ntern that

was held, and extinguished the ashes with his foot. Not a word was

spoken. I was brought here, I was brought to my living grave.

“If it had pleased God to put it in the hard heart of either of the

brothers, in all these frightful years, to grant me any tidings of my

dearest wifeso much as to let me know by a word whether alive

or deadI might have thought that He had not quite abandoned

them. But, now I believe that the mark of the red cross is fatal to

them, and that they have no part in His mercies. And them and

their descendants, to the last of their race, I, Alexandre Manette,

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

unhappy prisoner, do this last night of the year 1767, in my

unbearable agony, denounce to the times when all these things

shall be answered for. I denounce them to Heaven and to earth.”

A terrible sound arose when the reading of this document was

done. A sound of craving and eagerness that had nothing

articulate in it but blood. The narrative called up the most

revengeful passions of the time, and there was not a head in the

nation but must have dropped before it.

Little need, in the presence of that tribunal and that auditory,

to show how the Defarges had not made the paper public, with the

other captured Bastille memorials borne in procession, and had

kept it, biding their time. Little need to show tha