In Secret

“The escort were two mounted patriots… present danger arose from one of the patriots being chronically drunk…” (256-257)

This double of the drunken patriot and the sober patriot represents the revolutionaries as a whole. It shows us that since the revolutionaries have taken over Paris, although half of them are sober, the other half is completely trashed. It adds to the revolutionaries’ character, giving them a sense of inability and rashness. When someone is drunk, they cannot think properly, their actions are full of carelessness and stupidity, and they have an inability to govern themselves. This half of the revolutionaries that is drunk has all of these traits, except they don’t just have to govern themselves; they have to govern all of the other revolutionaries plus the lately fallen aristocrats. That much power in the hands of drunken people can go seriously wrong. Since they cannot think properly, it is extremely hard for them to govern fairly as well as properly, which would be helpful to Charles Darnay. The sober patriot, however, thinks clearly and when all the revolutionaries try to attack Charles Darnay, he saves Charles and closes a gate between them and the revolutionaries while the drunken patriot just sat and watched: “the postmaster interposed himself between this man and the rider’s bridle (at which he was evidently making), and soothingly said, ‘Let him be; let him be! He will be judged at Paris’ (257). If the sober patriot had been drunk, he would have either done nothing or joined in with the crowd, but since he was sober, although he doesn’t like Charles, he realized that Charles needed a fair trial in Paris and saved him from the mob instead of letting him die. If the majority of the revolutionaries were sober, they’d have the same thought process as the sober patriot, and they might realize that all the aristocrats deserve fair trials, unlike their current treatment of being thrown in prison for even helping an aristocrat. In this chapter, the recklessness of the revolutionaries and the unfairness of their actions is developed and portrayed in a negative light by Dickens.