Every day, five judges, the lawyer for the government, and a serious group of countrymen sat in the court to hear the cases for people brought there. Each evening the court would send out a list of prisoners to be brought the next day, and the prison guards would read out the list to all the prisoners inside the prison, joking as they did: "You in there, come out and listen to the evening news!"
"Charles Evremonde, called Darnay!"
At last the evening paper at La Force had his name on it, and it was first on the list.
When a name was called, the owner of the name would step to the side, to a place where all who were on the list must stand. Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, had reason to know the meaning of it. He had seen hundreds leave in that way.
His fat guard, who used reading glasses, looked over the top of them to see that Charles had taken his place. He went on with the rest of the list, stopping after each name to see that the prisoner moved to join the group that was to leave. There were twenty-three names called for, but only twenty who answered to their names. One had died in prison and two had already been killed by the guillotine, but no one in the courts had remembered that. The list was read in the big, low room with a rounded stone roof, where Charles had met other prisoners like himself on the night when he first arrived there. Every one of them had been killed in the four nights of killing after that. Every person he had since come to care for, and been separated from had died by the guillotine.
There were hurried goodbyes and other kind words, but it was soon over. It happened every afternoon, and there were other things that needed doing too. The others in La Force were preparing some games and music for that evening. They crowded around the windows and cried a few tears; but it would not be long before they would be locked up for the night, and there were twenty empty places in their planned entertainment to be filled. It is not that the prisoners had no feeling for those who were taken; the way they acted was just how it was at that time. Another strange way of the times was for some prisoners to become drunk with a sickness of the mind that went with the wild times, to the point where they would join those going to the guillotine even when they did not need to go. They were not trying to show off; it is just how some people feel when there is a great sickness killing many others, that they too would like to die with it. We all have secret feelings like that in ourselves that only need the right happenings to bring them out.
The ride to the little prison beside the court was short and dark, and the night in its dirty rooms was long and cold. The next day, fifteen prisoners were brought to the court before Charles Darnay's name was called. It took only an hour and a half to find all of them guilty, and to send them to be killed.
"Charles Evremonde, called Darnay," was at last called out.
The judges had hats with feathers in them, but others were wearing the rough red hats with three-coloured cloths on them. Looking at the people who were to judge him, and at the crowd in the court room, it would be easy to think that it was the law-breakers in the crowd and the honest people who were being brought before the court. The lowest, cruelest, and worst people in a city which was never without some low, cruel, and bad people, were the ones leading the whole show, talking loudly, agreeing, disagreeing, looking forward to what would happen, then being the ones who made things happen, all without anyone trying to stop them. Most of the men had weapons. Some of the women carried knives; some ate as they looked on; and many knitted. In this last group was one with a special piece of knitting under her arm as she worked. She was in the front, by the side of a man who Charles Darnay had not seen since he had come into the city, but whom he remembered as being Defarge. He saw her whisper in his ear one or two times, and she seemed to be his wife; but, what was strange in the two of them was that even with them sitting as close to him as could be, they never looked toward him. They seemed to be waiting for something, and they looked at the countrymen who would be judging him, but at nothing else. Under the President sat Doctor Manette, dressed quietly as always. As well as the prisoner could see, he and Mr. Lorry were the only men there, apart from judges, who did not wear the rough clothes of the freedom fighters.
Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, was said by the government lawyer to be a runaway, whose life was now owned by the new government under the law that said all runaways would be killed if they returned. It was nothing to them that the law was made after he returned to France. There he was, and there was the law. He had returned to France, and they wanted his head.
"Cut off his head!" cried the crowd. "He's an enemy of France!"
The President shook his bell to stop the cries, and he asked the prisoner if it was true that he had lived in England for many years.
Clearly it was.
Was he not a runaway then? What did he call himself? Not a runaway, he hoped, in the spirit of the law.
Why not? the President wanted to know.
Because he had freely chosen to give away a name and a class that he hated, by leaving the country. He said that at that time it would not have been seen as running away as it was now, for he only went to live through his own work in England and not by the hard work of the people of France, as his family had.
What proof did he have of this?
He had two witnesses: Gabelle, and Alexander Manette. But he had married in England, the President pointed out. True, but not to an English woman.
Was she a countrywoman of France?
Yes, she had been born there.
Her name and family?
"Lucie Manette, the only daughter of Doctor Manette, the good doctor who sits there."
This answer had a happy effect on the crowd. Enthusiastic cries for the good Doctor filled the room. So easily changed were the people that tears quickly rolled down some of the wild faces that had been looking angrily at the prisoner a few seconds before, as if they wanted to pull him out into the streets and kill him.
On these first few steps of his dangerous way, Charles Darnay had been acting on what Doctor Manette had told him to say. The same careful wisdom led every step of the way, and had prepared every inch of the road.
The President asked why he had returned to France when he did, and why he had not returned sooner.
He had not returned sooner, he answered, because he had no way to live in France apart from the way his family had lived. In England he had lived by teaching French. He had returned after being begged by letter from a French countryman who said his life was in danger by him not being there. He had come back to save a countryman's life, and to speak up for the truth, at any danger to himself. Was that wrong in the eyes of the new government?
The crowd cried with enthusiasm, "No!" and the President shook his bell to quiet them. Which it did not do, for they still cried "No!" until they were happy to stop of their own will.
The President asked for the name of that countryman. The prisoner said that the countryman was his first witness. He also talked with confidence about the countryman's letter, which had been taken from him at the border of the city, but which he was confident would be in with the other papers that were in front of the President.
The Doctor had made sure that it would be there -- had promised that it would be there -- and at this time it was taken up and read. Countryman Gabelle was called to speak for it and he did. Countryman Gabelle said, being very careful not to say anything that would make them angry, that with all of the work that the court had to do to stop the many enemies of the government, he had been forgotten in the Abbey Prison until three days ago, when he had been called before the court and had been given freedom after the jury agreed that he had good answers for the things said against him. He had been able to do this because he had been able to call back countryman Evremonde, called Darnay.
Next Doctor Manette was questioned. Because he was such a well-liked celebrity, and because his answers were so clear, his words had a good effect on the court. The jury and the crowd became as one, as the Doctor showed that the prisoner had been his first friend after being freed from so many years in prison himself, that the prisoner had stayed in England, always faithful and loving to his daughter and himself as they were in hiding, that, far from being a friend of the rich class there, he had almost lost his life as an enemy of England and a friend of the United States. When he asked for Mr. Lorry, an Englishman who was there in the court, who had also been a witness in the court case in London, and could back up the truth in the Doctor's account of what happened, the jury said they had heard enough, and they were ready with their votes if the President was happy to receive them.
The jury voted out loud, one by one, and at each vote, the crowd clapped, and shouted happily. All of the voices were for the prisoner, and the President said that he was free.
That started one of those strange ways that a crowd could give in to their easily changing emotions, or maybe just showed how generous and loving they could be, or maybe just made themselves feel better about being so cruel at other times. No one could say now which of these reasons was behind what happened next, but it may be that all three were there, with the middle one (their better feelings of love) most moving them at that time. As soon as the President said he was free to go, tears ran the way blood ran after so many other cases. So many people in the crowd, of both sexes, tried to hug him after his long and difficult time in prison, that he was in danger of collapsing. It was not made easier knowing that the same people, carried by another emotion, would have run at him with the same enthusiasm for tearing him to pieces and throwing the pieces in the street.
When the guards took him outside to make way for others, that gave him some rest from the crowd. Five people were to be questioned together next, as enemies of the government because of something they did not do or say to help the government. So enthusiastic was the court to make up for not having killed him, that these five people were judged and brought to where he was before he had left, marked for death before that time the next day.
One reason the case was finished so quickly for the five was that there had been no crowd to watch them. When Charles Darnay and Doctor Manette walked out through the gate, there was a great crowd on the street, in which there seemed to be every face that he had seen in the court... apart from two, for which Charles Darnay looked without finding them. As he came out, the people pushed toward him again, crying, hugging, and shouting, first in three separate steps, and then doing all three at the same time, until it seemed like even the river beside them was going crazy like the people on the side of it.
They put him in a big chair that they had taken from the court or from one of the rooms beside it. Over the chair they threw a red flag, and they put a spear with a red hat on top of it on the back of the chair. In this vehicle for the winner, not even the Doctor could stop the people from carrying Charles Darnay home on their shoulders, with a confused ocean of red hats moving around him, and such wild faces looking up at him from that ocean at times that more than once his confused mind thought he was in a cart on his way to the guillotine.
The trip was like a wild dream, with people hugging anyone they met on the way, and pointing him out. The new colour worn by the people made the snowy streets red as they moved through them, just as they had once coloured the ground under the snow with a deeper red. They carried him all the way to the yard of the house where he lived. Lucie's father had gone on before them to prepare her, and when her husband was standing back on the ground, she fainted into his arms.
As he held her to his heart and turned her beautiful head so it was between his face and the noisy crowd, and so his tears and her lips could come together without them seeing, a few of the people started dancing. Then all the others joined in, and the yard became too crowded for the dance of the freedom fighters. They took a young woman from the crowd and put her on the empty chair as their female god of freedom, and then, pouring out of the yard and into the streets and along the side of the river, and over the bridge, the dance itself was all they could think about as they left.
After shaking the Doctor's hand as he stood proud and happy before him; after shaking Mr. Lorry's hand, who came in breathing heavily after fighting through the dancers as they left the yard; after kissing little Lucie, who was lifted up to put her arms around his neck; and after hugging the ever faithful Miss Pross who lifted Lucie; he took his wife in his arms and carried her into the house.
"Lucie! My wife! I'm safe!"
"Oh Charles, my love, let me thank God for this on my knees as I have prayed to him."
They all humbly bowed their heads and hearts. When she was again in his arms, he said to her:
"And now speak to your father, my love. No other man in all of France could have done for me what he has done."
She put her head on her father's chest as she had put his poor head on her own breast long long ago. He was happy in the return he had made to her. He had been paid for what he went through in prison; he was proud of his strength. "You must not be weak, my love," he said to her. "Don't shake so. I have saved him."