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
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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
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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
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.
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Chapter XXIX
FIRE RISES
T here 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 high way 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
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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, chiseled, 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.
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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.
“Tonight?” said the mender of roads.
“Tonight,” 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
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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
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rough medley dress of homespun 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, guardhouses, 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.
The man slept on indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of
brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the pattering
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,
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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 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-by.
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 heavy-treading,
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
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showing where balustrades, arches, and windows were. Then it
soared higher, and grew broader and brighter. Soon, from a score
of the great windows, flames burst forth, and the stone faces
awakened, stared out of fire.
A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who
were left there, and there was a saddling of a horse and riding
away. There was spurring and splashing through the darkness,
and bridle was drawn in the space by the village fountain, and the
horse in a foam stood at Monsieur Gabelle’s door. “Help, Gabelle!
Help, every one!” The tocsin rang impatiently, but other help (if
that were any) there was none. The mender of roads, and two
hundred and fifty particular friends, stood with folded arms at the
fountain, looking at the pillar of fire in the sky. “It must be forty
feet high,” said they, grimly; and never moved.
The rider from the chateau, and the horse in a foam, clattered
away through the village, and galloped up the stony steep, to the
prison on the crag. At the gate, a group of officers were looking at
the fire; removed from them, a group of soldiers. “Help, gentleman
officers! The chateau is on fire; valuable objects may be saved
from the flames by timely aid! Help, help!” The officers looked
towards the soldiers who looked at the fire; gave no orders; and
answered with shrugs and biting of lips, “It must burn.”
As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street,
the village was illuminating. The mender of roads, and the two
hundred and fifty particular friends, inspired as one man and
woman by the idea of lighting up, had darted into their houses,
and were putting candles in every dull little pane of glass. The
general scarcity of everything, occasioned candles to be borrowed
in a rather peremptory manner of Monsieur Gabelle; and in a
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moment of reluctance and hesitation on that functionary’s part,
the mender of roads, once so submissive to authority, had
remarked that carriages were good to make bonfires with, and
that post-horses would roast.
The chateau was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roaring
and raging of the conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight
from the infernal regions, seemed to be blowing the edifice away.
With the rising and falling of the blaze, the stone faces showed as
if they were in torment. When great masses of stone and timber
fell, the face with the two dints in the nose became obscured: anon
struggled out of the smoke again, as if it were the face of the cruel
