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NOTES ON ISSUE 14: GLOSSARY
PART 1 OF 2
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…I was walking on a retired
part of the quay by the Seine for the refreshment of the frosty air, at
an hour’s distance from my place of residence in the Street of the
School of Medicine…
Doctor Manette’s lodgings were in the Rue de l’Ecole
de Médecine (in English, the “Street of the School
of Medicine”), which, located in the southern part of
Paris (south of the Seine), ran west from the Rue de la Harpe.
In his Companion to A Tale of Two Cities, Sanders suggests
that Dickens places Manette’s lodgings in this street
partly for its medical associations, and partly because Jean-Paul
Marat, of the Jacobin party, was murdered in his bath at Number
44 Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine by Charlotte Corday
– an event which figures prominently in Carlyle’s
French Revolution.
The death of Marat, who was among the most prominent
of the Jacobin revolutionaries, would have been familiar to
the Jacobin Tribunal before whom Doctor Manette’s letter
is read. (Marat was killed on July 13, 1793, and this part of
A Tale of Two Cities takes place very late
in 1793 or very early in 1794.) The Rue de l’Ecole
would also have been familiar to a revolutionary audience as
the site of the Jacobin “Club of the Cordeliers,”
which originally met at the Convent of the Cordeliers, next
to the Ecole de Médecine itself (Maxwell 477). Altogether,
the proximity of the Doctor’s residence to Marat’s,
and to the meeting-place of a prominent revolutionary club (which
included some of the most famous Jacobins – Marat, Desmoulins,
and Danton), may strengthen the impression that Doctor Manette
is, like Marat, an injured patriot and “friend of the
people.” Though the Rue de l’Ecole itself is not
legible on the Plan de la Ville de Paris en 1789, the
Rue de la Harpe is visible (in about the middle of the map,
running south to north along the left side of the orangish section),
as is the Convent of Cordeliers (at the lower left, “les
Cordeliers”).
Click on
map for larger view
The crisis of the episode between Marat and Charlotte Corday is
narrated by Carlyle as follows:
About eight on the Saturday
morning, she purchases a large sheath-knife in the Palais Royal; then
straightway, in the Place des Victoires, takes a hackney-coach: “To the
Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, No. 44.” It is the residence of the
Citoyen Marat! – The Citoyen Marat is ill, and cannot be seen…; sore
afflicted; ill of Revolution Fever, – of what other malady this History
had rather not name. Excessively sick and worn, poor man: with
precisely eleven-pence-halfpenny of ready money, in paper; with
slipper-bath; strong three-footed stool for writing on, the while; and
a squalid – Washerwoman, one may call her: that is his civic
establishment in Medical-School Street; thither and not elsewhither has
his road led him…. Hark, a rap again! A musical woman’s voice, refusing
to be rejected: it is the Citoyenne who would do France a service.
Marat, recognizing from within, cries, Admit her. Charlotte Corday is
admitted.
Citoyen Marat, I am from Caen the seat of rebellion, and wished to
speak with you. – Be seated, mon enfant. Now what are the
Traitors doing at Caen? What Deputies are at Caen? – Charlotte names
some Deputies. “Their heads shall fall within a fortnight,” croaks the
eager People’s-friend, clutching his tablets to write. Barbaroux, Pétion, writes he with bare
shrunk arm, turning aside in the bath: Pétion, and Louvet, and – Charlotte has drawn
her knife from the sheath; plunges it, with one sure stroke, into the
writer’s heart…. And so Marat People’s-friend is ended.... (646-7)
Charlotte Corday was guillotined for
assassinating Marat.
The carriage left the streets behind, passed the
North Barrier, and emerged upon the country road. At two-thirds of a
league from the Barrier – I did not estimate the distance at that time,
but afterwards when I traversed it – it struck out of the main avenue,
and presently stopped at a solitary house.
There was apparently no Barrier properly called the “North Barrier” in
1757, when Doctor Manette was summoned to the house outside Paris,
though the
northern tax-wall Barrière St. Martin (which, however, was not
built
until the 1780s) was renamed the Barrière Nord (“North Barrier”)
during the
Revolution (Plan de la Ville de Paris en 1789; Plan de la Ville de
Paris, Période
Révolutionnaire). Ultimately, the northern gate to which
Doctor Manette refers cannot be identified precisely, and the exact
location
of the “solitary house” above the city is thus hidden from the reader
as it is from
Manette. Two-thirds of a French league (a French league being
about four kilometers) would be a little more than two and a half
kilometers, or a little over a mile and a half.
…and I found a patient in a high fever of the
brain, lying on a bed.
A brain fever is an inflammation of the brain, or a fever (like typhus)
attended by brain complications (Oxford English Dictionary).
The Dictionary of Daily Wants (1859) gives the following
description and illustration of the brain, together with an account of
the symptoms and treatment of brain fever:
BRAIN.
– The brain is a large flat sheet of considerable dimensions, expanding
from the spinal marrow like an open umbrella from the stem that
supports it; and consists of two distinct substances; the under surface
soft, white, and tenacious, like a cake of marrow, and the upper
surface more firm than the other, and of an ashy grey colour. This
sheet of brain is rolled up so as to confine it in the smallest
compatible space, having at the same time regard to the rise and fall
of its substance, in time with the swell and exhaustion of the lungs,
and when so confined to protect it as far as possible against ordinary
dangers.
The brain is divided into two perfect halves, called hemispheres, right
and left; while each hemisphere, in turn, is further divided into three
distinct parts or lobes. There are also five small cavities made
between the convolutions, called ventricles. Besides the division into
hemispheres and lobes, the brain is further subdivided into the brain
proper – the cerebrum, and the little brain – the cerebellum, which is
situated at the back of the head. The first is the seat of the
imagination, judgment, and thought, and the source of those actions
which are the result of volition, or dependence on the will; from the
latter proceed those animal propensities and appetites that are, in the
natural state of man, irrespective of the judgment or will; and are,
therefore, called involuntary…. The brain is subject to many and
various diseases, both the result of accident and such as are ordinary
to the organ itself.
BRAIN FEVER is characterized by two distinct epochs or stages –
excitement and collapse; and though often distinct and well defined, it
occasionally happens that the one stage is so blended with the other as
not to be appreciable, till the graver consequences of the second
period evince themselves. The symptoms of the first stage are deep and
intense pain in the head, tightness across the forehead, throbbing of
the temporal arteries, ringing in the ears, flushed face, bloodshot
eyes, and a wild and glistening stare; the pupils are contracted, and
particularly sensible of light, while the ears are impatient and
irritable to the sense of noise: violent delirium, want of sleep,
convulsive paroxysms, attended with a hot dry skin, hard quick pulse, a
white coated tongue, great thirst, nausea and vomiting, and a confined
state of the bowels. Sometimes the delirium is the first symptom shown,
or the disease may progress to a culminating point in a more insidious
manner, often commencing with an apparent attack of biliary vomiting.
This formidable disease usually proves fatal in a few days, sometimes
in twelve hours.
The mode of treatment [for delirium] resolves
itself into blood-letting, purgatives, and cold applications to the
head…. After twelve hours, and between that and two days, the second
stage, or series of symptoms sets in, the headache and wild
delirium cease, and is succeeded by a low indistinct muttering and a
state of stupor, from which it is finally impossible to rouse the
patient…. The treatment in this second and fatal stage, is
necessarily one more of regimen than medicine. If the pulse is hard, a
blister may be put on the head; but the great art lies in the judicious
application of stimulants, such as ether, ammonia, valerian, beef-tea,
wine, and opiates. The following mixture combines most of these agents,
and may be employed to promote reaction, accompanied with thickened
beef-tea, and bottles of hot water to the feet.
Carbonate
of ammonia ½ drachm
Pow[d?]ered opium 3 grains
Ipecacuanha 3 grains
Mix in a mortar, and add
Camphor water 5 ½ ounces
Compound tincture of cinnamon ½ ounce
Sulphuric ether 1 drachm
Mix. [Administer a] tablespoonful every two hours. (180-1)
In A Tale of Two Cities, the
woman’s condition agrees with this 19th-century account of
brain fever (delirium followed by collapse), as does the duration of
her illness (which lasts for about two days – she has been ill,
according to the man
who summoned the Doctor, “Since about this hour last night,” and she
dies, according to Doctor Manette, 26 hours after his first arrival).
Doctor
Manette’s treatment seems, from the first, to indicate despair. It is,
as the Dictionary of Daily Wants
puts it, “necessarily one more of regimen than medicine,” and he can do
little more than give the woman doses of the “narcotic medicines”
furnished to him. He tries to soothe the patient, and little else, for
“I knew that [her raving] might last for many hours, and that it would
probably end in the silence of the grave.”
I noted that these bonds were all portions of a
gentleman’s dress. On one of them, which was a fringed scarf for a
dress of ceremony, I saw the armorial bearing of a Noble, and the
letter E.
This aristocratic “dress of ceremony” may be the sash of one of the
French chivalric orders, which would have been worn at Court occasions
(Sanders 156). An “armorial bearing” is a heraldic symbol, such
as a coat of arms (OED). “E” gives, presumably, the first
letter of a name.
I opened some of the bottles, smelt them, and put
the stoppers to my lips. If I had wanted to use anything save narcotic
medicines that were poisons in themselves, I would not have
administered any of those.
A narcotic is a drug that tends to induce “sleep or stupefaction” (OED);
the “narcotic medicines” are in this case probably opiates.
…taxed by him without mercy, obliged to work for
him without pay, obliged to grind our corn at his mill, obliged to feed
scores of his tame birds on our wretched crops, and forbidden for our
lives to keep a single tame bird of our own, pillaged and plundered to
that degree that when we chanced to have a bit of meat, we ate it in
fear…
Dickens, according to a letter he wrote to the novelist Bulwer-Lytton,
based part of this representation upon an anecdote in Rousseau’s
Confessions. Rousseau, whose Contrat Social
(“Social Contract”) became, according to Carlyle,
the gospel of the French Revolution – “has not Jean
Jacques promulgated his new Evangel of a Contrat Social?” (46) – was an
18th-century philosopher. The Contrat Social, now Rousseau’s
most famous work, is concerned with the conflict between the
rights of the individual and the rights of the community; it
attempts to resolve the conflict by dissolving the binary characterization,
demonstrating the extent to which the individual is both governed
and governing. In its denunciation of slavery and insistence
upon the right of every member of a community to participate
in making the laws that govern that community, the Contrat
Social is a democratic document, and one which –
though modern historians suggest that its influence has been
overstated – contributed to the Republican thinking of
the French Revolution (Gay 321-2). The portion of the Confessions
upon which Dickens drew for his picture of the feudal abuse
of the poor runs as follows:
I
begged this man to give me some dinner, for which I would pay. He
offered me some skimmed milk and coarse barley bread, and said he had
nothing else. I drank that milk with delight and ate that bread, husks
and all. But they were not very invigorating fare for a man dropping
with fatigue. The peasant watched me so closely and judged the truth of
my story by my appetite. Suddenly he said that he could see I was an
honest young man who had not come there as a paid spy. Then he opened a
trap-door beside his kitchen, went down some stairs and returned after
a minute with a nice brown wheaten loaf, a ham which was most tempting
although considerably cut into, and a bottle of wine, the sight of
which rejoiced my heart more than all the rest. To this was added a
fairly substantial omelet, and I made a dinner such as no one but a
walker ever enjoyed. When it came to paying, his alarm and uneasiness
returned. He would not take my money, and refused it in a strangely
perturbed way. And the funny thing was that I could not imagine what he
was frightened of. At last he tremblingly pronounced the terrible words
“excisemen” and “cellar rats.” He gave me to understand he hid his wine
on account of the excise and his bread on account of the duty, and that
he would be a lost man if they suspected for a moment that he was not
dying of hunger. All that he said to me on this subject, which was
entirely strange to me, made an impression on me which will never grow
dim. It was the germ of that inextinguishable hatred which afterwards
grew in my heart against the oppression to which the unhappy people are
subject, and against their oppressors. (qtd. in Sanders 157-8)
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