Vessey’s Reviews > A Tale of Two Cities > Status Update

‘There is prodigious strength in sorrow and despair.’

This is a desperate time, when desperate games are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I will play the losing one. No man’s life here is worth purchase. Any one carried home by the people today, may be condemned tomorrow.

I would ask you to believe that he has a heart he very, very, seldom reveals, and that there are deep wounds in it. I have seen it bleeding. Remember how strong we are in our happiness, and how weak he is in his misery!

I have looked at her when I could not bear her light. I have looked at her, when it has been such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost…I have looked at her, in a state so dulled and lethargic, that I have thought of nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across her at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I could intersect them.

All France lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. So does a whole world in all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so sublimer intelligence may read in the feeble shining of this earth, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.

Alll through it, I have known myself to be quite undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire – a fire, however, inseparable in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning away.

Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of beginning anew and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.

All you can ever do for me is done. I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation, I have not been so degraded but that the sight of you with your father, and of this home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of me.

‘If it had been possible that you could have returned the love of the man you see before you, he would have been conscious this day and hour, in spite of his happiness, that he would bring you to misery, bring you to sorrow and repentance, blight you, disgrace you, pull you down with him. I know very well that you can have no tenderness for me; I ask for none; I am even thankful that it cannot be.’

I shall never be better than I am. I shall sink lower, and be worse. I am like one who died young. All my life might have been.