 to entreat him further, and his pride was
touched besides. As they walked on in silence, he could not but see how used the
people were to the spectacle of prisoners passing along the streets. The very
children scarcely noticed him. A few passers turned their heads, and a few shook
their fingers at him as an aristocrat; otherwise, that a man in good clothes
should be going to prison, was no more remarkable than that a labourer in
working clothes should be going to work. In one narrow, dark, and dirty street
through which they passed, an excited orator, mounted on a stool, was addressing
an excited audience on the crimes against the people, of the king and the royal
family. The few words that he caught from this man's lips, first made it known
to Charles Darnay that the king was in prison, and that the foreign ambassadors
had one and all left Paris. On the road (except at Beauvais) he had heard
absolutely nothing. The escort and the universal watchfulness had completely
isolated him.
    That he had fallen among far greater dangers than those which had developed
themselves when he left England, he of course knew now. That perils had
thickened about him fast, and might thicken faster and faster yet, he of course
knew now. He could not but admit to himself that he might not have made this
journey, if he could have foreseen the events of a few days. And yet his
misgivings were not so dark as, imagined by the light of this later time, they
would appear. Troubled as the future was, it was the unknown future, and in its
obscurity there was ignorant hope. The horrible massacre, days and nights long,
which, within a few rounds of the clock, was to set a great mark of blood upon
the blessed garnering time of harvest, was as far out of his knowledge as if it
had been a hundred thousand years away. The sharp female newly-born, and called
La Guillotine, was hardly known to him, or to the generality of people, by name.
The frightful deeds that were to be soon done, were probably unimagined at that
time in the brains of the doers. How could they have a place in the shadowy
conceptions of a gentle mind?
    Of unjust treatment in detention and hardship, and in cruel separation from
his wife and child, he foreshadowed the likelihood, or the certainty; but,
beyond this, he dreaded nothing distinctly. With this on his mind, which was
enough to carry into a dreary prison court-yard, he arrived at
