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NOTES ON ISSUE 7: GLOSSARY
PART 3 OF 3
No vivacious Bacchanalian flame leaped out
of the pressed grape of Monsieur Defarge…
Bacchus is the god of wine, and a “Bacchanalian flame”
would be one of raucous or festive intoxication. It is interesting
to note that Carlyle, in The French Revolution, refers
to the early activity of patriotic French women – the
“Insurrection of Women” – as a “Maenadic”
frenzy. (The Maenads were the Bacchantes, female followers of
Bacchus; they were typically frenzied, orgiastic, and violent.)
Thus, although Monsieur Defarge’s wine lacks the Bacchanalian
flame, the reference to Bacchus may foreshadow Madame Defarge’s
patriotic fervor.
They had the air of a rough tribunal; Jacques One and
Two sitting on the old pallet-bed…
A tribunal is a judicial body, named for the original meaning
of the word “tribunal” – a “raised semicircular
or square platform in a Roman basilica, on which the seats of
the magistrates were placed” (OED). The present
tribunal, seated on a pallet-bed (which would be a bed of a
poor and probably incommodious sort, perhaps a straw bed or
a thin mattress [OED]), is indeed of a “rough”
kind; yet the allusion to antiquity contained in the word is
appropriate, and probably intentional: French patriots, during
and after the French Revolution, adopted what they considered
to be the political forms of classical antiquity, as well as
some of the styles of dress associated with it. Dickens’
vocabulary here and elsewhere seems to foreshadow this development.
“the guard, horse and foot, surrounded the petitioner,
and struck him blows. You hear?”
Both the cavalry (“horse”) and infantry (“foot”)
are included in the military presence described here. Given
that the phrase “horse and foot” is sometimes used
figuratively, because it includes both divisions of an army,
to mean “with all one’s might” (OED),
the expression, as it is used here, may stress the excessiveness
of the brutality directed against the petitioner.
“Monseigneur was the father of his tenants –
serfs – what you will – he will be executed as a
parricide. One old man says at the fountain, that his right
hand, armed with a knife, will be burnt off before his face;
that, into wounds which will be made in his arms, his breast,
and his legs, there will be poured boiling oil, melted lead,
hot resin, wax, and sulphur; finally, that he will be torn limb
from limb by four strong horses. That old man says, all this
was actually done to a prisoner who made an attempt on the life
of the last King, Louis Fifteen. But how do I know if he lies?
I am not a scholar.”
This punishment was in fact levied against a man who attempted
to assassinate Louis XV in 1757 – Robert François
Damiens. Damiens was apparently motivated by a conviction that
killing the King would help stabilize the Catholic church, as
Louis XV was then involved in a dispute with the Paris Parliament
concerning church doctrine (the Catholic church was experiencing
some upheaval at this time, partly as a result of the excommunication
of groups like the Convulsionists, to whom Dickens alludes in
a previous chapter). Only managing to wound Louis XV as he climbed
into his carriage, Damiens made no attempt to escape or resist
arrest, and was sentenced to quartering (quartering entails
being cut into pieces or being torn apart by horses) in the
Place de Grève (the traditional place of executions outside
the Hôtel de Ville in Paris). He underwent the tortures
described – the burning of his hand, the boiling oil,
melted lead, hot resin, wax, and sulphur in his wounds –
before being killed (Sanders 107).
Though Dickens seems to give this mode of execution
a kind of representative status, it was in fact a rare punishment
revived for Damiens. In 1610, Henri IV’s assassin had
undergone the same set of penalties, and since this previous
assassin had also been motivated by religious controversy, the
revival of his sentence was in a sense symbolic – a way
of suggesting that Damiens, like Ravaillac before him, had been
part of “a Jesuitical and devout conspiracy” bent
on regicide (Maxwell 459). Given the unusual and symbolic nature
of Damiens’ sentence, it is unlikely that Gaspard would
be subject to the same punishment, even though he is tried as
a parricide (a parricide is one who kills a parent or other
sacred or reverenced person [OED]). However, the impact
of this fictional decision is significant, for it emphasizes
the feudal aspect of French government before the Revolution.
Just as Dickens draws, elsewhere, upon somewhat anachronistic
concepts to illustrate the feudal character of the late Marquis
(e.g. the droit de seigneur),
his representation of Damiens’ punishment as a seemingly-standard
one emphasizes a tradition of feudal brutality that the French
Revolution sought to end. Where A Tale of Two Cities
exaggerates, it often does so to place special stress on the
ancien in ancien régime.
Workmen dig, workmen hammer, soldiers laugh and sing; in the morning,
by the fountain, there is raised a gallows forty feet high, poisoning
the water.
The “gallows forty feet high” – an innovation on the existing gallows
introduced in about 1775 – is, for Dickens, a symbol of aristocratic
and monarchical brutality. In this, he follows Carlyle: After
introducing the 40-foot gallows early in The French Revolution,
Carlyle makes continual allusions it, and it becomes an evocative motif
for the work as a whole.
The forty-foot gallows is illustrated (above) in the Artist’s Edition
(1893) of Carlyle’s French Revolution, in connection with its
first appearance (when the hungry people of Paris present a “Petition
of Grievances” to the King):
And so, on the 2nd day of May,
1775, these waste multitudes do here, at Versailles Château, in
wide-spread wretchedness, in sallow faces, squalor, winged raggedness,
present, as in legible hieroglyphic writing, their Petition of
Grievances. The Château-gates must be shut; but the King will
appear on the balcony, and speak to them. They have seen the King’s
face; their Petition of Grievances has been, if not read, looked at.
For answer, two of them are hanged, on a “new gallows forty feet high”;
and the rest driven back to their dens – for a time. (30)
Therefore, when Sunday came,
the mender of roads was not enchanted (though he said he was) to find
that madame was to accompany monsieur and himself to Versailles.
Versailles, located southwest of Paris, is four leagues (or about 20
kilometers/12 miles) from the city (Tronchet 277, Baillie and Salmon
399). Louis XIII purchased the land and built an “uncouth hunting seat”
there (Tronchet 277); and Louis XIV converted this rustic resort into
the magnificent château that still stands, begun in 1673 and
completed in 1680 (Tronchet 277). Louis XVI – whose court the mender of
roads and the Defarges go to see – was the last to live in it.
At the commencement of the French
Revolution,
a number of significant events took place at Versailles, and Louis and
his family were eventually forced to move out of it and into the Palais
des Tuileries in Paris. Baedeker’s Paris
and Its Environs (1878) gives the following account of some of
the significant revolutionary and post-revolutionary events at
Versailles:
It was at the meeting of the
[three] Estates [the nobility, the clergy, and the commons] held here
in 1789 that the “Tiers Etat” [the Third Estate, or common people] took
the memorable step – the first on the way to the Revolution – of
forming itself into a separate body, the Assemblée Nationale [the
National Assembly]. A few months later the unfortunate Louis XVI saw
the palace of Versailles sacked by a Parisian mob, which included many
thousands of women (“les dames de la
halle”), and since that period it has remained uninhabited….
The building [of the Palace of Versailles] dates from several different
periods, and its style lacks uniformity. The central part is the
original château of Louis XIII, built of brick and stone, and the
wings were added by J.H.Mansart (d.1708) under Louis XIV. On the right
rises the chapel with its pointed roof; adjoining it is a pavilion
erected by Louis XV; and to the left of the court is a corresponding
pavilion added by Louis XVIII. (278-80)
After Louis XVI was forced to decamp,
the Versailles furniture was sold, and the pictures were sent to the
Louvre (Baillie and Salmon 403). According to Baedeker, the
château itself was nearly sold, and Napoleon wouldn’t live in it
because of the restoration costs; but King Louis Phillippe saved
Versailles in 1837, donating funds to convert it into a historical
monument (278-9). The building was much restored in the 20th century
between World War I and World War II, as the park and gardens – 4
square kilometers in extent – were likewise. In 1961, a law was passed
mandating
the return of any extant pieces of the furniture dispersed during the
Revolution, and Versailles is today one of the three most visited
monuments in France (Baillie and Salmon 399-403).
…for, soon the large-faced King and the fair-faced
Queen came in their golden coach, attended by the shining Bull’s Eye of
their Court, a glittering multitude of laughing ladies and fine lords;
and in jewels and silks and powder and splendour…
The “shining Bull’s Eye” of the French Court
refers to the Oeil de Boeuf (literally “bull’s
eye” or “ox’s eye”) – a name used
by Carlyle, in The French Revolution, to designate
the group of courtiers surrounding the King and Queen at Versailles.
The name comes from the “Salle de l’Oeil de Boeuf”
– a small octagonal vestibule just outside the State Apartments
at Versailles, so-called for its small round window (called
an oeil de boeuf) (Sanders 107 and OED). An
early use of the term “Oeil de Boeuf” in
The French Revolution runs as follows: “The prophetic
song of Paris and its Philosophes is audible enough in the Versailles
Oeil-de-Boeuf; and the Oeil-de-Boeuf [meaning those
who occupy the chamber of this name], intent chiefly on nearer
blessedness, can answer, at worst, with a polite, ‘Why
not?’” (27). Dickens’ conversion of the French
phrase (“Oeil de Boeuf”) into its literal
English equivalent (“Bull’s Eye”) not only
adapts the facetiousness of his source text, but is also somewhat
ominous. The English translation – Bull’s Eye –
foreshadows the fate of the nobles constituting the Oeil
de Boeuf: that of becoming a target.
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