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A Tale of Two Cities
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BetaBook 3, Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 3: “The Track of a Storm”
Book 3, Chapter 10 Summary: “The Substance of the Shadow”
In his statement, Manette identifies himself and explains that he writes this in the tenth year of his imprisonment, using ink made of “scrapings of soot and charcoal from the chimney, mixed with blood” (331).
Manette then describes how, as he was walking one evening in 1757, two men in a carriage stopped him. The men have a patient they wish Manette to see, and since they are armed, Manette has no choice but to go with them.
The carriage travels to a mansion, where the men take Manette to see a young woman who is delirious, tied to a bed, and who cries out continuously for her husband, father, and brother. Manette questions the two men (whom he now realizes are twin brothers) on the woman’s illness and is eventually taken to see another patient: a “handsome peasant boy” (335) a few years younger than the woman, dying of a sword wound.
Manette asks how the boy was injured, and the “elder” brother (that is, the Marquis) explains that the boy insisted on dueling with his brother:
There was no touch of pity, sorrow, or kindred humanity, in this answer. The speaker seemed to acknowledge that it was inconvenient to have that different order of creature dying there, and that it would have been better if he had died in the usual obscure routine of his vermin kind (336).
The boy then offers his side of the story: the sick woman is his sister, and (like him) a tenant of the Evrémondes. She refused to sleep with the younger Evrémonde brother, so the Evrémondes worked her sick husband to death. Afterwards, the Marquis’s brother kidnapped and raped her. In response, the teenage boy hid his youngest sister away and then tracked down his sister’s rapist, receiving his fatal injury in the process. As the boy concludes his story, he dips his finger in his own blood and draws a cross in the air, “summon[ing]” the Marquis and his family to one day “answer” (339) for what they have done.
The boy dies, and Manette returns to the sister. More than a day later, she “[sinks] into a lethargy” (339), and Manette, now able to examine her more closely, discovers that she is pregnant. She finally dies a week later, and Manette returns home under strict orders not to speak of what he has seen. Shortly afterwards, he receives a visit from the Marquis’s wife (Darnay’s mother), who hopes to atone for the family’s cruelty by helping the peasant family’s youngest daughter. Manette, however, is unable to tell her where the girl is.
Disturbed by his experiences, Manette decides to write to the government. Shortly after he posts his letter, Manette is arrested and taken to the Bastille. He concludes his statement by cursing the Evrémonde brothers “and their descendants, to the last of their race” (344). Back in the present, Manette’s statement electrifies the courtroom. Unanimously, the jury sentences Darnay to death.
Book 3, Chapter 11 Summary: “Dusk”
Lucie nearly collapses when the verdict is read but manages to remain strong for her husband’s sake. Barsad takes pity on her and convinces the other jailers to allow Lucie a moment with Darnay, who blesses her and his child and assures her they will meet again in heaven. Darnay also prevents Doctor Manette from asking for forgiveness, saying that he respects him even more now that he knows the “natural antipathy” (347) he had to overcome to welcome Darnay into his family. Finally, he says that his fate is inevitable, because “good could never come of such evil, a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a beginning” (347).
Lucie faints when her husband is taken away, and Carton catches her, carrying her to a coach and then into her home. As he kisses Lucie goodbye, her daughter overhears him whisper “a life you love” (349).
Outside Lucie’s room, Carton urges Doctor Manette to try using his influence one more time. Manette promises to do so, and Carton says he will stop by Tellson’s later that night to learn if Manette was successful. After Manette leaves, Lorry says he doubts anyone would dare pardon Darnay given the mood of the courtroom earlier that day. Carton agrees, but says he asked Manette “because [he] felt that it might one day be consolatory to [Lucie]. Otherwise, she might think ‘his life was wantonly thrown away or wasted,’ and that might trouble her” (350). He then leaves, walking “with a settled step” (350).
Book 3, Chapter 12 Summary: “Darkness”
Carton decides to visit the Defarge’s wine-shop. Once there, Carton orders from Madame Defarge in uncharacteristically halting and heavily accented French. As Carton pretends to read a newspaper, Madame Defarge returns to her conversation with her husband, Jacques Three, and the Vengeance, remarking on how closely Carton resembles Darnay.
The conversation then picks up where it apparently left off, with Defarge expressing discomfort and insisting that “one must stop somewhere” (352). His wife and the others don’t share this view, and as the argument progresses, it becomes clear that Madame Defarge wants to see Lucie Manette (and possibly her father and child) executed. When Defarge continues to protest, she reveals to Jacques Three and the Vengeance why she is so set against the Evrémondes: she is the younger sister of the peasant boy and girl Doctor Manette attended. Defarge, who learned this after he recovered Manette’s papers from the Bastille, is forced to admit that this is true, and Madame Defarge triumphantly concludes that it would be better to “tell Wind and Fire where to stop” (354) than to tell her.
Carton leaves shortly afterwards, stopping to visit Barsad before returning to Tellson’s to wait for Manette. Manette doesn’t show up at the appointed time, however, and when he does, his manner immediately tells Lorry and Carton that “all [is] lost” (355). Manette has once again reverted to his behavior as a prisoner, asking in a “whimpering miserable way” (355) for his shoes and workbench.
Lorry and Carton settle Manette in a chair, and Carton tells Lorry what he must do next: Lucie and her family’s travel papers are in danger of being revoked, so they need to leave the country as soon as possible. In fact, Carton says, Lucie is likely to be denounced by Madame Defarge, who (according to Barsad) has instructed the wood-sawyer to claim he saw Lucie “making signs and signals to prisoners” (357). Carton therefore urges Lorry to ensure that the family leaves the next day and entrusts Lorry with his own travel papers as well. However, when Lorry asks whether he ought to wait for Carton to return before leaving, Carton tells him to “wait for nothing but to have [his] place occupied” (358). Both Lorry and Carton say they hope to fulfill their roles “faithfully” (359), and Carton leaves shortly afterwards, stopping briefly under window.
Book 3, Chapters 10-12 Analysis
The chapter containing Doctor Manette’s written statement is one of the most pivotal moments in A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens has foreshadowed both the existence of this statement and its contents heavily; although Manette himself apparently doesn’t remember writing it, both his alarm at Darnay’s anecdote about the message left in the Tower of London and his state in the days following Darnay and Lucie’s wedding now make sense. What is less expected is Madame Defarge’s relationship to the peasant family Manette describes, and while she remains a villainous figure, the backstory goes a long way towards humanizing her.
Dickens has contrasted Madame Defarge with Lucie Manette throughout the novel, but once again, there is more common ground between the two apparent opposites than is immediately obvious. In a sense, Madame Defarge is a twisted version of Lucie, similarly motivated by devotion to her family, but expressing that devotion through her quest for vengeance:
That sister of the mortally wounded boy upon the ground was my sister, that husband was my sister’s husband, that unborn child was their child, that brother was my brother, that father was my father, those dead are my dead, and that summons to answer for those things descends to me! (354).
Madame Defarge also grows more sympathetic in light of the revelation that even Doctor Manette gave into the desire for revenge against the entire Evrémonde family. Manette of course ultimately forgave Darnay and even welcomed him into his family, but the mere fact that someone so generous and merciful could have written what he did speaks to how terrible life under the Ancien Régime truly was. The idea of inheritance appears repeatedly in these chapters, with the peasant boy’s and Manette’s curses passing down from one generation of Evrémondes to the next, and Madame Defarge “inheriting” the duty of revenge.
In a broader sense, all of French society is caught up in a kind of ancestral guilt, with even the victims of the old regime (Madame Defarge, Doctor Manette, etc.) morally tainted by it. Symbolically, this is one reason it is ultimately Carton rather than Manette who emerges as a Christ figure; the only person who can “break” the family curse on Darnay is someone who exists outside that web of guilt and revenge. Manette, through no particular fault of his own, is enmeshed in this history, and in fact ends this section of the novel once more trapped in memories of it.
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By Charles Dickens
