A Tale of Two Cities (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Dickens [206]
3 (p. 117) Monsieur Gabelle: Gabelle is named after the deeply resented salt tax (the gabelle) imposed by the ancien régime; the government arrogated a monopoly on the entire salt trade, and also set a minimum level of consumption for each individual.
4 (p. 119) The sweet scents of the summer night rose . . . as the rain falls, impartially: Dickens is alluding to the Bible, Matthew 5:45: “He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (KJV).
Chapter 9: The Gorgon’s Head
1 (p. 119) The Gorgon’s Head: The three Gorgons of classical mythology were hideous creatures whose look turned men to stone; the chief Gorgon was Medusa, whose head was topped with hissing snakes. Perseus slew Medusa with the help of two deities, Hermes and Athena, who lent him a sword and a shield, respectively; Perseus then used her petrifying head to slay a sea monster poised to devour the lovely Andromeda. Medusa was a common ornament on Renaissance and Renaissance Revival buildings, and so belongs on the château. The Gorgon’s Head is also the basis for one of the novel’s bravura passages, when the Marquis is murdered.
2 (p. 123) a letter de cachet: It is a measure of the polar difference between the corrupted aristocratic Evrémondes and the loyal and loving Manette family, representatives of the rising professional middle class, that the Marquis would be willing to consign his nephew to prison indefinitely, while Lucie Manette risks her life to retrieve her father from just such an ordeal. (For a discussion of lettres de cachet, see note 3 for chapter 4, the first book).
3 (p. 123) one fellow, to our knowledge, was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter—his daughter?: This is a reference to the notorious and somewhat mythical droit du seigneur, an aristocratic privilege granting the lord sexual rights over a vassal’s bride on her wedding night. The right certainly existed in theory, but to what extent it was ever practiced is a matter of historical dispute. Like courtly love, it may have been largely a literary phenomenon; Dickens would have had in mind the French playwright Pierre-Augustin Carron de Beaumarchais’s reliance on it in his comedy The Marriage of Figaro (1784) as a standing indictment of the old order. Certainly in the eighteenth century, there are precious few references to any episodes even remotely resembling the abuses handed out by the young Marquis to the family of Madame Defarge (revealed as a crucial plot element later in the novel). It is another case of Dickens both exaggerating and simplifying the historical record to achieve his dramatic and political ends.
4 (p. 123) a new philosophy: Charles is a follower of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the other Enlightenment philosophers of the eighteenth century whose political writings laid the ideological groundwork for revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic.
5 (p. 124) the château as it was to be a very few years hence, . . . could have been shown to him that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked ruins: Dickens looks forward to the summer of 1789, when the aristocratic châteaux (country estates) became the principal objects of revolutionary violence outside of Paris. His language here is very close to that of the historian Thomas Carlyle: “How is the fair gold-and-green of the ripe bright Year defaced with horrid blackness: black ashes of chateaus, black bodies of gibbeted men” (from The French Revolution).
6 (p. 124) As for the roof he vaunted, . . . out of the barrels of a hundred