and locking behind them, until they came into a large, low, vaulted
chamber, crowded with prisoners of both sexes. The women were
seated at a long table, reading and writing, knitting, sewing, and
embroidering; the men were for the most part standing behind
their chairs, or lingering up and down the room.
In the instinctive association of prisoners with shameful crime
and disgrace, the newcomer recoiled from this company. But the
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
crowning unreality of his long unreal ride, was, their all at once
rising to receive him, with every refinement of manner known to
the time, and with all the engaging graces and courtesies of life.
So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison
manners and gloom, so spectral did they become in the
inappropriate squalor and misery through which they were seen,
that Charles Darnay seemed to stand in company of the dead.
Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost
of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of
wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal
from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed
by the death they had died in coming there.
It struck him motionless. The gaoler standing at his side, and
the other gaolers moving about, who would have been well enough
as to appearance in the ordinary exercise of their functions, looked
so extravagantly coarse contrasted with sorrowing mothers and
blooming daughters who were therewith the apparitions of the
coquette, the young beauty, and the mature woman delicately
bredthat the