A Tale of Two Cities

Here's a half-formed thought, about Dickens's best-selling novel. A city is a city if it has a Cathedral (amongst other, perhaps ill-defined, descriptors). The cathedrals for these two cities are St Paul's and Notre Dame, respectively. As if (Dickens is saying) England is governed by the Pauline principle of being born again, where France is under the control of a monstrous-maternal parody of Mary, Madame Therese Defarge.