Two Cities

Chapter 1 Times
It was the best of times and the worst of times.It was the age of wisdom, and it was also the age of foolishness.That was the time of faith, and it was also the time of doubt.It was the season of light, and it was also the season of darkness.It was the spring of hope and the winter of disappointment.We were all heading straight for heaven, we were all heading in the opposite direction—in short, then as now, some of the loudest authorities insisted on the superlative of the adjective.Both good and bad are superlative.

England is ruled by a king with a big jaw and a queen with a mediocre face.And a big-jawed king and a good-looking queen who control the French regime.For the lord who controls all the wealth of the two countries, the long-term stability of the state power is a foregone conclusion.

That was the year 770, five years of the Christian era.Spiritual revelations are popular in England.Mrs. Southcote celebrated her 25th birthday happily. A prophetic soldier in the royal guard announced that the lady was planning to land and sink London City and Westminster Abbey, thus kicking off the emergence of her noble image.Even after years of disappearance, once people mention it, it attracts as much attention as it did in the beginning, only with a little less otherworldly originality.Not long ago the King and the people of England were made aware of messages from the world.That's from the British Parliament.Strange to say, this information has had a huge impact on humanity.

France's supernatural holds far less place in people's hearts than her shield-and-trident-marked sister.France is going downhill, printing money, and using it.In addition, she followed the priests' guidance to establish some benevolent exploits for fun.Like sentencing a young man to have his hands chopped off, his tongue pulled out with pliers, and burned alive simply because she didn't kneel in the rain to salute her when she saw a dirty honor guard of monks pass fifty or sixty yards away. .And when the man was put to death, certain trees that grew in the forests of France and Norway were abandoned by fate to be felled and sawn into planks for execution racks.On the same day, there were probably some large carts sheltering from the wind and rain in the shabby huts of some peasant households on the hardened land near Paris.The cars were rough and splashed with country mud, pigs sniffed beside them and poultry perched on them.It is also very likely that these things have been chosen by death to be used as death row vehicles during the revolution.But fate and death are non-stop, but they are always silent and cautious, so that people cannot hear them.If anyone had anticipated all this, it would have been considered atheism and outrage.

England had little order and security to prove national self-reliance.Every day in Kyoto, armed gangsters break into houses, rob and block roads.A public warning was issued: Every family, every family, who wants to go out from the city, must store the furniture and belongings in the warehouse of the furniture store to ensure safety.Merchants robbed in broad daylight.If he occupies the position of "boss" among his peers and is challenged, he will kill the opponent in a cool and easy manner, and then walk away.Seven robbers robbed the mail van, and three of them were shot dead by the guards escorting the van. The guard himself was unavoidably killed by the four robbers "because he ran out of ammunition", and the mail was still taken away openly.The Lord Mayor of the City of London is a domineering official. He was restrained by a slasher in the Tenan Forest, and he could only obediently remain motionless.The robber actually robbed this man in front of all the attendants.Prisoners in the London Prison fought violently with prison guards. The supreme authority of the law shot at the prisoners, and batch after batch of prisoners were shot dead.Thieves ripped the diamond cross from the nobleman's neck in the court drawing room.The musketeers broke into St. Giles' Church to inspect the contraband, the mob and the musketeers fired back, and the musketeers fired back at the mob.This kind of incident has long been used to by everyone, and it is not surprising.Under such circumstances, the executioner was at a loss.Such people are not very useful, but they are always overwhelmed.They sometimes hang all kinds of criminals in rows.Sometimes the robbers caught on Tuesday were hanged on Saturday.Prisoners were sometimes burned by the dozens in Newgate Prison.Sometimes pamphlets were burned in front of the Great Hall of Westminster.Execute a heinous murderer today, and a poor thief who robbed a farm boy of sixpence tomorrow.

There are countless similar things, just like this happened one after another in the lovely ancient year 770, endlessly.Surrounded by these events, death and fate happened silently, but the rulers were all majestic and arbitrarily exercising their god-given monarchy.In this way, in 770 years, he has accomplished his own great achievements, and also accomplished countless little people-including the protagonists of our history.

(End of this chapter)