A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [205]
5 (p. 107) Unbelieving Philosophers: Dickens is referring to Skepticism, the school of eighteenth-century French Enlightenment thought most famously represented by Voltaire (1694-1778). Thomas Carlyle detested the atheism of the movement, but Dickens more distrusts the influence of its empirical, scientific thinking on the culture at large, from the abstract idealism of the French revolutionaries that is the subject of A Tale of Two Cities, to the heartless statistical fetishism exemplified in Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens’s novel Hard Times (1854).
6 (p. 107) Unbelieving Chemists: The reference is to the eighteenth-century fascination with alchemy and the perennial search for the “philosopher’s stone,” which would transform base metals into gold.
7 (p. 108) would have found it hard to discover . . . one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance, owned to being a Mother. . . . Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close: Once again, Dickens is probably drawing on Mercier (see note 1, above), this time from his post-revolutionary volume Le Nouveau Paris (1799), in which Mercier discusses how a positive attitude toward motherhood and breast-feeding developed only after the Revolution.
8 (p. 108) a fantastic sect of Convulsionists: The French equivalent to various forms of dissenting religious enthusiasts in eighteenth-century Britain and America, the Convulsionists spoke in tongues, flagellated themselves and each other, and “convulsed” in a manner that attracted the attention of some members of the French social elite, who adopted its most eye-catching exponents into their circle. Marie-Antoinette was particularly susceptible to such fads, a fact that contributed to the public’s resentment toward her.
9 (p. 108) another sect, which mended matters with a jargon about “the Centre of Truth”: The reference is to another popular mystical sect whose followers believed that despite man’s natural sinfulness, God retained him at the circumferential rim of Being. From there it was his duty to progress, through reflection and “vaporous feelings,” toward the “Centre of Truth.”
10 (p. 109) Palace of the Tuileries: The Tuileries Palace was begun in 1564 by Queen Catherine de Médicis (1519-1589) as a reminder of the Flor ence she had left behind; it was expanded by Henri IV (1553-1610), who joined it to the Louvre Palace by means of a long gallery.The palace lost its monarchical associations when Louis XIV removed his court to Versailles, but Louis XVI was forced by the French revolutionists to return in October 1789. Thereafter, the palace became a focus for revolutionary violence, not only in 1792 when the Swiss guards were slaughtered there en masse, but again in the July Revolution of 1830, and finally in 1871 when it was destroyed by the communards (supporters of the insurrectionary government known as the commune of Paris).
11 (p. 110) he shook the snuff from his fingers as if he had shaken the dust from his feet: In the Bible, Matthew 10:14, Jesus sent forth his twelve disciples, saying, “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet” (KJV).
Chapter 8: Monseigneur in the Country
1 (p. 113) A beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it, but not abundant . . . a dejected disposition to give up, and wither away: Another contemporaneous source becomes important for these observations on the parlous state of French agriculture in the 1780s; in his well-known Travels in France during the years 1787, 1788, 1789 (1792), English agriculturist Arthur Young gave frequent descriptions of rural poverty, as well as informed indictments of agricultural techniques and policy.
2 (p. 114) whips, which twined snake-like about their heads in the evening air,