How to pronounce “it was the best of times” in English

Had you asked me a few years ago, before I started researching this book, how does the Constitution begin?I may have said, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Which, by the way, is not altogether untrue if you think about what happened in 1787.But an even better answer to the question of why I rewrote the Constitution is this.