• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘Bravo!’ said Defarge, clapping him on the back when it was over, like a patron; ‘you are a good boy!’

The mender of roads was now coming to himself, and was mistrustful of having made a mistake in his late demonstrations; but no.

‘You are the fellow we want,’ said Defarge, in his ear; ‘you make these fools believe that it will last for ever. Then, they are the more insolent, and it is the nearer ended.’

‘Hey!’ cried the mender of roads, reflectively; ‘that’s true.’

‘These fools know nothing. While they despise your breath, and would stop it for ever and ever, in you or in a hundred like you rather than in one of their own horses or dogs, they only know what your breath tells them. Let it deceive them, then, a little longer; it cannot deceive them too much.’

Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client, and nodded in confirmation.

‘As to you,’ said she, ‘you would shout and shed tears for anything, if it made a show and a noise. Say! Would you not?’

‘Truly, madame, I think so. For the moment.’

‘If you were shown a great heap of dolls, and were set upon them to pluck them to pieces and despoil them for your own advantage, you would pick out the richest and gayest. Say! Would you not?’

‘Truly yes, madame.’

‘Yes. And if you were shown a flock of birds unable to fly, and were set upon them to strip them of their feathers for your own advantage, you would set upon the birds of the finest feathers; would you not?’

‘It is true, madame.’

‘You have seen both dolls and birds to-day,’ said Madame Defarge, with a wave of her hand towards the place where they had last been apparent; ‘now, go home!’

[END OF INSTALMENT 14]

CHAPTER 16

Still Knitting

Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned amicably to the bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled through the darkness, and through the dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by the wayside, slowly tending towards that point of the compass where the château of Monsieur the Marquis, now in his grave, listened to the whispering trees. Such ample leisure had the stone faces, now, for listening to the trees and to the fountain, that the few village scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat and fragments of dead stick to burn, strayed within sight of the great stone court-yard and terrace staircase, had it borne in upon their starved fancy that the expression of the faces was altered. A rumour just lived in the village – had a faint and bare existence there, as its people had – that when the knife struck home, the faces changed, from faces of pride to faces of anger and pain; also, that when that dangling figure was hauled up forty feet above the fountain, they changed again, and bore a cruel look of being avenged, which they would henceforth bear for ever. In the stone face over the great window of the bed-chamber where the murder was done, two fine dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose, which everybody recognised, and which nobody had seen of old; and on the scarce occasions when two or three ragged peasants emerged from the crowd to take a hurried peep at Monsieur the Marquis petrified, a skinny finger would not have pointed to it for a minute, before they all started away among the moss and leaves, like the more fortunate hares who could find a living there.

Château and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the stone floor and the pure water in the village well – thousands of acres of land – a whole province of France – all France itself – lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. So does a whole world with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.

The Defarges, husband and wife,