Tales From Dickens: A TALE OF TWO CITIES

A little more than a hundred years ago there lived in London (one of the two cities of this tale) a lovely girl of seventeen named Lucie Manette. Her mother had died when she was a baby, in France, and she lived alone with her old nurse, Miss Pross, a homely, grim guardian with hair as red as her face, who called Lucie "ladybird" and loved her very much. Miss Pross was sharp of speech and was always snapping people up as if she would bite their heads off, but, though she seldom chose to show it, she was the kindest, truest, most unselfish person in the world. Lucie had no memory of her father, and had always believed he also had died when she was a baby.

One day, however, through a Mr. Lorry, the agent of a bank, she learned a wonderful piece of news. He told her that her father was not dead, but that he had been wickedly thrown into a secret prison in Paris before she was born, and had been lost thus for eighteen long years. This prison was the Bastille -- a cold, dark building like a castle, with high gray towers, a deep moat and drawbridge, and soldiers and cannon to defend it.