The letter

[kev67]

SPOILERS:



I was slightly puzzelled by Dr Manette's letter that was read out in Charles Darnay's second trial. When I checked back to the chapter in which the Bastille was stormed, it seemed like M Defarge never found any letter. He sook out the tower in which Dr Manette had been imprisoned, but didn't find anything. So, was the letter a forgery? Why wasn't it produced at Darnay's first trial? OTOH, how is it that the story matched up with Mme Defarge's family history, and how come Dr Manette's face used to cloud over when he saw Charles Defarge?

[cacian]

SPOILERS:



I was slightly puzzelled by Dr Manette's letter that was read out in Charles Darnay's second trial. When I checked back to the chapter in which the Bastille was stormed, it seemed like M Defarge never found any letter. He sook out the tower in which Dr Manette had been imprisoned, but didn't find anything. So, was the letter a forgery? Why wasn't it produced at Darnay's first trial? OTOH, how is it that the story matched up with Mme Defarge's family history, and how come Dr Manette's face used to cloud over when he saw Charles Defarge?

so are you saying there was never any letter?

[kev67]

I see I started this thread in the wrong sub-forum. It should have been in A Tale of Two Cities.

In the chapter Echoing Footsteps, M. Defarge in one of the stormers of The Bastille. After the guards surrender, M. Defarge forces one of the jailers to take them to cell 105 in the North Tower, in which Dr Manette had been incarcerated years before:

With a menacing look at the turnkey he crawled upon the hearth, and, peering up the chimney, struck and prised at its sides with the crowbar, and worked at the iron grating across it. In a few minutes, some mortar and dust came dropping down, which he averted his face to avoid; and in it, and in the old wood-ashes, and in a crevice in the chimney into which his weapon had slipped or wrought itself, he groped with a cautious touch.

'Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the straw, Jacques?'
'Nothing.'
'Let us collect them together, in the middle of the cell. So! Light them, you!'

The turnkey fired the little pile, which blazed high and hot.. Stooping again to come out of a low-arched door, they left it burning, and retraced their way to the court-yard: seeming to recover their sense of hearing as they came down, until they were in the raging flood once more.

It seemed like they did not find anything. But then a letter is produced at Charles Darney's second trial in chapter, The Substance of the Shadow. In the letter Dr Manette condemns Charles Darnay's entire family for the actions of his father and uncle.