A World Of Doubles

Darnay and Lucie are about to marry, and Margaret Atwood turns to the secret in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities that's about to spoil the wedding: Darnay's real name. She reconstructs the closed-door scene between Darnay and Dr. Manette from its aftermath, the doctor coming out white and trembly, and voices what he must be thinking about the family that shut him in the Bastille and the man now marrying his daughter. Then nine days back at the shoemaker's bench.

The sharper insight is about Sydney Carton. Why does he dislike Darnay before Lucie is even in the picture? Because Darnay looks like him, and Carton doesn't like himself. Atwood calls it what we'd call self-loathing today and reads the mirror scene as its proof. She closes with a look ahead: the storming of the Bastille, Madame Defarge at full power with a knife, and the grisly death of Foulon, which Dickens took from real accounts.