Summary of Book 2, Chapter 9: The Gorgon's Head
Chapter 9 of Book the Second opens with a detailed description of the Marquis St. Evrémonde's chateau — a massive stone edifice decorated with stone balustrades, stone urns, stone flowers, and stone faces of men and lions, as if the mythological Gorgon had surveyed it and turned everything to stone. The Marquis arrives by carriage at night, enters his grand but grim residence past boar-spears, swords, and riding-whips that have been used to beat peasants, and proceeds to his private apartments decorated in the style of Louis XIV.
The Confrontation Between Uncle and Nephew
A supper table is set for two in a tower room, and the Marquis learns that his nephew has not yet arrived. He begins eating alone, but is interrupted when Charles Darnay — revealed here to be the Marquis's nephew — arrives from London. Their tense dinner conversation exposes a deep ideological divide. Darnay accuses his uncle of possibly working to have him imprisoned or killed, while the Marquis calmly acknowledges he would use a lettre de cachet to lock Darnay away indefinitely if he still had the court's favor.
The Marquis openly mourns the loss of aristocratic privileges: he recalls how their ancestors held the right of life and death over the common people, how peasants were hanged from this very room, and how one man was stabbed to death in the adjacent bedroom for objecting to the treatment of his daughter. He articulates his philosophy bluntly: "Repression is the only lasting philosophy" and vows, "I will die, perpetuating the system under which I have lived."
Darnay Renounces His Inheritance
Darnay responds with passionate condemnation of their family's legacy of oppression and cruelty. He declares that the Evrémonde name is "more detested than any name in France" and that he sees nothing but "the dark deference of fear and slavery" in the faces of the surrounding countryside. Fulfilling a promise made to his dying mother, Darnay announces that he renounces the property and his claim to the estate, calling it "a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering." He intends to live by working in England, where he already resides under a different name.
The Marquis makes a pointed reference to a certain "Doctor with a daughter" living in England — clearly meaning Doctor Manette and Lucie — suggesting he knows more about Darnay's personal life than his nephew would like.
The Murder of the Marquis
After bidding his nephew good night with sinister courtesy, the Marquis retires to bed. narrates three heavy hours of darkness over the chateau and village, the stone faces staring blindly into the night. At dawn, the stone faces of the chateau seem to crimson, and the fountain water appears to turn to blood. When the household awakens, chaos erupts — bells ring, people run up and down stairs, and a horseman gallops away with the tax collector Gabelle.
The reason: the Marquis has been murdered in his sleep, a knife driven into his heart. Wrapped around the knife's hilt is a note reading: "Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques." The phrase deliberately echoes the Marquis's own reckless command to his coachman in the previous chapter, and the signature "Jacques" identifies the killer as a member of the revolutionary underground. The Gorgon, writes, has surveyed the building once more and "added the one stone face wanting" — the petrified face of the dead Marquis, transformed at last into the stone he always resembled.