Book the Third - The Track of a Storm
6. VI. Triumph
(continued)
His removal, to make way for other accused persons who were to be
tried, rescued him from these caresses for the moment. Five were to
be tried together, next, as enemies of the Republic, forasmuch as
they had not assisted it by word or deed. So quick was the Tribunal
to compensate itself and the nation for a chance lost, that these
five came down to him before he left the place, condemned to die
within twenty-four hours. The first of them told him so, with the
customary prison sign of Death--a raised finger--and they all added
in words, "Long live the Republic!"
The five had had, it is true, no audience to lengthen their
proceedings, for when he and Doctor Manette emerged from the gate,
there was a great crowd about it, in which there seemed to be every
face he had seen in Court--except two, for which he looked in vain.
On his coming out, the concourse made at him anew, weeping,
embracing, and shouting, all by turns and all together, until the
very tide of the river on the bank of which the mad scene was acted,
seemed to run mad, like the people on the shore.
They put him into a great chair they had among them, and which they
had taken either out of the Court itself, or one of its rooms or
passages. Over the chair they had thrown a red flag, and to the back
of it they had bound a pike with a red cap on its top. In this car
of triumph, not even the Doctor's entreaties could prevent his being
carried to his home on men's shoulders, with a confused sea of red
caps heaving about him, and casting up to sight from the stormy deep
such wrecks of faces, that he more than once misdoubted his mind
being in confusion, and that he was in the tumbril on his way to the
Guillotine.
In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and pointing
him out, they carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with the
prevailing Republican colour, in winding and tramping through them,
as they had reddened them below the snow with a deeper dye, they
carried him thus into the courtyard of the building where he lived.
Her father had gone on before, to prepare her, and when her husband
stood upon his feet, she dropped insensible in his arms.
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