Book 2, Chapter 9 : “ The Gorgon’s Head”

1. Book 2, Chapter 9: “The Gorgon’s Head” Title meaning:a reference to three sisters, Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa, with snakes for hair, who had the power to turn anyone who looked at them to stone. Monseigneur’s chateau is made of all stone.

2. Plot Summary: • The chateau is all stone, as if a Gorgon's head had looked at it. • Monseigneur sits down to dinner after complaining that his nephew has not yet arrived. When Charles Darnay does arrive, Monseigneur observes that he has taken a long time coming from London. • Darnay accuses Monseigneur of an effort to have him imprisoned in France with a letter de cachet. Monseigneur does not deny this, but he complains about the inaccessibility of such measures and the privileges that the aristocracy has lost. He considers repression to be the only effective and lasting policy • Darnay replies that their family has done wrong and will pay the consequences. Darnay renounces his property and France. • Monseigneur mocks him for having not been more successful in England, then mentions the doctor and his daughter but ominously refuses to say more. • Owls howl through the night, and when the sun rises its slanting angle makes the chateau fountain seem full of blood. The villagers wake up first to start their toil, and the occupants of the chateau awake later, but when they do arise, they engage in frenzied activity. • Monseigneur was murdered during the night. There is a knife through his heart, containing a piece of paper on which it is written: "Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques."

3. Literary Devices: Foreshadowing: After Monseigneursays that oppression will “keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof... shuts out the sky,” the narrator foreshadows the coming revolution: “That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to him that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked rains” (124).Smilie: The narrator compares Monseigneur to a caged tiger: “Rustling about the room, his softly-slippered feet making no noise on the floor, he moved like a refined tiger:—looked like some enchanted marquis of the impenitently wicked sort, in story, whose periodical change into tiger form was either just going off, or just coming on. ” (127). Symbolism: On the morning his death is discovered, the water of the fountain at Monseigneur’s chateau appears, by the morning sunlight, to turn to blood:“In the glow, the water of the chateau fountain seemed to turn to blood” (128).

4. Essential Quote “It lay back on the pillow of Monsieur the Marquis. It was like a fine mask, suddenly startled, made angry, and petrified. Driven home into the heart of the stone figure attached to it, was a knife. Round its hilt was a frill of paper, on which was scrawled:‘Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques’” (130). Hear this chapter read aloud.