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NOTES ON ISSUE 10: GLOSSARY
PART 3 OF 4
…among the lean kine…
Kine is an archaic word for “cows” – the “lean kine” are thus a starved
herd of cattle.
…sent word to the sacristan who kept the keys of
the church, that there might be need to ring the tocsin by-and-by.
A sacristan is a sexton – a “church officer having the care of the
fabric of a church and its contents, and the duties of ringing the
bells and digging graves” (OED). A “tocsin” is a signal,
especially an alarm, rung on bells. Thus the sacristan, as the village
bell-ringer, would be in charge of ringing the tocsin in the event of
an emergency.
The illuminated village had seized hold of the
tocsin, and, abolishing the lawful ringer, rang for joy.
The lawful ringer of the bells being the local sacristan, this seizure
of the bells by the village represents the “abolition” of both a social
and a religious right. Carlyle also, in The French Revolution,
remarks on this appropriation of church-bells to revolutionary action
during the Fear:
They [townspeople] ring the
Church-bell by way of tocsin: and the Parish turns out to the work….
Churches also, and Canonries, are sacked, without mercy; which have
shorn the flock too close, forgetting to feed it. (192)
Both Dickens and Carlyle calumniate
the impiety of the Revolution, which would ultimately convert Notre
Dame from a Catholic cathedral into a “Temple of Reason.” The seizure
of the church bells during the Fear may foreshadow this eventuality.
…bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to do
with the collection of rent and taxes – though it was but a small
installment of taxes, and no rent at all…
Monsieur Gabelle, the local tax-gatherer (named by Dickens after one of
the most oppressive of pre-revolutionary taxes – the gabelle, or
salt-tax) undergoes a fate described in Carlyle: “As for the
Tax-gatherer, he, long hunting as a biped of prey, may now [during the
Fear] find himself hunted as one; his Majesty’s Exchequer will not
‘fill up the Deficit’ this season” (192).
…a small Southern man of retaliative temperament…
People of “Southern” temperament, like Monsieur Gabelle, are
proverbially passionate, apparently in proportion as they near,
geographically, the warmer climates of the Mediterranean. (Southern
France shares latitudes with Italy, whereas Paris, in the north,
approaches the comparatively chilly regions of England and Germany.)
Carlyle also refers to this quality in Southern Frenchmen, describing
the revolutionary tumult in southern France as that of “a passionate
Southern people,” remarking that “[h]ot is that Southern
Provençal blood” (423), and calling a would-be assassin “this
Amiral, of Southern temper and complexion” (727).
…and the rush-candles of the village guttering out…
A rush-candle, or rushlight, is a primitive kind of tallow candle.
Walsh’s Manual of Domestic Economy (1858) gives the following
description:
Tallow
candles are of three kinds – moulds, dips, and rushlights. Moulds and
dips have each a cotton wick, while the rushlight has one of rush....
Rushlights are made in the same way as dips [which are] made by dipping
the wicks in ... melted tallow again and again, until they have
acquired sufficient size for the purpose to which they are allotted;
after each dipping, except the last, the candle is drawn through a hole
in a board so as to remove all superfluous lumps, and reduce it to the
intended shape. Tallow for candles should be a mixture of beef and
mutton suet, in the proportion of one-third of the former to two of the
latter, if the kidney-fat or suet only is used, but if any subcutaneous
fat is mixed with it, more than half of mutton fat must not be
employed, or the smell will be exceedingly unpleasant. Tallow candles
always smell more or less disagreeable, and for this reason they are
not used, except from economical considerations; but as they give a
good light when regularly snuffed, they still maintain their hold upon
those who value this quality more than they dislike the unpleasant
smell, which is chiefly given out when actual combustion ceases, and
the fatty matters are passing off into the air without suffering
decomposition. There are, however, two great objections to these
candles, one being, that from the size of the wick it is not all burnt
to ash, and requires constant snuffing; the other, the disagreeable
smell after being put out. (125)
Rush-candles would be used in the
village partly because there would be no municipal lighting (such as
the oil-lanterns of Paris) in such a rural area, and partly because
rushlights were economical and could be made at home. The History
of Everyday Things (1930), quoting a letter of 1775, gives the
following account of preparing the wick of a rushlight:
As
soon as they [the rushes] are cut, they must be flung into water and
kept there, for otherwise they will dry and shrink, and the peel will
not run. At first a person would find it no easy matter to divest a
rush of its peel or rind, so as to leave one regular, narrow, even rib
from top to bottom that may support the pith.… When these junci
are thus prepared they must lie out on the grass to be bleached, and
take the dew for some nights, and afterwards be dried in the sun. Some
address is required in dipping these rushes in scalding fat or grease….
The careful wife of an industrious Hampshire [England] labourer obtains
all her fat for nothing; for she saves the scummings of her bacon-pot
for this use: and, if the grease abounds with salt, she causes the salt
to precipitate to the bottom by setting the scummings in a warm oven.
(210-1)
The History goes on to detail
the longevity of rushlights and the economy of using them, noting that
“a good rush, 2 feet 4½ inches long [would burn] only three
minutes short of an hour, and gave a good clear light”; that 1,600
rushes weighed about a pound; and that a working-class family would use
about a pound and a half of rushes a year, or 2,400 rushlights
(210-11).
For, the footsteps had become to
their minds [in Soho Square] as the footsteps of a people, tumultuous
under a red flag and with their country declared in danger, changed
into wild beasts, by terrible enchantment long persisted in.
The red flag described here is the red flag of martial law, first
introduced during the French Revolution on July 17, 1791, when a crowd
coming to sign a petition to depose King Louis XVI (who had just been
caught fleeing Paris with his family [June 20-25, 1791] and forced to
return) became violent in the Champ de Mars. Carlyle describes the
advent of the red flag as follows:
Enough,
towards half-past seven in the evening, the mere natural eye can behold
this thing: Sieur Motier [Lafayette], with Municipals in scarf, with
blue National Patrollotism, rank after rank, to the clang of drums;
wending resolutely to the Champ-de-Mars; Mayor Bailly, with elongated
visage, bearing, as in sad duty bound, the Drapeau Rouge [Red
Flag]. Howl of angry derision rises in treble and bass from a hundred
thousand throats, at the sight of Martial Law; which nevertheless,
waving its Red sanguinary Flag, advances there, from the
Gros-Caillou Entrance; advances, drumming and waving, towards Altar of
the Fatherland [where the petition had been set up]. (408)
Ultimately, King Louis XVI was deposed,
and put to death by guillotine on January 21, 1793 (this part of A
Tale of Two Cities occurs in 1792, after the King’s attempted
flight, but before his execution).
Dickens’ allusion to the “country
declared in danger” refers to the proclamation, made on July 22,
1792, that France was in danger of invasion by Prussian and
Austrian forces. Carlyle represents this threat as the reaction of
feudal Europe to the abolition of feudalism in France (“Fate and Feudal
Europe, having decided, come girdling in
from without” [475]). The French, despite the political disorder of the
revolutionary period, did manage to repulse foreign invasion; however,
their success meant the salvation of a system which
would ultimately produce the Reign of Terror. Dickens’ reference to the
change of
the French people “into wild beasts, by terrible enchantment long
persisted in” is probably a reference to the Terror; and though this
reference has been glossed as an allusion to the fate of Odysseus’ men
on Circe’s island – where she turned them all into pigs (Sanders 127) –
it may owe more to Carlyle’s assertions concerning the brutality of the
French people during the Revolution: Before the fall of the Bastille,
Carlyle represents the desperate poor as “frightful men, or rather
frightful wild animals” (31) driven into menace and aggression by
physical need. During the Terror, he writes of France as having become
a beast – a tiger:
Republic
One and Indivisible! She is the newest Birth of Nature’s waste
inorganic Deep, which men name Orcus, Chaos, primaeval Night; and knows
one law, that of self-preservation. Tigresse
Nationale: meddle not with a whisker of her! Swift-rending is
her
stroke; look what a paw she spreads; – pity has not entered into her
heart. (692)
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