They travelled in the night, halting an hour or two after daybreak, and lying by until the twilight fell. In this state they traversed without change, except of horses and pace, all the mire- deep leagues that lay between them and the capital. In this state they set forth with the sharp rain driving in their faces: clattering at a heavy dragoon trot over the uneven town pavement, and out upon the mire-deep roads. The escorted governed his own horse, but a loose line was attached to his bridle, the end of which one of the patriots kept girded round his wrist. The escort were two mounted patriots in red caps and tri-coloured cockades, armed with national muskets and sabres, who rode one on either side of him. Here he paid a heavy price for his escort, and hence he started with it on the wet, wet roads at three o’clock in the morning. “Rise and dress yourself, emigrant.”ĭarnay complied, and was taken back to the guard-house, where other patriots in rough red caps were smoking, drinking, and sleeping, by a watch-fire. “It is always as the good patriot says,” observed the functionary.
“As if it was not a favour to be protected from the lamp-iron!” “Choice! Listen to him!” cried the same scowling red-cap.
“You are an aristocrat, and must have an escort-and must pay for it.” “It is as the good patriot says,” observed the timid functionary. “Silence!” growled a red-cap, striking at the coverlet with the butt-end of his musket. “Citizen, I desire nothing more than to get to Paris, though I could dispense with the escort.” “Emigrant,” said the functionary, “I am going to send you on to Paris, under an escort.” And he was, therefore, as little surprised as a man could be, to find himself awakened at the small inn to which he had been remitted until morning, in the middle of the night.Īwakened by a timid local functionary and three armed patriots in rough red caps and with pipes in their mouths, who sat down on the bed. Ms difficulty at the guard-house in this small place had been such, that he felt his journey to have come to a crisis. Nothing but the production of the afflicted Gabelle’s letter from his prison of the Abbaye would have got him on so far. He had been days upon his journey in France alone, when he went to bed tired out, in a little town on the high road, still a long way from Paris. This universal watchfulness not only stopped him on the highway twenty times in a stage, but retarded his progress twenty times in a day, by riding after him and taking him back, riding before him and stopping him by anticipation, riding with him and keeping him in charge. The universal watchfulness so encompassed him, that if he had been taken in a net, or were being forwarded to his destination in a cage, he could not have felt his freedom more completely gone.
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Not a mean village closed upon him, not a common barrier dropped across the road behind him, but he knew it to be another iron door in the series that was barred between him and England. Whatever might befall now, he must on to his journey’s end. Every town-gate and village taxing-house had its band of citizen- patriots, with their national muskets in a most explosive state of readiness, who stopped all comers and goers, cross-questioned them, inspected their papers, looked for their names in lists of their own, turned them back, or sent them on, or stopped them and laid them in hold, as their capricious judgment or fancy deemed best for the dawning Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.Ī very few French leagues of his journey were accomplished, when Charles Darnay began to perceive that for him along these country roads there was no hope of return until he should have been declared a good citizen at Paris.
More than enough of bad roads, bad equipages, and bad horses, he would have encountered to delay him, though the fallen and unfortunate King of France had been upon his throne in all his glory but, the changed times were fraught with other obstacles than these. The traveller fared slowly on his way, who fared towards Paris from England in the autumn of the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two.
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