The Monseigneur reveals himself to be a most unpleasant
person who treats the woman whom he encounters at the roadside in Chapter 8 of Dickens’
A Tale of Two Cites in a most barbarous manner. Dickens plants
foreshadowing of what is to come in the symbolically representative phrase “To this
distressful emblem of a great distress….”
Monseigneur
encounter the woman, who is a starving peasant and a grieving widow, with an exclamation
of impatience, which is precisely what Dickens writes, “With an exclamation of
impatience...,” which is followed by an expression of great exasperation (extreme
annoyance) that is demonstrated in his first words to the woman: “How, then! What is it?
Always petitions!”
The woman unbelievably has the courage
to continue with making her petition (request) of the Monseigneur, which is that a
simple wooden marker be provided for her dead husband’s scantily marked grave so that
she might find it amongst the others and so that it might be identified by the living
once she too has died of starvation; it is important so that she might be lain next to
him.
When she says her husband has died and is buried in
among other “little heaps of poor grass,” Monseigneur treats her unsympathetically and
unkindly, saying, “Well! He is quiet!...” When she says he died of starvation as so many
more–including she herself—will do, Monseigneur treats her callously and cruelly,
saying, “Again, Well? Can I feed them?”
Dickens goes to
pains to describe the woman with great sympathy, saying “She looked an old woman, but
was young,” to point out that Monseigneur is without compassion or pity in the way he
treats her. Monseigneur allows the woman to be forcible removed from beside his carriage
as a sign of his denial of her petition and so he might continue on his journey, his
selfish, cold-hearted thoughts absorbed by the contemplation of the “league of two of
distance that remained between him and his chateau.”
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