her father, and had always believed he also had died when
she was a baby.

One day, however, through a Mr. Lorry, the agent of a bank, she learned
a wonderful piece of news. He told her that her father was not dead, but
that he had been wickedly thrown into a secret prison in Paris before
she was born, and had been lost thus for eighteen long years. This
prison was the Bastille--a cold, dark building like a castle, with high
gray towers, a deep moat and drawbridge, and soldiers and cannon to
defend it.

In those days in France the rich nobles who belonged to the royal court
were very powerful and overbearing, and the rest of the people had few
rights. One could be put into prison then without any trial at all, so
that many innocent people suffered. Lucie's mother had guessed that
Doctor Manette (for he was a physician) had in some way incurred the
hatred of some one of the nobles and had thus been taken from her; but
all she certainly knew was that he had disappeared one day in Paris and
had never come back.

For a year she had tried in every way to find him, but at length,
desolate and heartbroken, she had fallen ill and died, leaving little
Lucie with only Miss Pross, her English nurse, to care for her. Mr.
Lorry himself, who told Lucie this story, having known her father, had
brought her, a baby, to London in his arms.

Now, he told her, after all these years, her father had been released,
and was at that moment in Paris in charge of a man named Defarge, who
had once been his servant. But the long imprisonment had affected his
mind, so that he was little more than the broken wreck of the man he had
once been. Mr. Lorry was about to go to Paris to identify him, and he
wished Lucie to go also to bring him to himself.

You can imagine that Lucie's heart was both glad and sorrowful at the
news; joyful that the father she had always believed dead was alive,
and yet full of grief for his condition. She hastily made ready and
that same day set out with Mr. Lorry for France.

When they reached Paris they went at once to find Defarge. He was a
stern, forbidding man, who kept a cheap wine shop in one of the poorer
quarters of the city. He took them through a dirty courtyard behind the
shop and up five flights of filthy stairs to a door, which he unlocked
for them to enter.

In the dim room sat a withered, white-haired old man on a low bench
making shoes. His cheeks were worn and hollow, his eyes were bright and
his l