A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best and the worst ever, the age of madness and the age of wisdom; a time of faith and unbelief; a time of light and darkness, of hope and despair, where one had before one the brightest horizon, the deepest night; where we went straight to heaven and straight to hell. In short, it was a century so different from ours that, according to the opinion of the most prominent authorities, it can only be spoken of superlatively, either for good or for bad. At that time, a king with a strong jawbone, and a queen with an ugly face, reigned in England, while a king with a no less strong jaw, and a queen with a beautiful face, occupied the throne of France. In both countries, it was clearer than crystal, to all the great ones in the state, that the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves was renewed every day, and that the established order of things was never to change. In that heavenly time, revelations from the other world were, as they are now, being granted to Great Britain.A prophet, a simple bodyguard, had announced that on the day that Mrs. Southcott completed her twenty-fifth year, a gulf, ready to open, would engulf London and Westminster; and it was at most twelve years ago that the spirit of c**k-Lane had struck his messages, just as the spirits of last year (entirely unoriginal) struck us on theirs. Simple news, of a much more earthly order, had recently reached England, relating to a congress formed in America by subjects of Great Britain; news which, strangely enough, acquired more importance to humans than any communication transmitted by the race of mediums. France, less favored in matters of spiritualism, rolled quietly down a slope of infinite gentleness. She made paper money which she hastened to spend; and, under the guidance of his Christian pastors, amused himself in acts full of humanity, for example, in burning alive a young man, after having cut off his hands and tearing out his tongue, so as not to have knelt down, under rain, in honor of a procession of filthy monks, which passed fifty yards from where he stood.On the day of this martyrdom, he was growing in the great woods of France and Norway trees that Destiny, a powerful lumberjack, had already marked to be felled, so that from their planks one could build a mobile scaffolding, provided with a knife. and a bag, and whose history was to keep a terrible memory. That day, under the sheds of some of the ploughmen who cultivated the lands around Paris, sheltered rude carts covered with mud, scented by pigs and serving as a perch for poultry, that Death, universal farmer , had already chosen to make them the purveyors of the revolutionary ax. But, although they act incessantly, Fate and Death work only in silence, and no one heard the muffled sound of their footsteps, especially since it was enough to suspect their awakening, to do so. accuse of treachery and atheism. In England, there was hardly enough order, and the lives and property of the inhabitants were sufficiently protected to warrant national boasting. Armed robberies, daring break-ins, took place every night in the very heart of the capital. Families were publicly warned not to leave the city without leaving their furniture with the upholsterer, in order to be more certain of finding it when they returned. The nocturnal brigand was transformed, in the light of the sun, into a merchant of the City; recognized and challenged by his colleague, he stopped him by virtue of his title of captain, gallantly smashed his head, and fled on horseback.On the day of this martyrdom, he was growing in the great woods of France and Norway trees that Destiny, a powerful lumberjack, had already marked to be felled, so that from their planks one could build a mobile scaffolding, provided with a knife. and a bag, and whose history was to keep a terrible memory. That day, under the sheds of some of the ploughmen who cultivated the lands around Paris, sheltered rude carts covered with mud, scented by pigs and serving as a perch for poultry, that Death, universal farmer , had already chosen to make them the purveyors of the revolutionary ax. But, although they act incessantly, Fate and Death work only in silence, and no one heard the muffled sound of their footsteps, especially since it was enough to suspect their awakening, to do so. accuse of treachery and atheism. In England, there was hardly enough order, and the lives and property of the inhabitants were sufficiently protected to warrant national boasting. Armed robberies, daring break-ins, took place every night in the very heart of the capital. Families were publicly warned not to leave the city without leaving their furniture with the upholsterer, in order to be more certain of finding it when they returned. The nocturnal brigand was transformed, in the light of the sun, into a merchant of the City; recognized and challenged by his colleague, he stopped him by virtue of his title of captain, gallantly smashed his head, and fled on horseback.All this was happening in France and England in the year of grace 1775; and in this environment, while Fate and Death labored unnoticed, the two kings with the strong jaws, and the two queens, one beautiful, the other ugly, walked with a crash carrying their divine right with a high hand and firm. So, let's say, that good old year 1775 led their greatness, and myriads of tiny creatures, on the various paths they had to travel.