Confucius said: How can we repay virtue if we repay our grievances with virtue?
This means that if you return the evil deeds with good deeds, what should you do to repay the good deeds? Here people usually understand it as two extremes,
Or advocate that we will repay everything in our eyes, and treat others in the way of others,
Or ask us to tolerate a bad guy who is constantly doing evil without limits,
But in fact, Confucius just wanted to remind people that if you want to live freely in life, you should not blindly indulge in hatred, nor always be moved by self-sacrifice.
Therefore, after these two sentences, he continued: to repay grievances with directness and to repay virtue with virtue
Hello everyone, today brings you the work of British writer Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities"
Inside a hotel in France, Lori, a staff member at the Tersen Bank, is working with Lucy Manette.
Miss Lucy's father, Mr. Manette, was an important customer of the bank eighteen years ago, but later disappeared unexpectedly, but has now been rescued.
So, Lori is here to pick up people with Lucy
It was December 1757, and Mannett, a young doctor living in Paris, was walking when he was suddenly forced to make a visit by the powerful Marquis de Levermonde in a carriage.
In the Marquis's mansion, Manette witnessed the tragic scene of a beautiful peasant woman and a young man wounded by a sword being forced to die.
It turned out that the two sisters and brothers were sharecroppers in the Marquis's Palace, and the Marquis brothers had killed all their families for a moment of sexual pleasure.
Later, in order to cover up his atrocities, the Marquis brothers wanted to bribe Dr. Manette heavily, but the upright Manette sternly refused and wrote a letter of denunciation to his superiors.
But after many twists and turns, the letter eventually fell into the hands of the accused, so Manette was imprisoned in the Bastille and began his miserable life of isolation
Two years later, Manette's wife died of infinite longing for her husband, and before she died, she entrusted the Tersen Bank to act as the guardian of her youngest daughter, Lucy.
In this way, the young orphan girl Lucy was taken from Paris to London by Lori, and gradually grew up under the care of the kind maid Pros,
And Dr. Manet, after more than ten years of imprisonment, finally saw the light of day, and now he is taken in by the old servant Defa Day, living in a small shop in the Saint-Anthony district of Paris.
When Lowry takes Lucy to the shop, Manette is making shoes inside, which is small and the environment is extremely poor, but it has a good soothing effect for Manette, who has been derailed from the outside world for a long time
Lucy was thrilled to see Manette, but she knew she couldn't rush anything.
So he picked up his own characteristic hair to show his father to evoke the familiarity of the other party, but Manette seemed a little dull, he looked old, tired, and there were many old wounds on his body.
So, in order to facilitate the care of her father, Lucy finally decided to take Manette out of Paris for London.
On the way to Paris, the father and daughter met the French young Charlie Darnay and were carefully cared for by each other, which made Lucy very moved, and in her heart, she had a good feeling.
But looking at Darnay, Manette showed a strange appearance, because he was no one else, it was the son of the enemy Marquis of Ephremont,
To Mannett's slight reassurance, Darnay also resented the sins of his family, and was now planning to give up his inheritance and surname and move to England
But Darnay was a little unlucky, and soon after arriving in England, he was caught in a lawsuit, and the content of the trial was: Is Darnay a traitor to his country?
The lawyers argued endlessly in court, and many witnesses were called, including Lucy and Manette, but none of them testified that Darnay was guilty.
The most powerful assist here is a lawyer named Caton, who looks almost exactly like Darnay.
So, using my own example to show everyone, maybe Darnay just looks a little like the traitor.
Eventually, Darnay was acquitted and soon gained a foothold in England, becoming a well-respected French teacher in the region
Lucy and Manette, who had already settled in England, now lived on a street corner in London, and Mr. Manette returned to his old business and started his old business.
His medical skills and medical ethics are very good, so he is very popular with the patients, Lucy sees her father's state getting better and better, and feels that life is full of hope.
Lori often came to visit the door, treating the familiar place as his own home, except for the maid Pros, who was a little dissatisfied with the present day, because the men who tried to pursue Miss Lucy always worried her
On this day, Darnai took advantage of Lucy's absence and found Dr. Manette, who expressed his love for Lucy and wanted to mention his name and identity.
But Manette stopped him, saying he would not object if Lucy wanted to.
Of course, The pursuit of Miss Lucy is by no means the only one in Darnell, in addition to him, the lawyer Caton and Strayford, who has fought for Darnell, also have a crush on Lucy.
Among them, Caton was humbled because he was suffering from lung disease and would soon die, and Steifer was very confident.
But the confession did not succeed, because Miss Lucy was only fond of Darnay, and they were about to get married
Before the wedding, Lucy and her father were in the plane tree on the doorstep of their home
Next, spent a warm time,
They opened their hearts to each other, and Manette no longer hid from his daughter the pain of his imprisonment, thinking that he could finally face the past calmly.
But on the day of their wedding, when Manette and Darnay had talked in the house, he was still sick.
However, Manette did not show it, but waited for Lucy and her husband to leave for the newlywed trip, and then silently picked up his tools and went to repair his shoes again
A few years passed, Lucy and Darnay lived happily, and their daughter Little Lucy grew up healthy,
But Caton has never stopped loving Lucy, although he has vigorously restrained himself, but this repressed long love can be seen by everyone
At the same time, France, thousands of miles away, is in turmoil, Darnay's parents have died one after another, and his uncle, the Marquis of Eufremont, has finally been killed by the father of a peasant with a knife after crushing a peasant's child.
A revolution was brewing, and Defari's little shop was the focal point of the revolution, and Mrs. Defari kept weaving the atrocities of the nobility into scarves to convey the news, including Darnay's name
In 1789, the French Revolution finally broke out, the civilians captured the Bastille, and the nobles were sent to the guillotine one by one, and at this critical juncture, a distress letter reached Darnay's hands.
This is the handwriting of the former butler, Gabriel, who is imprisoned by the revolutionaries and is about to be sentenced to death.
Darnay was distraught that he had already given up his property and had not persecuted the poor, so why would he be the object of the revolution, but in order to rescue the butler, he went to Paris alone.
However, Darnay did not go far before he was recognized and secretly imprisoned in the Third Prison on the charge of "fugitive nobleman"
Because of the banking relationship, Lori was also in France at this time, and he witnessed the crazy actions of these "patriots" with his own eyes, and his heart inevitably shrank.
On this day, the frightened Lori was suddenly pushed open the door, and he was about to shout, and he saw that it was Manette and Lucy, and there was no doubt that the father and daughter had come here to save Darnay.
So Lowry proposed that Manette, who had been in contact with patriots, go around, and sure enough, because of his painful experience, Manette quickly gained recognition among patriots and was given a chance to visit Darnay.
Under his active maneuvering, Darnay is quickly transferred from the secret prison and locked up with ordinary prisoners, which makes Manette see hope and believe that his experience of being imprisoned will become his universal passport to help him rescue his son-in-law.
Not long after, Darnay was formally tried, and under a series of evidences, he finally self-acquitted himself and was released in court
However, Lucy did not relieve her anxiety, but whenever there was any wind and grass outside, she was nervous to the point of not being able to do it, and it turned out that a woman's intuition for predicting bad things was always accurate.
On this day, as soon as the maid Pros went out to buy something, four people broke through the door and announced that Darnay had been arrested again for a report and would be tried the next day
The next day, Darnay was taken to court, and the Patriots invited three witnesses in sequence, shockingly, including Mr. Manette.
Manette shouts that he is not a witness, but the patriots show the manuscript he wrote when he was secretly imprisoned, which records the crimes of the Darnai family.
"The last man to accuse the house of Efrey Monte to the heavens and the earth",
This is exactly what Dr. Manette once complained about, and now, according to this manuscript, the court will sentence his son-in-law, Darnai, to death within twenty-four hours
When the gavel is struck, everyone is in despair, Manette knows that he is no longer able to save Darnay, and Lucy has already fainted from crying.
But Darnay said that he did not resent his father-in-law who sent him to the execution ground, on the contrary, he finally understood Manette's love for his daughter Lucy and the pain that the other party had endured because of his family.
However, in the invisible corner, Caton quietly picked up Lucy and left
Caton is here to deliver on his promises, and he once confessed to Lucy that he would "seize every opportunity to make any sacrifice for you and your loved ones".
Therefore, in order not to make Lucy sad, Caton decided to use his appearance and Darnai's appearance to help the death row prisoner Darnai to get a golden cicada out of the shell.
He enlisted a spy to help, took the fainted Darnay out, then changed into the other person's clothes and waited for death
But just as 52 prisoners were about to be executed, a weaver found that Mrs. Defari was missing.
It turned out that she was the youngest daughter of the sharecropper who had been forced to destroy her family by the Marquis brothers, so it seemed easy to understand that she insisted on executing Darnay.
So, when Darnay was about to cut off her head, she didn't watch her enemy die, and where did she go?
Of course, Mrs. Defari did not feel that the revenge had been repaid and went to see the scenery, but secretly came to Darnay's house in an attempt to send the enemy's wife and daughter to hell together.
Fortunately, Caton had already arranged that the Lucy family had quietly left France, but Mrs. Defari had a fierce conflict with the remaining maid, Pros, and was mistakenly killed by the other side
Dickens said, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... we were all going straight up to heaven, we were all going straight to hell."
Nineteenth-century Europe was a period of rapid capitalist development, where classes were divided, the aristocracy was brutal, the common people were resentful, and the social contradictions were irreconcilable.
But "blood cannot replace hatred, let alone love, it can only make people more narrow",
It's like Manette and Caton in the book, the son of a man who buried the pain of the past for the happiness of his daughter, who married his dearest to an enemy,
One who endured endless loneliness alone because of love, and finally even gave up his precious life,
Hatred cannot dissolve hatred after all, and being trapped in the memory of suffering cannot make people live more soberly, but like Mrs. Defari, she will destroy herself together for revenge.
Because, no matter when, there is no end to retribution, and love is always more powerful than hate