And so we begin...Book 1, Chapter 1

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness […]" The sentence goes on for awhile, but you get the general picture. There are lots of opposites at work in the eighteenth century. This chapter, the greatest of all openings, is a sort of guidebook to the time.  We don’t meet any characters (but don’t you worry, they’ll be here soon enough). What we do get, however, is a breakdown of the important places in the novel: France and England.  France’s economy is failing, Protestants and being persecuted, and the Royal Family is clueless.  In England, people are upset about the American Revolution, crime is rampant, and their Royal Family is not much better than France's.  Our narrator predicts that trees are growing in the fields of France that will soon be cut and shaped into scaffolds and guillotines. In other words, things may be going along just as always – but that sure doesn’t mean that they’re going along smoothly.