Summary: The Eve of Lucie's Wedding
Book II, Chapter XVII of A Tale of Two Cities takes place on the evening before Lucie Manette's wedding to Charles Darnay. As the sun sets with unusual beauty over their quiet corner in Soho, Lucie and her father, Doctor Alexandre Manette, sit together beneath the plane-tree in their courtyard. Lucie has reserved this final evening entirely for her father, and the two share a tender, emotionally charged conversation about what the marriage will mean for their bond.
Lucie's Promise and the Doctor's Reassurance
Lucie assures her father that her love for Charles will never come between them. She tells him that if her marriage were arranged in any way that would separate them — "even by the length of a few of these streets" — she would be deeply unhappy and self-reproachful. Doctor Manette responds with surprising cheerfulness and conviction, telling Lucie that his future is "far brighter" seen through her marriage than it could ever have been without it. He explains that his greatest anxiety has been that Lucie's life should not be "wasted" or "struck aside from the natural order of things" for his sake. When Lucie says she would have been happy with her father alone, the Doctor gently smiles at her unconscious admission that she would have been unhappy without Charles, having met him.
The Doctor's Prison Memories
For the first time outside the courtroom, Doctor Manette speaks openly about his eighteen years of imprisonment in the Bastille. He describes looking at the moon from his cell window — sometimes unable to bear its light because it reminded him of what he had lost, sometimes beating his head against the prison walls, and sometimes falling into such a dull, lethargic state that he could think of nothing but counting how many horizontal and perpendicular lines he could draw across the moon's face. He reveals that he spent countless hours wondering about the unborn child from whom he had been torn: whether it was alive, whether it was a son who might avenge him, or a daughter who would grow to be a woman. He imagined his child as perfectly forgetful of him, married to a man who knew nothing of his fate, his place in the next generation "a blank."
The Phantom and the Vision
On gentler moonlit nights, Manette tells Lucie, he imagined a daughter coming to his cell and leading him to freedom. He distinguishes between two visions: a ghostly image that stood motionless between his window and door, and a more real, living child of his imagination — one who resembled her mother and who showed him a home "full of her loving remembrance of her lost father." In this peaceful fantasy, his picture hung in her room, he was in her prayers, and even her children had been taught to pity him. Though she could never truly deliver him, she always brought him back to his cell, where he wept with relief and blessed her. Lucie, deeply moved, identifies herself with this imagined daughter.
The Quiet Close of the Evening
Manette explains that he recalls these old troubles to express why he loves Lucie beyond what words can convey and to thank God for his happiness, which exceeds anything his wildest thoughts in prison could have imagined. They go inside, where a small supper awaits with only Miss Pross as company, since the wedding will be attended by no one but Mr. Lorry as guest and Miss Pross as bridesmaid. The Doctor is cheerful, half-objecting to the "loving little plot" that keeps Charles away on this last evening. Later, in the stillness of three in the morning, Lucie creeps downstairs to her father's room. She finds him sleeping peacefully, his white hair spread on the pillow. notes the "quiet, resolute, and guarded struggle with an unseen assailant" visible even in his sleeping face — the marks of long captivity that Manette holds in check through sheer determination. Lucie prays silently over him, kisses him, and withdraws. As sunrise comes, the shadows of the plane-tree leaves move across his face "as softly as her lips had moved in praying for him."