frowning walls, and looked up at its bars, and spoke in whispers. She could
never deliver me; I imagined that she always brought me back after showing me
such things. But then, blessed with the relief of tears, I fell upon my knees,
and blessed her.”
“I am that child, I hope,
my father. O my dear, my dear, will you bless me as fervently to-morrow?”
“Lucie, I recall these
old troubles in the reason that I have to-night for loving you better than
words can tell, and thanking God for my great happiness. My thoughts, when they
were wildest, never rose near the happiness that I have known with you, and
that we have before us.”
He embraced her, solemnly commended her to Heaven, and humbly thanked Heaven for having bestowed her on him. By-and-bye, they went into the house.
Not only is it a tender seen between father and daughter before she is given in marriage, we see Dr. Manette’s relief that the care his daughter gave him did not reduce and limit her life, and that she will have the opportunity to love and fulfill herself. He also recalls the memory of while imprisoned wondering what had happened to his child. As a father I could have imagined the heart wrenching pain. He recalls how he had given hope of meeting his child again. Let me requote this piece of his conversation.
“I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful of me—rather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious of me. I have cast up the years of her age, year after year. I have seen her married to a man who knew nothing of my fate. I have altogether perished from the remembrance of the living, and in the next generation my place was a blank.”
He
had suffered, both physically and emotionally.
His years imprisoned were filled with conjuring up images of his lost
daughter. He even pictured being in her
prayers. And now he will lose his
daughter in another sense, but this time he loses her for her joy. Finally the scene concludes with her being in
his prayers. Such a remarkably tender
scene.
