"Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickens Charles)

he can no longer address us from a platform, Dickens still has the
power to move vast audiences.


A TALE OF TWO CITIES: THE PLOT

A Tale of Two Cities opens in the year 1775, with the narrator
comparing conditions in England and France, and foreshadowing the
coming French Revolution. The first action is Jarvis Lorry's night
journey from London, where he serves as an agent for Tellson's Bank.
The next afternoon, in a Dover inn, Lorry meets with Lucie Manette, a
seventeen-year-old French orphan raised in England. Lorry tells
Lucie that her father, the physician Alexandre Manette, is not dead
as she's always believed. Dr. Manette has just been released from
years of secret imprisonment in the Paris prison, the Bastille.

Lorry escorts Lucie across the English Channel to a house in a poor
Paris suburb where her father, in a dazed state from long solitary
confinement, confusedly works at the shoemaker's trade he learned in
prison. Dr. Manette has been taken care of by Ernest Defarge, a
former servant of the Manette family, now the keeper of a wine shop.
Defarge and his wife--a strong-looking, confident woman--appear to be
engaged in antigovernment activity. Lucie is saddened by her
father's state and, resolving to restore him to himself, she and
Lorry carry the doctor back to England.

Five years pass. In London, at Old Bailey (the courthouse) we meet
Charles Darnay, a French expatriate who is on trial for treason.
Lucie Manette and Jarvis Lorry both testify that they met Darnay on
their return trip across the Channel five years earlier. John
Barsad, an English spy, swears that Darnay's purpose in traveling was
to plot treason against England. Darnay is acquitted when his
lawyer, Stryver, shatters a witness' identification by pointing at
Darnay's uncanny resemblance to Sydney Carton--a brilliant but
dissolute lawyer who is wasting his talents in poorly paid servitude
to Stryver.

Lucie and her father--who has regained his faculties and returned to
medical practice--now live happily in a quiet corner of Soho with
Lucie's fiercely loyal companion, Miss Pross. They are frequently
visited by Lorry (now a close family friend), Darnay, and Carton.
Lucie imagines hearing "hundreds of footsteps" thundering into her
life--a fantasy that in fact foreshadows the revolutionary strife in
France.

The scene shifts to France. Driving in his carriage through the
streets of Paris, the cruel Marquis St. Evremonde runs over and
kills a poor man's child. We learn that the Marquis is Charles
Darnay's uncle (out of shame for his wicked male forebears, Darnay
had changed his name from St. Evremonde to the English-sounding