A Tale of Two Cities

I finished this book in time for my book club that meets on the last tuesday of each month. I had 200 pages left 4 days before the meeting. I took off my whiny pants and just read it. I am so glad that I did. This was my fourth time reading this and every time I read it I end up in tears. This is a story set during the French Revolution. I had heard it described as bloody, but until I read Dickens' descriptions of some of the events that happened I had no idea what that meant. The streets literally flowed with the blood of those taken by Madame Guillotine. He used foreshadowing very effectively. In the begining of the book a barrel of wine breaks and spills all over the street. The people stop what they are doing and rush out to drink what they can. They sip pools of it. Mop it up with their clothes and ring it into thier and their babies' mouths. Also the man who was delivering the wine didn't care, it wasn't his problem, those who own the wine needed to worry about it not him. When it was over they and their clothes were stained red. During the bloodiest parts of the revolution the people were literally stained with blood, they couldn't wash it off their hands, thier clothes or anything else they had. The women would sit at the foot of the Guillotine, as the people were beheaded blood would spatter them, they would even take souveniors of their "favorite" aristocrat i.e. locks of thier hair or pieces of their clothing. Those not in France didn't feel like it was any of their business and stayed out of it. One of the biggest ironies of this is that part of the blame for the revolution was King Louis' financial help of the American Colonists during their revolution which led to high taxes, but the Fench peasants took their courage and ideas from those American Colonists.



This is a sad display of what we humans are capable of if pushed too far.
Here is a picture of a recreated guillotine. Most people would lie down with thier head through the hole and a basket below them. The revolutionaries invented this machine to make the beheadings more efficient and faster. If I had a choice of the guillotine and someone chopping my head off I would choose the guillotine. Until I read this book and the accounts of the beheadings before and after this was invented I would have never looked at the guillotine as the merciful method of execution and can now even see it as a blessing.