of herself to her; by the aid of Heaven I will do
it!" Thus, Doctor Manette. And when Jarvis
Lorry saw the kindled eyes, the resolute face,
the calm strong look and bearing of the man
whose life always seemed to him to have been
stopped, like a clock, for so many years, and then
set going again with an energy which had lain
dormant during the cessation of its usefulness,
he believed.

Greater things than the Doctor had at that
time to contend with, would have yielded before
his persevering purpose. While he kept himself
in his place, as a physician whose business was
with all degrees of mankind, bond and free, rich
and poor, bad and good, lie used his personal
influence so wisely, that he was soon the inspecting
physician of three prisons, and among them of
La Force. He could now assure Lucie that
her husband was no longer confined alone, but
was mixed Avith the general body of prisoners;
he saw her husband weekly, and brought sweet
messages to her, straight from his lips;
sometimes her husband himself sent a letter to her
(though never by the Doctor's hand), but she
was not permitted to write to him; for, among
the many wild suspicions of plots in the prisons,
the wildest of all pointed at emigrants who were
known to have made friends or permanent
connexions abroad.

This new life of the Doctor's was an anxious
life, no doubt; still, the sagacious Mr. Lorry saw
that there was a new sustaining pride in it. Nothing
unbecoming tinged the pride; it was a natural and
worthy one; but, he observed it as a curiosity.
The Doctor knew, that up to that time, his
imprisonment had been associated in the minds of
his daughter and his friend, with his personal
affliction, deprivation, and weakness. Now that
this was changed, and he knew himself to
be invested through that old trial with forces
to which they both looked for Charles's ultimate
safety and deliverance, he became so far exalted
by the change, that he took the lead and direction,
and required them as the weak, to trust
to him as the strong. The preceding relative
positions of himself and Lucie were reversed,
yet only as the liveliest gratitude and affection
could reverse them, for he could have had no
pride but in rendering some service to her who
had rendered so much to him. "All curious to
see," thought Mr. Lorry, in his amiably shrewd
way, "but all natural and right; so, take the
lead, my dear friend, and keep it; it couldn't be
in better hands."

But, though the Doctor tried hard, and never
ceased trying, to get Charles Darnay set at
liberty, or at least to get him brought to trial,
the public current of the time set too strong and
fast for him. The new Era began; the king was
tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared
for victory or death against the world in arms;
the black flag waved night and day from the great
towers of Notre-Dame; three hundred thousand
men, summoned to rise against the tyrants of
the earth, rose from all the varying soils of
France, as if the dragon's teeth had been sown
broadcast, and had yielded fruit equally on hill
and plain, on rock in gravel and alluvial mud,
under the bright sky of the South and under
the clouds of the North, in fell and forest, in
the vineyards and the olive-grounds and among
the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn,
along the fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and
in the sand of the sea-shore. What private
solicitude could rear itself against the deluge of
the Year One of Liberty—the deluge rising from
below, not falling from above, and with the
windows of Heaven shut, not opened!

There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no
interval of relenting rest, no measurement of
time. Though days and nights circled as regularly
as when time was young, and the evening and the
morning were the first day, other count of time
there was none. Hold of it was lost in the
raging fever of a nation, as it is in the fever of
one patient. Now, breaking the unnatural silence
of a whole city, the executioner showed the
people the head of the king—and now, it seemed
almost in the same breath, the head of his fair
wife which had had eight weary months of
imprisoned widowhood and misery, to turn it
grey.

And yet, observing the strange law of
contradiction which obtains in all such cases, the
time was long, while it flamed by so fast. A
revolutionary tribunal in the capital, and forty
or fifty thousand revolutionary committees all
over the land; a law of the Suspected, which
struck away all security for liberty or life, and
delivered over any good and innocent person to
any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged with
people who had committed no offence, and could
obtain no hearing; these things became
the established order and nature of appointed
things, and seemed to be ancient usage before
they were many weeks old. Above all, one
hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been
before the general gaze from the foundations
of the world—the figure of the sharp female
called La Guillotine.

It was the popular theme for jests; it was
the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented
hair from turning grey, it imparted a peculiar
delicacy to the complexion, it was the National
Razor which shaved close: who kissed La
Guillotine, looked through the little window and
sneezed into the sack. It was the sign of the
regeneration of the human race. It superseded
the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts
from which the Cross was discarded, and it was
bowed down to and believed in where the Cross
was denied.

It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the
ground it most polluted, were a rotten red. It
was taken to pieces, like a toy-puzzle for a
young Devil, and was put together again where
the occasion wanted it. It hushed the eloquent,
struck down the powerful, abolished the  beautiful
and good. Twenty-two friends of high
public mark, twenty-one living and one dead,
it had lopped the heads off, in one morning, in as
many minutes. The name of the strong man of
Old Scripture had descended to the chief