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By Root 1490 0

for echoes, and a very harbour from the raging streets” (p. 94). The miniature social order they reconstitute for themselves in Soho is a kind of benign matriarchy, presided over by the heroine, Lucie Manette: “Ever busily winding the golden thread which bound her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress and companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house in the tranquilly resounding corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of years” (p. 207). Lucie embodies the miracle of domestic life: that its binding force is greater than the sum power of its individual members. Her love for her family is a self-replenishing energy, satisfying all as it sustains her:

many times her father had told her that he found her more devoted to him married (if that could be) than single, and . . . many times her husband had said to her that no cares and duties seemed to divide her love for him or her help to him, and asked her “What is the magic secret, my darling, of your being everything to all of us, as if there were only one of us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to have too much to do?” (p. 210).

This benevolent example extends to Miss Pross, a servant elevated to “companion” who eats with the family on Sundays and, in her devotion to her employers, reminds Mr. Lorry “that there is nothing in it [the world] better than the faithful service of the heart; so rendered and so free from any mercenary taint” (p. 98). This relationship between the classes in the Soho household is the real English guarantee against revolution. It is a fictional construction of the social goal Dickens once described to the Administrative Reform Association, one of the many liberal bodies he addressed in his career as all-purpose public advocate: “It is stated that this Association sets class against class. Is this so? No, it finds class set against class, and seeks to reconcile them” (Speeches, p. 203).

But the Manettes’ trials have only just begun. While Lucie, surely Dickens’s blandest angel of goodness, directs the process of family healing from her “tranquil” corner of London, in the opposite corner, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris, stands the unforgettable Madame Defarge, English fiction’s matriarch of horror. The single encounter between the two women is one of the most hair-raising episodes in the novel:

“Is that his child?” said Madame Defarge, stopping in her work for the first time, and pointing her knitting-needle at little Lucie as if it were the finger of Fate.

“Yes, madame,” answered Mr. Lorry; “this is our poor prisoner’s darling daughter, and only child.”

The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed to fall so threatening and dark on the child, that her mother instinctively kneeled on the ground beside her, and held her to her breast. The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed then to fall, threatening and dark, on both the mother and the child (p. 266).

Madame Defarge, is a supreme Dickens creation, often likened to Lady Macbeth; but she outdoes even this daunting model with her diabolical mix of patient cunning and shocking malevolence. As with Dickens’s account of the Revolution in general, the Madame is more mythic than strictly historical. She is one of the Furies of Hell:

There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid a dreadfully disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more to be dreaded than this ruthless woman, now taking her way along the streets. . . . imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of her.

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live (pp. 358-359).

Liberty