A Tale of Two Cities

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.



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 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, 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.

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