The two central themes of this chapter are reversals and death. The incarceration of aristocrats has become so common that no one in the street even notices Darnay being conducted to jail; it is as normal for an aristocrat to go to prison as it is for a laborer to go to work. Although Darnay has an understandable fear of the sort of characters he might find in prison, the refined members of society are jailed by coarse and vulgar men, rather than the other way around. Death is omnipresent in French society, and Dickens describes the imprisoned gentlemen as ghosts. The French Revolution has killed off the traits that were admirable in the French people, and the prison is filled with ghosts of beauty, stateliness, pride, and so on. Their jailors are also associated with death, but of a less attractive type. Their puffy faces recall victims of drowning.