"Alexandre Manette, Lucie Manette, her child. Jarvis Lorry, banker, English. Sydney Carton, advocate, English. Which is he?"
He lies here, in a corner, apparently in a swoon. He is in bad health.
"Behold your papers, countersigned."
"One can depart, citizen?"
"One can depart."
The ministers of Sainte Guillotin are robed and ready. Crash!--and the women who sit with their knitting in front of the guillotine count one. Crash!--and the women count two.
The supposed Evrémonde descends with the seamstress from the tumbril, and joins the fast-thinning throng of victims before the crashing engine that constantly whirrs up and falls. The spare hand does not tremble as he grasps it. She goes next before him--is gone. The knitting women count twenty-two.
The murmuring of many voices, the pressing on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells forward like one great heave of water, all flashes away. Twenty-three.
They said of him about the city that night that it was the peacefulest man's face ever beheld there. Had he given utterance to his thoughts at the foot of the scaffold, they would have been these:
"I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous, and happy in that England which I shall see no more. I see her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence.