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NOTES ON ISSUE 2: GLOSSARY
PART 2 OF 3
…hauling up men by those ropes and
pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their condition.
The practice of hanging offenders from the Parisian street-lanterns
becomes, in A Tale of Two
Cities, as in Dickens’ chief historical source
(Carlyle’s French Revolution), emblematic of patriotic
retribution. In The French
Revolution, the practice is inaugurated in a chapter
titled “The Lanterne,” in which the people, after
taking the Bastille, hang certain officials from the lanterns
near the Hôtel de Ville. “To the lantern!”
or simply “Lanterne!”
always implies, in Carlyle, imminent execution.
The Paris lanterns, and especially their projecting
lamp-irons, were apparently of convenient shape and stature
for use as makeshift gallows. Mercier (whose Tableau de Paris [1771-88] was one of Dickens’
French sources) notes, in an account of “Street Lighting”
(“Réverbères”), that the
oil-lamps of Paris were “badly hung; they made, in Milton’s
words, darkness itself visible. They should be fixed close to
the wall, not swung out above the street on great brackets”
(43). It is perhaps this distance of the lantern from the wall,
and the length of the bracket from which the oil-lamp was suspended,
which suggested the more grisly use to which the fixtures could
be put.
“What now? Are you a subject for the mad-hospital?”
“Mad-hospitals” in France dated from the mid-17th
century, but were not like modern asylums for the mentally ill.
Instead, they were more like prisons, outfitted with cells and
dungeons, and they contained not only the “mad,”
but also the poor, the indigent, the unemployed, and the criminal.
Michel Foucault notes that, after the establishment of these
hospitals, “one out of every hundred inhabitants of the
city of Paris found themselves confined there” (124);
in fact, he associates confinement in mad-hospitals with the
confinement resulting from a lettre de cachet, and suggests that madness
was in fact generated by confinement to hospitals – not
cured by it. Thus, when Defarge asks the man who writes “BLOOD”
on the wall in the Saint Antoine district whether he is a subject
for the mad-hospital, this may be a critique of the man’s
sanity; on the other hand, it may – in light of the nature
of such institutions at the time – be merely a critique
of his idleness.
The Hôpital Général, established
by royal edict in 1656, initiated what Foucault calls the “Great
Confinement,” intended to heal the sick, but also to prevent
“mendicancy and idleness as the source of all disorders”
(Foucault 124-9). Dickens, sensitive to social injustices and
particularly to the institution of social confinement (a visit
to Newgate Prison is recorded in Sketches
by Boz, and a visit to prisoners in solitary confinement
in a Philadelphia prison is described in
American Notes) would probably have been well aware of
the nature of French madhouses (and similar English ones, like
Bedlam) in the 18th century. Further, he may have read Mercier’s
report of Bicêtre in the Tableau
de Paris (1781-88), a collection of sketches on which
he drew for details of pre-revolutionary Paris:
Debtors are incarcerated here [in Bicêtre],
beggars, and madmen, together with all the viler criminals,
huddled pell-mell. There are others, too; epileptics, imbeciles,
old men, paupers and cripples, who, not being criminals, are
known by the generic title of “good poor”; to my
mind they should find refuge elsewhere, apart from the rogues
their neighbors. (160)
Mercier’s description of the appalling
conditions in Bicêtre – as many as six sick men
to a bed, a general lack of ventilation and drainage (to the
extent that one prisoner feigned death three times just to be
carried upstairs to purer air, and wasn’t believed when
he finally did die) – tends to confirm Foucault’s
argument that asylums frequently created the illness and insanity
they were meant to cure.
Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it down to
pick her teeth with a toothpick.
As Richard Maxwell points out in his edition of A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens revised his
original portrait of Madame Defarge to agree with the image
of the citoyennes tricoteuses
– the “knitting citizens” (female) of the
Revolution, “notorious for their regular attendance at
public executions” (448). In Dickens’ original conception
(found in the manuscript version of A Tale), Madame Defarge was addicted to needlework
instead of knitting.
“What the devil do you do in that galley there?”
said Monsieur Defarge to himself.
This apostrophe of Monsieur Defarge’s is usually used
as an example of Dickens’ attempt to represent French
linguistic constructions in English. Sanders, in his Companion
to A Tale of Two Cities, glosses “What the devil
do you do in that galley there?” as the idiomatic “equivalent
of the French ‘Que faites-vous dans cette galère?’
– ‘What are you doing in this mess?’”
(47). Monsieur Defarge’s “what … do you do”
is meant to reflect the French use of a present tense verb.
In English, we would choose between the present and the present
progressive. (“Que faites-vous?”
is an interrogative conjugation which may be translated either
“What are you doing?” or “What do you do?”
according to the context of the phrase.)
…and fell into discourse with the triumvirate of customers
who were drinking at the counter.
Here, “triumvirate” is used mainly in the generic
sense of a threesome; yet the word – adapted from the
Latin and originally referring, in Roman history, to “[t]he
position, office, or function of the triumviri …, an association
of three magistrates for joint administration” or “[b]y
extension: any association of three joint rulers or powers”
(OED) – suggests political collusion.
It may also faintly foreshadow the neo-classical allegiances
of revolutionary Paris, when “the republican spirit of
the Parisians revived the classical coiffure of Rome, and a
‘tête à la Brutus’” (Planché
403-4) demonstrated an aesthetic and political nostalgia for
antiquity.
“How goes it, Jacques?”
The fact that the members of the “triumvirate” with
whom Monsieur Defarge confers address one another as “Jacques”
not only supports the impression of their collusion, but invokes
the revolutionary overtones of the “Jacquerie”
– a name originally used as a general term for the French
peasantry (from the moniker “Jacques
Bonhomme” – roughly “Goodman James”
in English), but particularly applied to the individuals involved
in a 14th-century peasant rebellion (1357-8) in Northern France
(Sanders 47). This rebellion might be said, as a revolt of the
French poor against the aristocracy, to prefigure the Revolution
of 1789. Indeed, it not only contributes to Dickens’ revolutionary
vocabulary (his use of the term “Jacques”), but
to the geography of his revolutionary novel: The 14th-century
revolt of the Jacquerie was initiated in the area around
the town of Beauvais – the birthplace of Lucie’s
father, Doctor Manette, in A
Tale of Two Cities (Sanders 47).
…and nothing within range, nearer or lower than the
summits of the two great towers of Notre-Dame had any promise
on it of healthy life or wholesome aspirations.
The cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, like St. Paul’s
cathedral in London, stands on ground which has had religious
significance since the period of Roman settlement. One 19th-century
guidebook gives the following account of its construction and
the religious buildings that preceded it on the spot:
Notre Dame … was begun in the year
1163 by Maurice de Sully, the sixty-second bishop of Paris.
Pope Alexander III laid the foundation-stone. Two churches had
stood previously upon the same ground …, one dedicated
to St. Etienne and the other to La Vierge Marie [the Virgin
Mary]. During … excavations [later] made … under
the choir of Notre Dame, stones were discovered showing that
the Parisian sailors had upon this spot erected an altar to
Jupiter, in the reign of Tiberius Caesar. In the 6th century
was dedicated the church to St. Etienne, and in the following
century, that to the Virgin…. (Dickens’s
Dictionary of Paris 165-7)
The religious significance of the location
of Notre Dame – from antiquity onward – contributes
to its status as a spiritual center for the city of Paris. Indeed,
Tronchet’s Picture of Paris (c. 1818) calls Notre Dame
“the mother church of France,” and Dickens frequently
uses it (though partly no doubt because of its fame even among
English readers) as a point of geographical reference in A Tale of Two Cities. Notre Dame stands on
the east side of the Ile de la Cité – one of the
Parisian islands in the Seine – and is less than a mile
from the Saint Antoine district (measured from the Place de
la Bastille as the crow flies). Nevertheless, the “summits
of the two great towers” of Notre Dame are probably more
of a symbolic than a literally visible landmark in A
Tale of Two Cities. At the beginning of the 19th century,
Notre Dame was described as follows:
[It is] so surrounded with houses that there
is no spot from which it may be seen with advantage. It is a
Gothic edifice, built in the form of a cross, and remarkable
for the lightness of its structure. But its two large square
towers, in giving a stateliness, give also a heaviness to the
building. (Tronchet 227)
The two great towers, which were apparently
originally intended to have spires, never received them. One
19th-century guidebook warns English tourists that “Until
our eye has got accustomed to the spireless towers they may
appear stumpy” (Dickens’s Dictionary of Paris
167); and Baedeker’s Paris and Its Environs (1878)
remarks that “The general effect, though not unimposing,
is hardly commensurate with the renown of the edifice. This
is owing partly to structural defects, partly to the lowness
of its situation, and partly to the absence of spires”
(212).
This engraving of Notre Dame, included in
Tronchet’s Picture of Paris (c. 1818), shows the
cathedral with the river in the foreground, from the east. The
perspective from Saint Antoine would be from the northeast –
and probably impeded.
Click
on map for larger view
This portion of the Plan de la Ville de Paris en 1789 shows Notre Dame relative to Saint
Antoine (the Bastille is visible at the far right).
“Why! Because he has lived so long, locked up, that
he would be frightened – rave – tear himself to
pieces – die – come to I know not what harm –
if his door was left open.”
In his account of the liberated behavior of Doctor Manette,
Dickens seems to follow French accounts of the experience of
actual prisoners of the Bastille. One of Dickens’ sources
for many of the Parisian elements of A
Tale of Two Cities was Mercier’s Tableau
de Paris (1781-88); and the character of Doctor Manette
is probably partly based on a figure in an “Anecdote”
in Mercier’s Tableau. In both the “Anecdote”
and A Tale of Two Cities,
the prisoner is released from the Bastille during the reign
of Louis XVI; in both, he finds his release unendurable; and
in both, he goes to live with an old servant. The “Anecdote”
is excerpted below:
When Louis XVI came to the throne, new and
humanitarian ministers performed an act of justice and clemency,
in inspecting the registers of the Bastille and freeing many
prisoners.
Among them was an old man who, for forty-seven years, groaned,
detained between four thick and cold walls…. [Then one
day the] lower door of his tomb turns on its frightening hinges,
opens, not just halfway, as is its custom, and an unknown voice
says to him that he can come out.
He thinks he is dreaming. He hesitates, he rises, he makes his
way with a trembling step, frightened of the huge space through
which he moves. The stairs of the prison, the hall, the court,
all appear enormous to him, almost without end. He stops as
though confused and lost; his eyes have difficulty tolerating
the full light of day; he looks at the sky as at an object utterly
new; he stares, he cannot cry. He is astounded by his freedom
to move from place to place; his legs, despite his efforts,
remain frozen as his tongue. He finally passes through the formidable
gate.
When he feels himself carried away in the vehicle which will
return him to his ancient habitation, he gives articulate cries;
he cannot tolerate the extraordinary movement; he must get out.
Conducted by a charitable arm, he asks for the street where
he once lodged. He arrives; his house is no longer there; a
public building has replaced it. He recognizes neither the quarter
nor the city nor the objects which he once knew. The dwellings
of his neighbors, imprinted on his memory, have taken new forms.
In vain his looks interrogate those around him; he does not
see a single face of which he has the faintest memory.
Terrified, he stops and gives a deep sigh. This city, so beautifully
peopled with living beings, it is for him a necropolis; no one
knows him; he knows no one; he weeps and longs for his cachot [dungeon cell].
At the name of the Bastille, which he invokes and claims for
himself as an asylum, at the view of his clothing, which speaks
of another era, a crowd surrounds him. Curiosity and pity press
in upon him; the oldest question him and have no idea of the
deeds which he recalls. By chance they bring him an old servant,
porter for a long time, trembling in the knees, who, confined
in his lodge for fifteen years, has scarcely enough strength
to pull the rope for the door.
He does not recognize the master he once served; but informs
him that his wife died thirty years ago, of sorrow and misery;
that his children have departed for unknown lands; that all
his friends are no more. The indifference with which this tale
is told shows that it speaks of events long ago, almost effaced….
Crushed by grief, he [the released prisoner] goes to find the
Minister whose generous compassion has made him a present of
that liberty which so much weighs upon him. He bows and says:
Let me be taken back to the prison from which you have drawn
me…. The minister’s heart grows tender. The unfortunate
one is given as a companion the old porter who can speak to
him still of his wife and children…. (qtd. in and translated
by Maxwell 416-7)
Doctor Manette’s response to liberation
is similar to the old man’s in Mercier’s “Anecdote.”
Though he was (as we find out later) imprisoned in the Bastille
for about 18 years instead of 47, and though his servant (Defarge)
is much younger, hailer and heartier than the old man’s,
the stories are obviously similar.
…unglazed, and closing up the middle in two pieces,
like any other door of French construction.
An “unglazed” window is simply one without glass
(OED); doors of “French construction”
are even now called “French doors” or “French
windows” (OED) and are readily recognizable –
instead of sliding up and down within a frame, or opening from
one side, a French window is “a long window opening like
a folding-door, and serving for exit and entrance” (OED).
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