Preview: Part II, Chapter 8
Reading boundary
Start: A beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it
Stop after: Monseigneur, not yet.
The Marquis’s journey continues from Paris into the countryside. Dickens pairs a beautiful landscape with scarcity, exhausted labor, and the signs of a system that extracts more than rural people can bear.
Information travels piecemeal along the road. A brief report from a road-mender becomes more troubling because the Marquis cannot immediately explain what the man saw.