ontrary, many
reasons to believe, that some of these privileges had been used to the
frightful oppression of the peasant, quite as near to the time of the
Revolution as the doctor's narrative, which, you will remember, dates
long before the Terror. And surely when the new philosophy was the talk
of the salons and the slang of the hour, it is not unreasonable or
unallowable to suppose a nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, and
representing the time going out, as his nephew represents the time
coming in; as to the condition of the peasant in France generally at
that day, I take it that if anything be certain on earth it is certain
that it was intolerable. No _ex post facto_ enquiries and provings by
figures will hold water, surely, against the tremendous testimony of men
living at the time.

There is a curious book printed at Amsterdam, written to make out no
case whatever, and tiresome enough in its literal dictionary-like
minuteness, scattered up and down the pages of which is full authority
for my marquis. This is "Mercier's Tableau de Paris." Rousseau is the
authority for the peasant's shutting up his house when he had a bit of
meat. The tax-taker was the authority for the wretched creature's
impoverishment.

I am not clear, and I never have been clear, respecting that canon of
fiction which forbids the interposition of accident in such a case as
Madame Defarge's death. Where the accident is inseparable from the
passion and emotion of the character, where it is strictly consistent
with the whole design, and arises out of some culminating proceeding on
the part of the character which the whole story has led up to, it seems
to me to become, as it were, an act of divine justice. And when I use
Miss Pross (though this is quite another question) to bring about that
catastrophe, I have the positive intention of making that half-comic
intervention a part of the desperate woman's failure, and of opposing
that mean death--instead of a desperate one in the streets, which she
wouldn't have minded--to the dignity of Carton's wrong or right; this
_was_ the design, and seemed to be in the fitness of things.

Now, as to the reading. I am sorry to say that it is out of the question
this season. I have had an attack of rheumatism--quite a stranger to
me--which remains hovering about my left side, after having doubled me
up in the back, and which would disable me from standing for two hours.
I have given up all dinners and town e