A London banker's errand to Paris unburies a doctor who has spent eighteen years walled up in the Bastille, and the ripples draw in a dissolute English barrister, a French aristocrat who has renounced his name and his fortune, and a wine-shop keeper's wife who knits the names of the doomed into a private register. Dickens braids private loyalty and public terror until the two cities close on a single scaffold, where a wasted man at last finds the one thing he can do supremely well. It opens on the most quoted sentence in English fiction and closes on one more famous still — the historical novel built, deliberately, to break your composure on the final page.