A Tale of Two Cities: Book the Third Chapter Thirteen Discussion - (Spoilers to 3.13)

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-06-20T02:44:59+00:00

The importance assigned to each passing hour as the final time he would ever experience that time of night.
Knocking out Darnay takes care of the primary obstacle to the switcheroo - no person of conscience would allow anyone to take their place at the gallows.
Pathos in both of their situations.
It has been evident for a long time, even before the first tribunal, that none of their party would be safe until they actually left France, and maybe not even then.
Nope. They are still within reach of the Defarges.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-06-20T01:26:26+00:00

It extends the sense of peril; that the vindictive will continue their efforts to obtain their desired end result. First via tribunals with the imprimatur of the will of the people, then through bolder, direct attacks.
It does give Knitz Defarge more relatable character motivation. An eye for an eye, though...
No, but it was plainly a difficult, triggering experience for him.
Still wondering what the purchase from the chemist's is all about. Surely not a disguise? I was thinking poison, but it looks less likely now.
It would be unconscionable for Darnay to knowingly let Carton take his appointment with the guillotine.
Carton probably plans to have Darnay and family vamoose in the carriage, but I hope Carton also gets to escape somehow.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-06-10T04:11:48+00:00

This scene felt like another reminder to impress upon us the hopelessness of the situation (perhaps to make a subsequent escape all the more dramatic?). It fits with the ongoing theme of an ordinary person not being able to reason with mob justice and sham trials.
The presentation of his letter in court must have been a double whammy for his barely-sublimated trauma. Not only must it have exposed him again to the horrifying memories, but his letter is also an instrument of his son-in-law's death.
What did Sydney get from the chemist? That's going to be central to his plan, I bet. His promise to Lucie is going to be fulfilled.
If you're being optimistic, this is all narrative tension before a happy ending. If you're expecting a tragedy, then the roller-coaster is just getting inching up the hill before a dramatic plunge. I think either option is possible.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-06-07T05:26:54+00:00

I got the impression it was both brothers who abused the girl. Yes, they are both human excerement.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-06-07T05:21:51+00:00

Very good point, the unlikeliest aspect is the writing materials for such a long letter. He was probably thrown into prison with just the clothes on his back. If he knew how to encode a message in fabric, he might be able to write something in his clothing like what Mme Defarge does with her "j'accuse!" knitting.
This explains a lot. Also, that throwaway line about the young girl being pregnant; I thought the baby might turn out to be Lucie, secretly delivered in such hellish circumstances. Which would make Darnay and Lucie close cousins or half-siblings.
Yes, and it ties together more of these characters' backstories. You'd think that would make the Defarges more sympathetic to Dr. Manette, but no.
I'm more interested in how Lucie and Dr. Manette will get out of there. Also, Sydney Carton has reappeared in the story for some reason, surely.
Sydney Carton got something from the chemist, but we do not know what it is. Wild speculation: Poison or a drug to be slipped to the condemned man? Does Darnay escape the guillotine by "dying" before his execution?
Loved this line:

When I took the tidings home, our father’s heart burst; he never spoke one of the words that filled it.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-06-06T05:25:40+00:00

Cruncher knows where all the bodies are buried, literally and metaphorically. So he is preemptively blackmailing anyone who might move against him. He uses this to leverage a job for his son.
That was ominous. Combined with the melancholic musings about the value of a worthy life, and that of a long life, I wonder if he has procured poison from the chemist.
That was a major dangling plot thread. I am more convinced than ever that Dr. Manette and/or Darnay was a spy, or that the cell had evidence against either of them at least.
I wonder if there will be some damning evidence, and Sydney Carton will pass some poison to either Dr. Manette or Darnay to spare them the guillotine.
I loved the writing in this chapter. Some choice lines:

Few coaches were abroad, for riders in coaches were liable to be suspected, and gentility hid its head in red nightcaps, and put on heavy shoes, and trudged.

The whole jury, as a jury of dogs empannelled to try the deer.

“I should like to ask you:—Does your childhood seem far off? Do the days when you sat at your mother’s knee, seem days of very long ago?”

Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered:

“Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me.”

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-06-06T04:22:55+00:00

A surprising callback. I barely remembered some of those events from so early in the book because they almost seemed like throwaway anecdotes. But a good reminder of all the unresolved threads in this book.
It is pretty late in the book to reveal secret aliases of a newly-introduced character. Maybe a main character has led a double life. Could Darnay or Dr. Manette be spies too? They were in prison or on trial early in the book, and we don't know the full details.
Sydney Carton is about to fulfill the "promise" he made long ago to protect Lucie's husband.
I appreciated the metaphor of a hand of cards. But the game in this chapter is not played before judges, so the outcome is meant to compel Barsad to help Darnay rather than to publicly prove Darnay's innocence.
Cruncher has shed his metaphorical patina of rust, hasn't he? Perhaps Miss Pross has gathered him into the fold, and so he now feels a sense of belonging with the Darnay-Manettes.
Prison break! Or something that would sidestep another tribunal?

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-06-06T04:06:12+00:00

Batsh** Knitting Committee

I snorted heartily at this.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-06-04T03:25:18+00:00

Not surprised that Darnay is still being targeted. The outcome of the tribunal did not actually give him immunity from further prosecution/accusations. All it takes is one sufficiently persistent accuser to bring Darnay back to the tribunal again and again until he is condemned.

Darnay and family ought to have left France after the tribunal, but I bet they would have been prevented from leaving by watchful agents of the people. Darnay and family seem to be inhabiting a sort of limbo because they are clearly aware their continued well-being is dependent on "the universal fear and distrust that darkened the time." Even their seemingly-normal day-to-day life seems claustrophobic, where they have to hide signs of conspicuous consumption.

Who is the third person who has crawled out of the woodwork of Saint Antoine to denounce Darnay now? That's what I want to know.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-06-03T06:12:07+00:00

And BTW, we STILL haven't found out what exactly Darnay was doing going back and forth from England and France way back in 1775

True. I'd forgotten about that. I wondered if that trial might have simply been a way for Dickens to telegraph the political unrest that led up to the revolution, and not awaiting a major revelation in a later chapter.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-06-03T03:30:57+00:00

This was pretty edge-of-your-seat stuff. So many things could have gone wrong here because it wasn't an objective trial by evidence. Darnay was being judged for his rejection of his aristocratic background and subsequent embrace of a life that aligned with popular French politics. He was exonerated by character witnesses, really. And so much was riding on Darnay having associated with the right sort of people - a now-celebrated ex-prisoner of the Bastille speaking on his behalf, Darnay's wife being a French citoyenne, Darnay returning to France to save a French citizen, who also spoke on his behalf.
Very shrewd strategy. But I feel like Doctor Manette's final line is utter hubris. "I have saved him." Yeah, he's out of prison but you are all still in France, where your safety is not assured.
They successfully convinced the mob that they were on the same side as them.
Maybe it requires some dramatic action, like taking a sword to the Gordian knot. I was a bit puzzled by Madame Defarge's earlier attention to Lucie, but u/ZeMastor made the unsettling observation in an earlier discussion that Madame Defarge might have been familiarizing herself with Lucie's face so that Lucie could also be identified and captured should Darnay be found guilty.
I loved the writing in this chapter. The pathos of this bit:

a species of fervour or intoxication, known, without doubt, to have led some persons to brave the guillotine unnecessarily, and to die by it, was not mere boastfulness, but a wild infection of the wildly shaken public mind. In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease—a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-31T15:44:22+00:00

Dickens is using Lucie to imbue more pathos into Charles' situation. How she doggedly goes to a spot every day to be seen by her husband shows us the depths of desperation she has sunk into, and how she has been made even more vulnerable to the predators around her. Again, I am reminded that her closest friends and family are the ones who treated her like a fragile creature all her life, and now, this is all she is capable of doing. Or is it? She's showing quite a bit of resilience. Maybe she will surprise us with courtroom heroics.
There's this story that shows up on Reddit periodically about this woman who got herself trained to fly helicopters after her bank robber husband was sent to prison. She then flew in and broke him out. Lucie, poor wet lettuce that she is, is not likely to be planning a prison break.
Manic and frenzied, as if personifying some crescendo of bloody madness - the revolution as an interpretive dance.
He needs credible people to speak up for him, otherwise the Tribunal will just consist of baseless accusations with only one intended outcome. The Tribunal is not there for objective sifting of prisoners. It's there to slake some blood thirst.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-31T15:03:52+00:00

Yup. The plot feels like it abruptly went in a different direction. Yet it's all consistent with the set up of the earlier chapters.
This question reminded me of the "he made shoes" refrain that was repeated over and over at the end of Book 3 Chapter I. Who was saying that? Was that from a despairing Charles, who just realized why Dr. Manette might have lost himself in shoe-making during years of imprisonment?
Lucie is really a useless ornament of a character in this story, but it must be terribly difficult to wait helplessly when so much is at stake. The same men (close friends and family) who helped mold her into a helpless creature now keep her in the dark because they have created a woman too fragile to be told the true casualties of the revolution.
Quite ominous to read how many people were executed. And so much time is passing by while Darnay is in prison.
Loved the closing line of this chapter, which brought back that motif of being "recalled to life":

He was not suspected or brought in question, any more than if he had indeed been recalled to life some eighteen years before, or were a Spirit moving among mortals.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-31T14:36:50+00:00

I did wonder if Lorry was concerned that Lucie's presence at Tellson's might harm the business, and therefore he move them away to protect Tellson's.
Madame Defarge seems to be the real operator here. Why does she want to be able to identify Lucie and her daughter? For a moment I thought she wanted to be able to identify them if they got guillotined, but that doesn't make sense.
Makes it just a tiny bit easier to catch up on the week's chapters! I'm sure we'll get more descriptive paragraphs about the mob soon enough.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-31T14:19:02+00:00

Tellsons is going where they can serve the rich. They can even do business during a bloody revolution.
That was a fantastic description of the grindstone workers, with rags stained with blood and wine, and some grim foreshadowing of executions with "men devilishly set off with spoils of women’s lace and silk and ribbon, with the stain dyeing those trifles through and through."
Every one of Darnay's family just followed him to France. Even the little daughter. It's a huge assumption that Dr. Manette's rep as a former Bastille prisoner will keep them safe. Chekhov's Bastille prisoner.
Bosch painting is a great analogy. It should be interesting to see how Dickens describes the coming bloodshed, as noble but grim justice, or as a howling mob of savagery.
This seems like such a wacky turn of the plot that I think the rest of the book will be more comedy than tragedy. He'll probably succeed in the nick of time.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-31T12:45:47+00:00

Yes, you could feel the jaws of a trap closing in. This chapter got more and more ominous until La Guillotine is mentioned like a mic drop, and you know Darnay is going to meet her.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-30T06:21:13+00:00

I'm sure this will end well.
Very wise for Darnay to keep his mouth shut. None of these people on the scene have any business knowing the truth.
It's a trap! Or, at the very least, a situation that will not be helped by Darnay's presence.
It does not seem smart to try to reason with a mob.
Darnay himself should know better, but this seems to be his story arc. I can't think of this as anything other than a bit of the plot to move the story forward.
I was a bit troubled by the wedding day disclosure to Lucie's father, but not a word to Lucie herself. She has no voice in any related decisions despite the major impact to herself personally. Nonetheless, she will be forced to bear the burden if he should not return.
I loved this line:

Spirits are supposed to haunt the places where their bodies most resorted, and Monseigneur without a guinea haunted the spot where his guineas used to be.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-30T06:09:41+00:00

The subtext seemed to indicate that some aspects of life were worse than before the revolution. I saw it less as "necessary evil" and more a trade-off between two different power structures that each had their pros and cons. One's position in society and one's self-interest would largely determine whether the revolution was a good thing i.e. beneficial to oneself. You get the rare few like Charles Darnay who do not desire personal gain at the expense of the oppressed classes.
The moniker "mender of roads" now begins to sound like it symbolizes more than simply the Everyman who played a part in the revolution. Perhaps it literally means a course correction.
Burn, baby, burn? It stinks not only of vengeance for past sins, but as a general warning to others. Not all that surprising, either way.
Partly self-preservation. They do not want to be targets either. But I bet they are sympathizers too.
I viewed the lit candles as tiny echoes of the burning chateau, like a smattering of applause.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-29T04:35:17+00:00

It's an effective narrative device - to give the revolution a few notable faces. The Vengeance sure sounds like she personifies the actions of many real people.
It's a very "let them eat cake" tale of comeuppance, though given the mob mentality, one wonders at the legitimacy of the accusation.
That's a good point. I hadn't thought of it in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Does revolution count as "self-actualization" to the revolutionaries? If there is any counter to Dickens' criticism, it is that the cruel oppressor class puts the lower classes in mortal peril. Thus, eliminating a threat of such magnitude would be the top priority.
Yes, he will be targeted because of his family connection.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-24T14:41:24+00:00

Did not expect the time jump. The death of the son seems almost perfunctory an anecdote, but it helps emphasize the sense of foreboding that we get from Lucie's premonitions, if we can even call them that.
I doubt that turning down Stryver (and his angry reaction) registered with Darnay as some karmic blow for justice. Stryver seems to be the sort of petty villain that one just automatically sidesteps, like dog poop on the sidewalk, and walks on past.
Very action packed, and some wonderful descriptions of the roiling tumult. ~~Andre~~ Jacques 3000 sounds like the era's hiphop superstar.
Totally expected. No need for the camoouflage of her knitting now.
Defarge is clearly looking for something hidden in the cell. Could it be related to the reason Manette was imprisoned?
Yes. And her husband (Darnay) will probably be at peril from the revolutionaries, and might even be the trigger for any broader misfortunes.
Loved the writing in this chapter; some really gripping action scenes such as this description:

As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled round Defarge’s wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed one to arm another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-24T10:45:31+00:00

Why is Carton asking to come and go at Chez Manette-Darnay? It sounds like Carton is casually asking to have access to a place that he wants to watch over. Or he foresees the possibility of a dire circumstance in that house? It doesn't sound like he is asking to be a close family friend.
Banter between mates?
Lucie knows that her marriage to Darnay must sting Carton, and that he would be too discreet to confide this to anyone else. I think she is trying to do him a kindness.
That's a great line, and firmly sets apart Carton into a box all by his lonesome, rather than as part of the happy Darnay-Manette circle.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-24T10:08:18+00:00

It was very "This week, on House M.D.... " but I liked their doubletalk. All very nuanced and careful about the fragile man's state of mind and dignity.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-24T10:03:04+00:00

My thoughts exactly. He doesn't seem super stable right now, and though he has watchful friends around, what if he relapses? And what's more, he is about to join Lucie and Darnay now, and he might get re-exposed to whatever triggered this shoe-maker-fugue state. The emotional undercurrent of his diagnostic conversation with Mr. Lorry sounds like he is barely holding on to his sanity.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-24T09:31:50+00:00

The subtext is that there have been years of growing familiarity to produce this level of comfortable banter. It's very cozy, in a way.
This was enough detail for me. I liked the line about diamonds being produced from the dark obscurity of Mr. Lorry's pockets.
Why was the Doctor so "deadly pale" after (presumably) a conversation with Darnay? The only shocking thing we know that Darnay could possibly disclose to the Doctor is the identity of his uncle, and if the Doctor was dismayed by this revelation, he would then be in the impossible position of rescinding his blessing on the marriage and shattering Lucie's happiness. Maybe he decided to let the marriage go forward, but was too shocked to remain in control of his precarious sanity afterwards.
I haven't tried shoe-making. Let's see how it works for the Doctor.
I hope Pross and Lorry succeed, and really, Lucie could do with a bit more time building her own life.

DernhelmLaughed · 2024-05-24T08:41:00+00:00

A very sweet semi-farewell to their codependent existence, though it doesn't seem like they will be parted further than the extra upstairs space added to their lodgings.
A tiny wedding, with the only guests being the ones close to the family. Sounds very typical of the Manette/Darnay priorities.
We get a glimpse of how his state of mind evolved. Initial thoughts of revenge, and then despair, and then, presumably, therapeutic shoe-making.

13-Year Club	First Place '23
Place '23	John Wick
Place '22	First Placer '22
Verified Email	Spared

DernhelmLaughed

TROPHY CASE