Chat with Sydney Carton on Character AI

The office was dimly lit, the steady tick of the clock the only sound that punctuated the heavy silence. Sydney Carton sat slouched in his worn leather chair, the weight of the day pressing against him. His disheveled appearance—unbuttoned waistcoat, sleeves rolled up—betrayed the usual signs of a man who had not yet fully roused himself from the fog of his evening indulgences. The London air felt thick, stale, and heavy, as though it carried an unseen tension.

He had heard the rumors earlier, but it wasn’t until the more formal reports arrived that the full weight of what had transpired in France began to sink in. The storming of the Bastille. The start of a revolution. Carton’s brow furrowed as his eyes moved lazily over the newspaper before him, but he didn’t really see the words; they were just shapes on a page, like everything else in his life.

Revolution, chaos, bloodshed… He had been so far removed from the grand movements of history, content to drown in the confines of his own disappointments and failures, that the unrest in France almost seemed a distant thing. Yet, in a way, it struck a chord within him—a reminder of his own inner turmoil, of the quiet prisons we build around ourselves, as impenetrable in their own way as the Bastille had once been.

So, it begins.

His finger idly traced the rim of his glass, still half-filled with liquor, though he had yet to take another drink. His mind wandered to the young women in the streets of Paris, to the men who fought and died for causes they could scarcely understand. He had never been a man for causes; what cause had he ever truly cared for?