A Tale of Two Cities
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 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 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 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 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.
CHAPTER 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 life, 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 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?”
“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 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 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