StoryExternal resources and research often inspire authors to write about their own personal feelings. Charles Dickens' classic novel A Tale of Two Cities satirizes the French Revolution, building on his infatuation with French culture. The novel opens in the pre-revolutionary year 1775, when Lucie Manette (a classic Victorian heroine) is told that her father is alive. Dr. Manette, Lucie's father, was imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille, a prison in Paris. Even though Lucie has never met her father, she is drawn to him by love and treats him as if she has known him her whole life. Lucie along with her father returns to London to start a new life and along the way meets a man traveling under the name of Charles Darnay. Lucie and Charles fall in love and return to London with Doctor Manette. Several years later, Charles returns to his hometown of Paris, only to find that revolutionaries have taken control of France and have become the hated leaders themselves. The novel A Tale of Two Cities illustrates that intentions, ambitions, and power can take over people, turning them into hated leaders. The revolutionaries in the novel were third-class (very poor) citizens who hoped to bring justice to France. Some citizens of Paris were so poor that a bandana of wine was a child's daily meal. “Or even with handkerchiefs taken from the heads of women, which were squeezed into the mouths of infants” (Dickens 21). The aristocrats also treated the peasants badly. In chapter 7 of the first book, Gaspard's son is hit by the carriage of a rich monsignor. Instead of showing concern for the dead child, the rich man asks, “The horses there; are they okay?" (Dickens 85). Once the revolution begins, however, these patriots, drunk with abusive power, begin the extermination of the much-hated aristocrats. Power-driven peasants often became oppressors because of their intentions to establish justice, as Dickens states: [The revolutionaries] will crush humanity once more, under similar hammers, and it will writhe in the same tortured forms Sow again the same seed of rapacious license and oppression, and it will surely bear fruit according to its own species (288).This quote explains why the revolutionaries took over the aristocracy, killing innocent people like the seamstress. Using their power-driven designs they become "the same tortured forms" the indifferent aristocrats once were.