Three was nearly at his side; Madame Defarge, still heading some
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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 incoherencies, “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 lighted torch in his hands—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.”
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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
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. There was a small chimney,
heavily barred across, a few feet within. There was a heap of old
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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.
“Stop!—Look here, Jacques!”
“A. M.!” creaked 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!”
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!
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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 wine-shop 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 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
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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 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
wandering 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 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
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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 suchlike, 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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Chapter XXVIII
THE SEA STILL RISES
Haggard Saint Antoine 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.
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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 the
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
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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 three score 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 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 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
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might suck grass, when these breasts were 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 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
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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
