As our novel starts, a very businessman-like British
gentleman makes his way into of
a very unsettling mission. In fact, it’s almost enough to make a businessman cry. You
see, eighteen years ago, a French doctor was imprisoned without any warning (or any
trial). He’s been locked up in the worst prison of all prisons,
Bastille. After almost two decades, he was released – again without any
explanation – and he’s currently staying with an old servant of his, Defarge. Today, Mr.
Lorry (that’s our British businessman) is on a mission to the French doctor back to
England, where he can live in peace with his daughter.
Dr. Manette may be
free, but he’s still a broken man. He spends most of his time cobbling together shoes
and pacing up and down in his dark room. Too accustomed to the space of a prison to
understand that he can actually leave his room, Dr. Manette seems doomed to live a
pitiful life.
Fortunately for Dr. Manette, he happens to
have the World’s Perfect Daughter. Lucie, the child he left eighteen years ago, is now a
grown-up, smiling, blond, perfect ray of sunshine. They don’t have much money (Dr.
Manette’s cash was all seized in France), but Lucie manages to shine her rays of
wonderfulness over their lives. In other words, they’re pretty happy. And they’ve
adopted Mr. Lorry as a sort of drop-in uncle.
As we pick up the story in 1780,
Dr. Manette and Lucie have been called as witnesses in a treason case. Apparently, a
young man named Charles Darnay is accused of providing classified information to the
French government. English trials at the time resemble smoke-and-mirror tricks: Dickens
takes great delight in mocking the esteemed members of the court.
Sydney
loves Lucie with all his heart, but he’s convinced that he could never deserve her.
She’d like to help him be a better person, but he would rather wallow in his misery.
After all, wallowing sounds like so much fun, doesn’t it? Wallow, wallow, wallow. That’s
Sydney in a nutshell.
Charles, meanwhile, fares a little bit better. He
marries Lucie. On the day of his wedding, he tells Dr. Manette a secret: he’s actually a
French nobleman in disguise. A very particular French nobleman, as a matter of fact: the
Marquis Evrémonde. Because everything in a Dickens novel has to fit
into a neat pattern, it’s no real surprise that the Evrémondes were the evil brothers
who locked Dr. Manette up in the first place. The good doctor is a bit shocked, of
course, but he eventually realizes that Charles is nothing like his father or his uncle
(the evil Evrémondes brothers). Dr. Manette is willing to love Charles for the man he
is, not the family he left behind.
(See the link for the rest of
it)
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