Synopsis
Above a Paris wine shop, a man bends over an unfinished shoe. Asked his name, he gives the number of his old cell. Lucie Manette sits beside the father she has never known. He lifts one of her curls, then unfolds a scrap of cloth. Inside are a few strands of her mother’s hair, kept through eighteen years in the Bastille.
In London, Lucie marries Charles Darnay, a Frenchman who has given up his noble name. Their little girl adores Sydney Carton, the rumpled lawyer who once saved Darnay from the gallows when a witness could barely tell the two men apart.
A plea from a former servant draws Darnay back to a France in revolt. At two each afternoon Lucie stands outside a Paris prison so her husband might see her from a window. Her father wins him his freedom. That night comes another knock. This time the tribunal has a paper in Dr. Manette’s own hand. With one day left, Carton asks a friend to have the horses ready by two.
