Home › A Tale of Two Cities › A Tale of Two Cities: Manette

A Tale of Two Cities: Manette

About eighteen years before the story opens, Doctor Manette, a prominent young physician of Paris, had suddenly disappeared. Everything was done to discover some trace of him, but in vain. The loss of her husband caused his wife such anguish that she resolved to bring up her little daughter in ignorance of her father's fate; and when in two years she died she left little Lucie under the guardian-ship of Tellson & Co., to whose care Doctor Manette for many years had intrusted his financial affairs.

Strange tidings concerning the doctor had just come from Paris, and Mr. Lorry was on his way to meet his ward and explain to her the facts of her early life. This was a duty from which the kind-hearted banker shrank, and when he saw the slight, golden-haired girl who came to meet him his heart almost failed him; but his task was accomplished at last. "And now," concluded Mr. Lorry, "your father has been found. He is alive, greatly changed, but alive. He has been taken to the house of a former servant in Paris, and we are going there. I, to identify him, you to restore him to life and love."

The servant that sheltered Doctor Manette was a man by the name of Defarge who, with his wife, kept a wine-shop in the obscure district of St.-Antoine. The banker and Lucie were taken to an attic, where a haggard, white-haired man sat on a low bench, making shoes, a wreck of a man oblivious of all around him.

Again was the Channel crossed, and again the old inquiry whispered in the ear of Jarvis Lorry: "I hope you care to be recalled to life?" "I can't say."