These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver, exuding
patronage of the most offensive quality from every pore,
had walked before him like three sheep to the quiet corner
in Soho, and had offered as pupils to Lucie’s husband:
delicately saying ‘Halloa! here are three lumps of breadand-
cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!’
The polite rejection of the three lumps of bread-andcheese
had quite bloated Mr. Stryver with indignation,
which he afterwards turned to account in the training of
the young gentlemen, by directing them to beware of the
pride of Beggars, like that tutor-fellow. He was also in the
habit of declaiming to Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied
wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay had once put in practice to
‘catch’ him, and on the diamond-cut-diamond arts in
himself, madam, which had rendered him ‘not to be
caught.’ Some of his King’s Bench familiars, who were
occasionally parties to the full-bodied wine and the lie,
excused him for the latter by saying that he had told it so
often, that he believed it himself—which is surely such an
incorrigible aggravation of an originally bad offence, as to
justify any such offender’s being carried off to some
suitably retired spot, and there hanged out of the way.
These were among the echoes to which Lucie,
sometimes pensive, sometimes amused and laughing,
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listened in the echoing corner, until her little daughter was
six years old. How near to her heart the echoes of her
child’s tread came, and those of her own dear father’s,
always active and self-possessed, and those of her dear
husband’s, need not be told. Nor, how the lightest echo of
their united home, directed by herself with such a wise
and elegant thrift that it was more abundant than any
waste, was music to her. Nor, how there were echoes all
about her, sweet in her ears, of the many times her father
had told her that he found her more devoted to him
married (if that could be) than single, and of the many
times her husband had said to her that no cares and duties
seemed to divide her love for him or her help to him, and
asked her ‘What is the magic secret, my darling, of your
being everything to all of us, as if there were only one of
us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to have too much
to do?’
But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that
rumbled menacingly in the corner all through this space of
time. And it was now, about little Lucie’s sixth birthday,
that they began to have an awful sound, as of a great storm
in France with a dreadful sea rising.
On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred
and eighty-nine, Mr. Lorry came in late, from Tellson’s,
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and sat himself down by Lucie and her husband in the
dark window. It was a hot, wild night, and they were all
three reminded of the old Sunday night when they had
looked at the lightning from the same place.
‘I began to think,’ said Mr. Lorry, pushing his brown
wig back, ‘that I should have to pass the night at Tellson’s.
We have been so full of business all day, that we have not
known what to do first, or which way to turn. There is
such an uneasiness in Paris, that we have actually a run of
confidence upon us! Our customers over there, seem not
to be able to confide their property to us fast enough.
There is positively a mania among some of them for
sending it to England.’
‘That has a bad look,’ said Darnay—
‘A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay? Yes, but we
don’t know what reason there is in it. People are so
unreasonable! Some of us at Tellson’s are getting old, and
we really can’t be troubled out of the ordinary course
without due occasion.’
‘Still,’ said Darnay, ‘you know how gloomy and
threatening the sky is.’
‘I know that, to be sure,’ assented Mr. Lorry, trying to
persuade himself that his sweet temper was soured, and
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that he grumbled, ‘but I am determined to be peevish after
my long day’s botheration. Where is Manette?’
‘Here he is,’ said the Doctor, entering the dark room at
the moment.
‘I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and
forebodings by which I have been surrounded all day long,
have made me nervous without reason. You are not going
out, I hope?’
‘No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you
like,’ said the Doctor.
‘I don’t think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am
not fit to be pitted against you to-night. Is the teaboard
still there, Lucie? I can’t see.’
‘Of course, it has been kept for you.’
‘Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed?’
‘And sleeping soundly.’
‘That’s right; all safe and well! I don’t know why
anything should be otherwise than safe and well here,
thank God; but I have been so put out all day, and I am
not as young as I was! My tea, my dear! Thank ye. Now,
come and take your place in the circle, and let us sit quiet,
and hear the echoes about which you have your theory.’
‘Not a theory; it was a fancy.’
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‘A fancy, then, my wise pet,’ said Mr. Lorry, patting
her hand. ‘They are very numerous and very loud,
though, are they not? Only hear them!’
Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their
way into anybody’s life, footsteps not easily made clean
again if once stained red, the footsteps raging in Saint
Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in the dark London
window.
Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky
mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro, with frequent
gleams of light above the billowy heads, where steel blades
and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous roar arose
from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked
arms struggled in the air like shrivelled branches of trees in
a winter wind: all the fingers convulsively clutching at
every weapon or semblance of a weapon that was thrown
up from the depths below, no matter how far off.
Who gave them out, whence they last came, where
they began, through what agency they crookedly quivered
and jerked, scores at a time, over the heads of the crowd,
like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throng could have
told; but, muskets were being distributed—so were
cartridges, powder, and ball, bars of iron and wood,
knives, axes, pikes, every weapon that distracted ingenuity
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could discover or devise. People who could lay hold of
nothing else, set themselves with bleeding hands to force
stones and bricks out of their places in walls. Every pulse
and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain and at
high-fever heat. Every living creature there held life as of
no account, and was demented with a passionate readiness
to sacrifice it.
As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so,
all this raging circled round Defarge’s wine-shop, and
every human drop in the caldron had a tendency to be
sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already
begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued
arms, thrust this man back, dragged this man forward,
disarmed one to arm another, laboured and strove in the
thickest of the uproar.
‘Keep near to me, Jacques Three,’ cried Defarge; ‘and
do you, Jacques One and Two, separate and put
yourselves at the head of as many of these patriots as you
can. Where is my wife?’
‘Eh, well! Here you see me!’ said madame, composed
as ever, but not knitting to-day. Madame’s resolute right
hand was occupied with an axe, in place of the usual softer
implements, and in her girdle were a pistol and a cruel
knife.
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‘Where do you go, my wife?’
‘I go,’ said madame, ‘with you at present. You shall see
me at the head of women, by-and-bye.’
‘Come, then!’ cried Defarge, in a resounding voice.
‘Patriots and friends, we are ready! The Bastille!’
With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France
had been shaped into the detested word, the living sea
rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the
city to that point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums beating, the
sea raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack
began.
Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls,
eight great towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke.
Through the fire and through the smoke—in the fire and
in the smoke, for the sea cast him up against a cannon, and
on the instant he became a cannonier—Defarge of the
wine-shop worked like a manful soldier, Two fierce
hours.
Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls,
eight great towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One
drawbridge down! ‘Work, comrades all, work! Work,
Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand,
Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty
Thousand; in the name of all the Angels or the Devils—
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which you prefer—work!’ Thus Defarge of the wineshop,
still at his gun, which had long grown hot.
‘To me, women!’ cried madame his wife. ‘What! We
can kill as well as the men when the place is taken!’ And
to her, with a shrill thirsty cry, trooping women variously
armed, but all armed alike in hunger and revenge.
Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still the deep
ditch, the single drawbridge, the massive stone walls, and
the eight great towers. Slight displacements of the raging
sea, made by the falling wounded. Flashing weapons,
blazing torches, smoking waggonloads of wet straw, hard
work at neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks,
volleys, execrations, bravery without stint, boom smash
and rattle, and the furious sounding of the living sea; but,
still the deep ditch, and the single drawbridge, and the
massive stone walls, and the eight great towers, and still
Defarge of the wine-shop at his gun, grown doubly hot by
the service of Four fierce hours.
A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley—this
dimly perceptible through the raging storm, nothing
audible in it—suddenly the sea rose immeasurably wider
and higher, and swept Defarge of the wine-shop over the
lowered drawbridge, past the massive stone outer walls, in
among the eight great towers surrendered!
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So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on,
that even to draw his breath or turn his head was as
impracticable as if he had been struggling in the surf at the
South Sea, until he was landed in the outer courtyard of
the Bastille. There, against an angle of a wall, he made a
struggle to look about him. Jacques Three was nearly at
his side; Madame Defarge, still heading some of her
women, was visible in the inner distance, and her knife
was in her hand. Everywhere was tumult, exultation,
deafening and maniacal bewilderment, astounding noise,
yet furious dumb-show.
‘The Prisoners!’
‘The Records!’
‘The secret cells!’
‘The instruments of torture!’
‘The Prisoners!’
Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherences, ‘The
Prisoners!’ was the cry most taken up by the sea that
rushed in, as if there were an eternity of people, as well as
of time and space. When the foremost billows rolled past,
bearing the prison officers with them, and threatening
them all with instant death if any secret nook remained
undisclosed, Defarge laid his strong hand on the breast of
one of these men—a man with a grey head, who had a
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lighted torch in his hand— separated him from the rest,
and got him between himself and the wall.
‘Show me the North Tower!’ said Defarge. ‘Quick!’
‘I will faithfully,’ replied the man, ‘if you will come
with me. But there is no one there.’
‘What is the meaning of One Hundred and Five,
North Tower?’ asked Defarge. ‘Quick!’
‘The meaning, monsieur?’
‘Does it mean a captive, or a place of captivity? Or do
you mean that I shall strike you dead?’
‘Kill him!’ croaked Jacques Three, who had come close
up.
‘Monsieur, it is a cell.’
‘Show it me!’
‘Pass this way, then.’
Jacques Three, with his usual craving on him, and
evidently disappointed by the dialogue taking a turn that
did not seem to promise bloodshed, held by Defarge’s arm
as he held by the turnkey’s. Their three heads had been
close together during this brief discourse, and it had been
as much as they could do to hear one another, even then:
so tremendous was the noise of the living ocean, in its
irruption into the Fortress, and its inundation of the courts
and passages and staircases. All around outside, too, it beat
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the walls with a deep, hoarse roar, from which,
occasionally, some partial shouts of tumult broke and
leaped into the air like spray.
Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had
never shone, past hideous doors of dark dens and cages,
down cavernous flights of steps, and again up steep rugged
ascents of stone and brick, more like dry waterfalls than
staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three, linked
hand and arm, went with all the speed they could make.
Here and there, especially at first, the inundation started
on them and swept by; but when they had done
descending, and were winding and climbing up a tower,
they were alone. Hemmed in here by the massive
thickness of walls and arches, the storm within the fortress
and without was only audible to them in a dull, subdued
way, as if the noise out of which they had come had
almost destroyed their sense of hearing.
The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a key in a
clashing lock, swung the door slowly open, and said, as
they all bent their heads and passed in:
‘One hundred and five, North Tower!’
There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed window
high in the wall, with a stone screen before it, so that the
sky could be only seen by stooping low and looking up.
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There was a small chimney, heavily barred across, a few
feet within. There was a heap of old feathery wood-ashes
on the hearth. There was a stool, and table, and a straw
bed. There were the four blackened walls, and a rusted
iron ring in one of them.
‘Pass that torch slowly along these walls, that I may see
them,’ said Defarge to the turnkey.
The man obeyed, and Defarge followed the light
closely with his eyes.
‘Stop!—Look here, Jacques!’
‘A. M.!’ croaked Jacques Three, as he read greedily.
‘Alexandre Manette,’ said Defarge in his ear, following
the letters with his swart forefinger, deeply engrained with
gunpowder. ‘And here he wrote ‘a poor physician.’ And it
was he, without doubt, who scratched a calendar on this
stone. What is that in your hand? A crowbar? Give it me!’
He had still the linstock of his gun in his own hand. He
made a sudden exchange of the two instruments, and
turning on the worm-eaten stool and table, beat them to
pieces in a few blows.
‘Hold the light higher!’ he said, wrathfully, to the
turnkey. ‘Look among those fragments with care, Jacques.
And see! Here is my knife,’ throwing it to him; ‘rip open
that bed, and search the straw. Hold the light higher, you!’
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With a menacing look at the turnkey he crawled upon
the hearth, and, peering up the chimney, struck and prised
at its sides with the crowbar, and worked at the iron
grating across it. In a few minutes, some mortar and dust
came dropping down, which he averted his face to avoid;
and in it, and in the old wood-ashes, and in a crevice in
the chimney into which his weapon had slipped or
wrought itself, he groped with a cautious touch.
‘Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the straw,
Jacques?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Let us collect them together, in the middle of the cell.
So! Light them, you!’
The turnkey fired the little pile, which blazed high and
hot. Stooping again to come out at the low-arched door,
they left it burning, and retraced their way to the
courtyard; seeming to recover their sense of hearing as
they came down, until they were in the raging flood once
more.
They found it surging and tossing, in quest of Defarge
himself. Saint Antoine was clamorous to have its wineshop
keeper foremost in the guard upon the governor
who had defended the Bastille and shot the people.
Otherwise, the governor would not be marched to the
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Hotel de Ville for judgment. Otherwise, the governor
would escape, and the people’s blood (suddenly of some
value, after many years of worthlessness) be unavenged.
In the howling universe of passion and contention that
seemed to encompass this grim old officer conspicuous in
his grey coat and red decoration, there was but one quite
steady figure, and that was a woman’s. ‘See, there is my
husband!’ she cried, pointing him out. ‘See Defarge!’ She
stood immovable close to the grim old officer, and
remained immovable close to him; remained immovable
close to him through the streets, as Defarge and the rest
bore him along; remained immovable close to him when
he was got near his destination, and began to be struck at
from behind; remained immovable close to him when the
long-gathering rain of stabs and blows fell heavy; was so
close to him when he dropped dead under it, that,
suddenly animated, she put her foot upon his neck, and
with her cruel knife—long ready—hewed off his head.
The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was to
execute his horrible idea of hoisting up men for lamps to
show what he could be and do. Saint Antoine’s blood was
up, and the blood of tyranny and domination by the iron
hand was down—down on the steps of the Hotel de Ville
where the governor’s body lay—down on the sole of the
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shoe of Madame Defarge where she had trodden on the
body to steady it for mutilation. ‘Lower the lamp yonder!’
cried Saint Antoine, after glaring round for a new means
of death; ‘here is one of his soldiers to be left on guard!’
The swinging sentinel was posted, and the sea rushed on.
The sea of black and threatening waters, and of
destructive upheaving of wave against wave, whose depths
were yet unfathomed and whose forces were yet
unknown. The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying
shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the
furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no
mark on them.
But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and
furious expression was in vivid life, there were two groups
of faces—each seven in number —so fixedly contrasting
with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore more
memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners,
suddenly released by the storm that had burst their tomb,
were carried high overhead: all scared, all lost, all
wondering and amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and
those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits. Other
seven faces there were, carried higher, seven dead faces,
whose drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the
Last Day. Impassive faces, yet with a suspended—not an
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abolished—expression on them; faces, rather, in a fearful
pause, as having yet to raise the dropped lids of the eyes,
and bear witness with the bloodless lips, ‘THOU DIDST
IT!’
Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the
keys of the accursed fortress of the eight strong towers,
some discovered letters and other memorials of prisoners
of old time, long dead of broken hearts,—such, and
such—like, the loudly echoing footsteps of Saint Antoine
escort through the Paris streets in mid-July, one thousand
seven hundred and eighty-nine. Now, Heaven defeat the
fancy of Lucie Darnay, and keep these feet far out of her
life! For, they are headlong, mad, and dangerous; and in
the years so long after the breaking of the cask at Defarge’s
wine-shop door, they are not easily purified when once
stained red.
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XXII
The Sea Still Rises
Haggard Saint Antoine had had only one exultant
week, in which to soften his modicum of hard and bitter
bread to such extent as he could, with the relish of
fraternal embraces and congratulations, when Madame
Defarge sat at her counter, as usual, presiding over the
customers. Madame Defarge wore no rose in her head, for
the great brotherhood of Spies had become, even in one
short week, extremely chary of trusting themselves to the
saint’s mercies. The lamps across his streets had a
portentously elastic swing with them.
Madame Defarge, with her arms folded, sat in the
morning light and heat, contemplating the wine-shop and
the street. In both, there were several knots of loungers,
squalid and miserable, but now with a manifest sense of
power enthroned on their distress. The raggedest nightcap,
awry on the wretchedest head, had this crooked
significance in it: ‘I know how hard it has grown for me,
the wearer of this, to support life in myself; but do you
know how easy it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to
destroy life in you?’ Every lean bare arm, that had been
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without work before, had this work always ready for it
now, that it could strike. The fingers of the knitting
women were vicious, with the experience that they could
tear. There was a change in the appearance of Saint
Antoine; the image had been hammering into this for
hundreds of years, and the last finishing blows had told
mightily on the expression.
Madame Defarge sat observing it, with such suppressed
approval as was to be desired in the leader of the Saint
Antoine women. One of her sisterhood knitted beside her.
The short, rather plump wife of a starved grocer, and the
mother of two children withal, this lieutenant had already
earned the complimentary name of The Vengeance.
‘Hark!’ said The Vengeance. ‘Listen, then! Who
comes?’
As if a train of powder laid from the outermost bound
of Saint Antoine Quarter to the wine-shop door, had been
suddenly fired, a fast-spreading murmur came rushing
along.
‘It is Defarge,’ said madame. ‘Silence, patriots!’
Defarge came in breathless, pulled off a red cap he
wore, and looked around him! ‘Listen, everywhere!’ said
madame again. ‘Listen to him!’ Defarge stood, panting,
against a background of eager eyes and open mouths,
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formed outside the door; all those within the wine-shop
had sprung to their feet.
‘Say then, my husband. What is it?’
‘News from the other world!’
‘How, then?’ cried madame, contemptuously. ‘The
other world?’
‘Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the
famished people that they might eat grass, and who died,
and went to Hell?’
‘Everybody!’ from all throats.
‘The news is of him. He is among us!’
‘Among us!’ from the universal throat again. ‘And
dead?’
‘Not dead! He feared us so much—and with reason—
that he caused himself to be represented as dead, and had a
grand mock-funeral. But they have found him alive,
hiding in the country, and have brought him in. I have
seen him but now, on his way to the Hotel de Ville, a
prisoner. I have said that he had reason to fear us. Say all!
HAD he reason?’
Wretched old sinner of more than threescore years and
ten, if he had never known it yet, he would have known
it in his heart of hearts if he could have heard the
answering cry.
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A moment of profound silence followed. Defarge and
his wife looked steadfastly at one another. The Vengeance
stooped, and the jar of a drum was heard as she moved it
at her feet behind the counter.
‘Patriots!’ said Defarge, in a determined voice, ‘are we
ready?’
Instantly Madame Defarge’s knife was in her girdle; the
drum was beating in the streets, as if it and a drummer had
flown together by magic; and The Vengeance, uttering
terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about her head like
all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to
house, rousing the women.
The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger
with which they looked from windows, caught up what
arms they had, and came pouring down into the streets;
but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From
such household occupations as their bare poverty yielded,
from their children, from their aged and their sick
crouching on the bare ground famished and naked, they
ran out with streaming hair, urging one another, and
themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions.
Villain Foulon taken, my sister! Old Foulon taken, my
mother! Miscreant Foulon taken, my daughter! Then, a
score of others ran into the midst of these, beating their
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breasts, tearing their hair, and screaming, Foulon alive!
Foulon who told the starving people they might eat grass!
Foulon who told my old father that he might eat grass,
when I had no bread to give him! Foulon who told my
baby it might suck grass, when these breasts where dry
with want! O mother of God, this Foulon! O Heaven our
suffering! Hear me, my dead baby and my withered father:
I swear on my knees, on these stones, to avenge you on
Foulon! Husbands, and brothers, and young men, Give us
the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, Give us
the heart of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon,
Rend Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, that
grass may grow from him! With these cries, numbers of
the women, lashed into blind frenzy, whirled about,
striking and tearing at their own friends until they dropped
into a passionate swoon, and were only saved by the men
belonging to them from being trampled under foot.
Nevertheless, not a moment was lost; not a moment!
This Foulon was at the Hotel de Ville, and might be
loosed. Never, if Saint Antoine knew his own sufferings,
insults, and wrongs! Armed men and women flocked out
of the Quarter so fast, and drew even these last dregs after
them with such a force of suction, that within a quarter of
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an hour there was not a human creature in Saint Antoine’s
bosom but a few old crones and the wailing children.
No. They were all by that time choking the Hall of
Examination where this old man, ugly and wicked, was,
and overflowing into the adjacent open space and streets.
The Defarges, husband and wife, The Vengeance, and
Jacques Three, were in the first press, and at no great
distance from him in the Hall.
‘See!’ cried madame, pointing with her knife. ‘See the
old villain bound with ropes. That was well done to tie a
bunch of grass upon his back. Ha, ha! That was well done.
Let him eat it now!’ Madame put her knife under her arm,
and clapped her hands as at a play.
The people immediately behind Madame Defarge,
explaining the cause of her satisfaction to those behind
them, and those again explaining to others, and those to
others, the neighbouring streets resounded with the
clapping of hands. Similarly, during two or three hours of
drawl, and the winnowing of many bushels of words,
Madame Defarge’s frequent expressions of impatience
were taken up, with marvellous quickness, at a distance:
the more readily, because certain men who had by some
wonderful exercise of agility climbed up the external
architecture to look in from the windows, knew Madame
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Defarge well, and acted as a telegraph between her and the
crowd outside the building.
At length the sun rose so high that it struck a kindly ray
as of hope or protection, directly down upon the old
prisoner’s head. The favour was too much to bear; in an
instant the barrier of dust and chaff that had stood
surprisingly long, went to the winds, and Saint Antoine
had got him!
It was known directly, to the furthest confines of the
crowd. Defarge had but sprung over a railing and a table,
and folded the miserable wretch in a deadly embrace—
Madame Defarge had but followed and turned her hand in
one of the ropes with which he was tied—The Vengeance
and Jacques Three were not yet up with them, and the
men at the windows had not yet swooped into the Hall,
like birds of prey from their high perches—when the cry
seemed to go up, all over the city, ‘Bring him out! Bring
him to the lamp!’
Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the
building; now, on his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his
back; dragged, and struck at, and stifled by the bunches of
grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds
of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always
entreating and beseeching for mercy; now full of
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vehement agony of action, with a small clear space about
him as the people drew one another back that they might
see; now, a log of dead wood drawn through a forest of
legs; he was hauled to the nearest street corner where one
of the fatal lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let
him go—as a cat might have done to a mouse—and
silently and composedly looked at him while they made
ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately
screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling
out to have him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he
went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him
shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope broke, and
they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful,
and held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with
grass enough in the mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance
at the sight of.
Nor was this the end of the day’s bad work, for Saint
Antoine so shouted and danced his angry blood up, that it
boiled again, on hearing when the day closed in that the
son-in-law of the despatched, another of the people’s
enemies and insulters, was coming into Paris under a guard
five hundred strong, in cavalry alone. Saint Antoine wrote
his crimes on flaring sheets of paper, seized him—would
have torn him out of the breast of an army to bear Foulon
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company—set his head and heart on pikes, and carried the
three spoils of the day, in Wolf-procession through the
streets.
Not before dark night did the men and women come
back to the children, wailing and breadless. Then, the
miserable bakers’ shops were beset by long files of them,
patiently waiting to buy bad bread; and while they waited
with stomachs faint and empty, they beguiled the time by
embracing one another on the triumphs of the day, and
achieving them again in gossip. Gradually, these strings of
ragged people shortened and frayed away; and then poor
lights began to shine in high windows, and slender fires
were made in the streets, at which neighbours cooked in
common, afterwards supping at their doors.
Scanty and insufficient suppers those, and innocent of
meat, as of most other sauce to wretched bread. Yet,
human fellowship infused some nourishment into the
flinty viands, and struck some sparks of cheerfulness out of
them. Fathers and mothers who had had their full share in
the worst of the day, played gently with their meagre
children; and lovers, with such a world around them and
before them, loved and hoped.
It was almost morning, when Defarge’s wine-shop
parted with its last knot of customers, and Monsieur
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Defarge said to madame his wife, in husky tones, while
fastening the door:
‘At last it is come, my dear!’
‘Eh well!’ returned madame. ‘Almost.’
Saint Antoine slept, the Defarges slept: even The
Vengeance slept with her starved grocer, and the drum
was at rest. The drum’s was the only voice in Saint
Antoine that blood and hurry had not changed. The
Vengeance, as custodian of the drum, could have wakened
him up and had the same speech out of him as before the
Bastille fell, or old Foulon was seized; not so with the
hoarse tones of the men and women in Saint Antoine’s
bosom.
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XXIII
Fire Rises
There was a change on the village where the fountain
fell, and where the mender of roads went forth daily to
hammer out of the stones on the highway such morsels of
bread as might serve for patches to hold his poor ignorant
soul and his poor reduced body together. The prison on
the crag was not so dominant as of yore; there were
soldiers to guard it, but not many; there were officers to
guard the soldiers, but not one of them knew what his
men would do—beyond this: that it would probably not
be what he was ordered.
Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but
desolation. Every green leaf, every blade of grass and blade
of grain, was as shrivelled and poor as the miserable
people. Everything was bowed down, dejected, oppressed,
and broken. Habitations, fences, domesticated animals,
men, women, children, and the soil that bore them—all
worn out.
Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual
gentleman) was a national blessing, gave a chivalrous tone
to things, was a polite example of luxurious and shining
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fife, and a great deal more to equal purpose; nevertheless,
Monseigneur as a class had, somehow or other, brought
things to this. Strange that Creation, designed expressly for
Monseigneur, should be so soon wrung dry and squeezed
out! There must be something short-sighted in the eternal
arrangements, surely! Thus it was, however; and the last
drop of blood having been extracted from the flints, and
the last screw of the rack having been turned so often that
its purchase crumbled, and it now turned and turned with
nothing to bite, Monseigneur began to run away from a
phenomenon so low and unaccountable.
But, this was not the change on the village, and on
many a village like it. For scores of years gone by,
Monseigneur had squeezed it and wrung it, and had
seldom graced it with his presence except for the pleasures
of the chase—now, found in hunting the people; now,
found in hunting the beasts, for whose preservation
Monseigneur made edifying spaces of barbarous and barren
wilderness. No. The change consisted in the appearance of
strange faces of low caste, rather than in the disappearance
of the high caste, chiselled, and otherwise beautified and
beautifying features of Monseigneur.
For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked,
solitary, in the dust, not often troubling himself to reflect
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that dust he was and to dust he must return, being for the
most part too much occupied in thinking how little he
had for supper and how much more he would eat if he
had it—in these times, as he raised his eyes from his lonely
labour, and viewed the prospect, he would see some
rough figure approaching on foot, the like of which was
once a rarity in those parts, but was now a frequent
presence. As it advanced, the mender of roads would
discern without surprise, that it was a shaggy-haired man,
of almost barbarian aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that were
clumsy even to the eyes of a mender of roads, grim,
rough, swart, steeped in the mud and dust of many
highways, dank with the marshy moisture of many low
grounds, sprinkled with the thorns and leaves and moss of
many byways through woods.
Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in
the July weather, as he sat on his heap of stones under a
bank, taking such shelter as he could get from a shower of
hail.
The man looked at him, looked at the village in the
hollow, at the mill, and at the prison on the crag. When
he had identified these objects in what benighted mind he
had, he said, in a dialect that was just intelligible:
‘How goes it, Jacques?’
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‘All well, Jacques.’
‘Touch then!’
They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap
of stones.
‘No dinner?’
‘Nothing but supper now,’ said the mender of roads,
with a hungry face.
‘It is the fashion,’ growled the man. ‘I meet no dinner
anywhere.’
He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with
flint and steel, pulled at it until it was in a bright glow:
then, suddenly held it from him and dropped something
into it from between his finger and thumb, that blazed and
went out in a puff of smoke.
‘Touch then.’ It was the turn of the mender of roads to
say it this time, after observing these operations. They
again joined hands.
‘To-night?’ said the mender of roads.
‘To-night,’ said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.
‘Where?’
‘Here.’
He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones
looking silently at one another, with the hail driving in
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between them like a pigmy charge of bayonets, until the
sky began to clear over the village.
‘Show me!’ said the traveller then, moving to the brow
of the hill.
‘See!’ returned the mender of roads, with extended
finger. ‘You go down here, and straight through the street,
and past the fountain—‘
‘To the Devil with all that!’ interrupted the other,
rolling his eye over the landscape. ‘I go through no streets
and past no fountains. Well?’
‘Well! About two leagues beyond the summit of that
hill above the village.’
‘Good. When do you cease to work?’
‘At sunset.’
‘Will you wake me, before departing? I have walked
two nights without resting. Let me finish my pipe, and I
shall sleep like a child. Will you wake me?’
‘Surely.’
The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast,
slipped off his great wooden shoes, and lay down on his
back on the heap of stones. He was fast asleep directly.
As the road-mender plied his dusty labour, and the
hail-clouds, rolling away, revealed bright bars and streaks
of sky which were responded to by silver gleams upon the
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landscape, the little man (who wore a red cap now, in
place of his blue one) seemed fascinated by the figure on
the heap of stones. His eyes were so often turned towards
it, that he used his tools mechanically, and, one would
have said, to very poor account. The bronze face, the
shaggy black hair and beard, the coarse woollen red cap,
the rough medley dress of home-spun stuff and hairy skins
of beasts, the powerful frame attenuated by spare living,
and the sullen and desperate compression of the lips in
sleep, inspired the mender of roads with awe. The traveller
had travelled far, and his feet were footsore, and his ankles
chafed and bleeding; his great shoes, stuffed with leaves
and grass, had been heavy to drag over the many long
leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he
himself was into sores. Stooping down beside him, the
road-mender tried to get a peep at secret weapons in his
breast or where not; but, in vain, for he slept with his arms
crossed upon him, and set as resolutely as his lips. Fortified
towns with their stockades, guard-houses, gates, trenches,
and drawbridges, seemed to the mender of roads, to be so
much air as against this figure. And when he lifted his eyes
from it to the horizon and looked around, he saw in his
small fancy similar figures, stopped by no obstacle, tending
to centres all over France.
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The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and
intervals of brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow,
to the paltering lumps of dull ice on his body and the
diamonds into which the sun changed them, until the sun
was low in the west, and the sky was glowing. Then, the
mender of roads having got his tools together and all
things ready to go down into the village, roused him.
‘Good!’ said the sleeper, rising on his elbow. ‘Two
leagues beyond the summit of the hill?’
‘About.’
‘About. Good!’
The mender of roads went home, with the dust going
on before him according to the set of the wind, and was
soon at the fountain, squeezing himself in among the lean
kine brought there to drink, and appearing even to
whisper to them in his whispering to all the village. When
the village had taken its poor supper, it did not creep to
bed, as it usually did, but came out of doors again, and
remained there. A curious contagion of whispering was
upon it, and also, when it gathered together at the
fountain in the dark, another curious contagion of looking
expectantly at the sky in one direction only. Monsieur
Gabelle, chief functionary of the place, became uneasy;
went out on his house-top alone, and looked in that
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direction too; glanced down from behind his chimneys at
the darkening faces by the fountain below, and sent word
to the sacristan who kept the keys of the church, that there
might be need to ring the tocsin by-and-bye.
The night deepened. The trees environing the old
chateau, keeping its solitary state apart, moved in a rising
wind, as though they threatened the pile of building
massive and dark in the gloom. Up the two terrace flights
of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like
a swift messenger rousing those within; uneasy rushes of
wind went through the hall, among the old spears and
knives, and passed lamenting up the stairs, and shook the
curtains of the bed where the last Marquis had slept. East,
West, North, and South, through the woods, four heavytreading,
unkempt figures crushed the high grass and
cracked the branches, striding on cautiously to come
together in the courtyard. Four lights broke out there, and
moved away in different directions, and all was black
again.
But, not for long. Presently, the chateau began to make
itself strangely visible by some light of its own, as though it
were growing luminous. Then, a flickering streak played
behind the architecture of the front, picking out
transparent places, and showing where balustrades, arches,
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