Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

D.W. Buffa's newest novel to be released is Evangeline, a courtroom drama about the murder trial of captain who is one of the few to survive the sinking of his ship.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities:

Two of the most famous lines Charles Dickens wrote, two of the most famous lines in the English language, are the first and the last sentences of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” And, “It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.” Both lines are connected to the the events of the French Revolution, which, along with the American Revolution, changed the world forever, a revolution which is now celebrated as a new birth of freedom, but which, at the time, and for a great many years after, was seen as the end of civilized life. Charles Dickens saw it as both.

The opening line, that remarkable first sentence, is not the kind of sentence taught today in writing classes; the first sentence is a whole paragraph:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epic of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present, that some of the noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
In this, the “year of Our Lord 1775,” while Louis XVI was safely on the throne of France, a young boy was sentenced to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers and his body burned alive, “because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honor to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.” Death was a remedy for crime, or rather for criminals; “not that it did the least good in the way of prevention…but, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each particular case….” It was also a popular form of entertainment, and not just in France. In England, Dickens explains, people paid to see “the play at the Old Bailey.” Someone is asked what was coming at the next court trial. He is told that the defendant would “be drawn on a hurdle to be half hanged, and then he’ll be taken down and sliced before his face, and then his inside will be taken out and burned while he looks on, and then his head will be chopped off, and he’ll be cut into quarters. That’s the sentence.”

When I was still practicing law, a judge once told me during a pre-trial conference that if my client pled guilty he would get probation, but if he went to trial he would go to prison. “Even if he’s acquitted?” I asked, trying not to laugh. The English were more direct, and more brutal. “If he’s found Guilty, you mean to say?” “Oh, they’ll find him guilty,” said the other. “Don’t you be afraid of that.”

This brief conversation takes place while the prisoner, Charles Darnay, charged with being an enemy of England and a friend to the United States, stands there, “being mentally hanged, beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there.” But Darnay “neither flinched from the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it.” That Darnay was able to maintain his composure in such circumstances was unusual, but more unusual still, he was acquitted by the jury. Part of the reason was that he bore such a striking resemblance to one of the lawyers, Sydney Carton, that the witness for the prosecution was forced to admit that he could not be absolutely certain that his identification of Darnay was correct.

Charles Darnay is a French aristocrat who had come to believe that the French aristocracy was doomed. His uncle, Monseigneur, on the other hand, thought his nephew part of the cause: “We have lost many privileges; a new philosophy has become the mode.” Darnay thought too many privileges were left. “I believe our name to be more detested than any name in France.” This, to the uncle, is a source of pride. “Let us hope so. Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.”

Unlike those members of the French aristocracy who, reading Rousseau, became so enamored of the rights of man that they were willing to join in the movement for equality, Monseigneur never doubted his God-given right to have everything his own way, from having four different servants involved in making and serving his hot chocolate in the morning - he would have been humiliated had there been only three, and “must have died of two” - to killing anyone, including a child, who became a nuisance. When his carriage rode over and killed an infant, he shouted, “It is extraordinary to me that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is for ever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses?” Proving his humanity, he threw out a gold coin, and when someone threw it back at him, he exclaimed: “I would ride over any of you very willingly and exterminate you from the earth.”

Among the others who saw this was a woman who the whole time kept knitting, and “still knitted on with the steadfastness of Fate,” the unforgettable Madame Defarge. Later, when someone murders the Monseigneur and the killer is executed, Defarge promises the destruction of the “chateau and all the race.” She only had to wait until 1789, when the Bastille was attacked. An axe in her hand, and carrying both a pistol and a knife, Madame Defarge led the mob, shouting to the other women, “We can kill as well as the men when the place is taken.” She cuts off the head of one man, and then puts her foot on the body of the governor of the prison “to steady it for mutilation.”

The revolution has started. The nobility flee France any way they can. No one pities them. Madame Defarge has seen “our sister-women suffer, in themselves and in their children, poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery, oppression and neglect of all kinds.” Everyone thought to have played any part in this is put in prison where they are brought before “a self-appointed Tribunal…by which they were rapidly ordered to be put forth to be massacred or to be released, or (in a few cases) to be sent back to their cells.”

The figure that stands out in all this is “the sharp female called La Guillotine,” which became, not just an efficient method of decapitation, but “the sign of the regeneration of the human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on the breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied.” Every day the tumbrils ‘jolted heavily, filled with the condemned.” The Guillotine was sometimes called ‘the barber,’ shaving more than sixty heads in a day. One of those heads was supposed to belong to Charles Darnay.

While everyone was fleeing France, Charles Darnay returned, keeping a promise to help someone in need. He is brought to trial as an emigrant, whose life, according to the prosecutor, “was forfeit to the Republic, under the decree which banished all emigrants on pain of Death.” Darnay, however, is married to the daughter of Dr. Manette who had for years been a prisoner in the Bastille and was, for that reason, thought a hero of the Revolution. When he testifies that his son-in-law had stood trial as a “foe of England and a friend of the United States,” the crowd cheers and the jury acquits. Darnay knows that the same people now cheering would, “carried by another current,” have torn him to pieces in the street.

His freedom does not last. Denounced by Madame Defarge and her husband as “one of a family of tyrants, one of a race proscribed, for that they had used their abolished privileges to the infamous oppression of the people,” he is again imprisoned and put on trial. When Dr. Manette tries to testify again on his son-in-law’s behalf, he is told by the Court that, “If the Republic should demand of you the sacrifice of your child herself, you will have no duty but to sacrifice her.” Darnay is condemned to die.

A story about the rage and oppression of men and women driven mad by the sudden acquisition of the power to do to others what had been done to them - the extermination of an entire class - requires someone willing to do something noble and heroic, someone who can recite with credibility that famous last line: “It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done.” In a classic use of double identity, Sydney Carton, the lawyer who looked just like Charles Darnay when Darnay was on trial in England, and who, like Darnay, had fallen in love with the daughter of Dr. Manette, keeps a promise he had made when he told her, after she rejected his offer of marriage, to “think now and then that there is a man who would give his life to keep a life you love beside you.” Carton visits Darnay in prison the night before Darnay’s scheduled execution, and over prisoner’s objection, changes clothes with him and, undetected, takes his place. If this seems more than a shade too melodramatic, Charles Dickens might well ask whether the real question is whether we have all become far too unromantic.

The last line comes after what, Dickens tells us, would have been Carton’s last thoughts. He sees “the long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by the retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.”

But why, exactly, did the French Revolution happen? Dickens paints a picture of an arrogant, and brutal, aristocracy at best indifferent, and at worse, celebrating, the oppressions of the poor, which meant the great majority of the people of France, and with Madame Defarge he creates a character that almost defines the word ‘revenge.’ But what, suddenly, set everything on fire. Writing twenty-five years earlier, another British writer, Thomas Macaulay, suggested that it was the addition of “new theories” to “ancient abuses” that made it all happen.
The people, having no constitutional means of checking even the most flagitious misgovernment were indemnified for oppression by being suffered to luxuriate in anarchical speculation, and to deny or ridicule every principle on which the institution of the State reposed. Neither those who attribute the downfall of the old French institutions to the public grievances, nor those who attribute it to the doctrine of the philosophers, appear to us to have taken into their view more than half the subject.
The French Revolution, like the American Revolution, depended, ultimately, on the thought that had come to dominate the way people thought about their condition. The French read Rousseau; the Americans read John Locke. The French Revolution ended with Napoleon, an emperor; the American Revolution ended with George Washington, an elected president of an elected federal government. It is our misfortune that Charles Dickens did not write a novel about that.

Thursday, October 24, 2024

D.W. Buffa