A Tale of Two Cities-CHAPTER 6 TRIUMPH

TRIUMPH,The dread ¹ Tribunal of five Judges, Public Prosecutor ², and determined ³ Jury, sat every day. Their lists went forth ⁴ every evening, and were read out by the gaolers of the various prisons to their prisoners. The standard gaoler-joke was “Come out and listen to the Evening Paper, you inside there! ” “Charles Evremonde, called Darnay!
”,So at last began the Evening Paper at La Force.,When a name was called, its owner stepped apart into a spot reserved for those who were announced as being thus fatally recorded. Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, had reason to know the usage; he had seen hundreds pass away so.,His bloated gaoler, who wore spectacles to read with, glanced over them to assure himself that he had taken his place, and went through the list, making a similar short pause at each name. There were twenty-three names, but only twenty were responded to; for one of the prisoners so summoned had died in gaol ⁵ and been forgotten, and two had already been guillotined and forgotten. The list was read, in the vaulted ⁶ chamber ⁷ where Darnay had seen the associated prisoners on the night of his arrival. Every one of those had perished in the massacre ⁸; every human creature he had since cared for and parted with, had died on the scaffold.,There were hurried words of farewell and kindness, but the parting was soon over. It was the incident of every day, and the society of La Force were engaged in the preparation of some games of forfeits ⁹ and a little concert, for that evening. They crowded to the grates and shed tears there; but, twenty places in the projected entertainments had to be refilled, and the time was, at best, short to the lockup hour, when the common rooms and corridors would be delivered over to the great dogs who kept watch there through the night. The prisoners were far from insensible or unfeeling; their ways arose out of the condition of the time. Similarly, though with a subtle difference, a species of fervour or intoxication ¹¹, known, without doubt, to have led some persons to brave the guillotine unnecessarily, and to die by it, was not mere ¹² boastfulness, but a wild infection of the wildly shaken public mind. In seasons of pestilence ¹³, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease—a terrible passing inclination ¹⁴ to die of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke ¹⁵ them.,“Charles Evremonde, called Darnay,” was at length arraigned ¹⁷.,His judges sat upon the Bench in feathered hats; but the rough red cap and tricoloured cockade was the head-dress otherwise prevailing ¹⁸. Looking at the Jury and the turbulent audience, he might have thought that the usual order of things was reversed, and that the felons ¹⁹ were trying the honest men. The lowest, cruelest, and worst populace of a city, never without its quantity of low, cruel, and bad, were the directing spirits of the scene: noisily commenting, applauding, disapproving ²⁰, anticipating, and precipitating ²¹ the result, without a check. Of the men, the greater part were armed in various ways; of the women, some wore knives, some daggers ²², some ate and drank as they looked on, many knitted. Among these last, was one, with a spare piece of knitting under her arm as she worked. She was in a front row, by the side of a man whom he had never seen since his arrival at the Barrier, but whom he directly remembered as Defarge. He noticed that she once or twice whispered in his ear, and that she seemed to be his wife; but, what he most noticed in the two figures was, that although they were posted as close to himself as they could be, they never looked towards him. They seemed to be waiting for something with a dogged determination and they looked at the Jury, but at nothing else. Under the President sat Doctor Manette, in his usual quiet dress. As well as the prisoner could see, he and Mr. Lorry were the only two men there, unconnected with the Tribunal, who wore their usual clothes, and had not assumed the coarse garb ²³ of the Carmagnole.,Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, was accused by the public prosecutor as an emigrant ²⁴, whose life was forfeit ¹⁰ to the Republic, under the decree which banished ²⁵ all emigrants ²⁶ on pain of Death. It was nothing that the decree bore date since his return to France. There he was, and there was the decree; he had been taken in France, and his head was demanded.,“Take off his head! ” cried the audience. “An enemy to the Republic!”,The President rang his bell to silence those cries, and asked the prisoner whether it was not true that he had lived many years in England?,Her heart was relieved of its blankest dread.她极度恐惧的心理消除了 。,The defender argued down the prosecutor at the court.辩护人在法庭上驳倒了起诉人
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