The novel opens in 1775, which the narrator describes as an era much like his own in its contradictions and divisions; rationality and optimism compete with “foolishness” and “despair" to create both a “season of Light” and a “season of Darkness” (5).

From here, the narrator moves on to compare France and England: “There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France” (5). In other ways, the two countries are quite similar; superstition, oppression, and violence loom large in each. The English, for instance, are preoccupied with religious prophecies and supposed hauntings even as their American colonies are on the verge of rebelling. Law and order are also in shambles, and not only because the country is plagued by highway robbers; the English courts are just as willing to execute a “wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence” as they are an “atrocious murderer” (7).

In France, meanwhile, a young man is tortured and put to death for failing to kneel to a group of passing monks. The narrator notes, however, that even as this man is being executed, the “Woodman, Fate” and the “Farmer, Death” (6) are gathering together the materials that will eventually be used to build guillotines, and to transport prisoners to them.