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 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 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.

CHAPTER XXII

THE SEA STILL RISES

GGARD Saint Antoine had had only one exultant

HAGGAR

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 the Saint Antoine quarter to the wine-shop door had been suddenly fired, a fast-spreading murmur came rushing along.

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"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 ?" then ?"

The other world?"

cried madame, contemptuously.

"Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished people that they might eat grass, and who died and went to hell?"

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"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 Hôtel 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, we ready?"

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are

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 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 Hôtel 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 That was well done to

ropes.

Ha, ha! That was

tie a bunch of grass upon his back. 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