A Tale of Two Cities

01The Year of Paradoxes and Unseen Revolution

In the year of Our Lord 1775, a paradox lay upon the land like a thick fog that neither the sun's truth nor the wind's reason could dispel. It was a time of contradictions, where every truth was countered by an equal and resolute untruth. The people of England and France, though separated by a mere channel of water, lived as if worlds apart, each in their own tumult of splendor and squalor. In England, the throne was occupied by a king whose jaw was as prominent as his scepter, and a queen of such plainness that her visage spoke more of the hearth than of the royal court. Across the channel, their counterparts in France bore the same regal jaws, but the queen there was graced with a beauty that belied the ugliness of the times. The lords and ladies, the keepers of the state's grain and coin, were convinced that the order of things was eternal, unshakable. Yet beneath their gilded carriages and powdered wigs, the earth trembled with the silent footsteps of change. In England, the people were caught in a web of spiritual fervor and earthly concerns. Mrs. Southcott, a woman of twenty-five years, had been declared a prophetess, and her words were as eagerly awaited as the next season's harvest. The Cock-lane ghost, having ceased its spectral knockings only a decade prior, had been replaced by the equally mundane and otherworldly messages from a congress of rebels in America, whose declarations would shake the very foundations of empires. France, less touched by the divine or perhaps less inclined to listen, slid with graceless ease towards an abyss of its own making. Paper money flowed like wine, and the people, under the watchful eyes of their shepherds in the cloth, committed acts of such cruelty that the angels themselves would weep. A young man, guilty of nothing more than a lack of reverence in the rain, was tortured and killed, his only crime being indifference to a procession of monks. Unseen, the Woodman, Fate, marked the trees that would form the guillotine, and the Farmer, Death, prepared his carts, soon to be known as tumbrils, for a harvest of a different kind. These harbingers of revolution worked in silence, their presence felt but unacknowledged, for to speak of them was to court accusations of heresy and treason. Back in England, the veneer of order was as thin as the paper upon which proclamations were printed. Thieves and highwaymen roamed the streets and countryside with impunity, their audacity matched only by their violence. The Lord Mayor himself was not immune to the highwayman's demand, and the guardians of the law were as likely to be found battling the inmates as protecting the citizenry. The hangman, that grim servant of justice, was never idle, his noose swinging with the weight of the condemned, from the vilest murderer to the most pitiable of thieves. The flames that consumed contraband and seditious pamphlets at the steps of Westminster Hall also licked the flesh of those branded for lesser crimes. Thus was the year 1775, a year that saw the great and the humble alike swept along the roads of destiny. The mighty with their divine rights and the common with their simple hopes and fears, all marched to the rhythm of an unseen drum, towards a future that was as uncertain as it was inevitable.