back against the nearest wall.
(“I really think this must be a man!” was Mr. Lorry’s breathless
reflection, simultaneously with his coming against the wall.)
“Why, look at you all!” bawled this figure, addressing the inn
servants. “Why don’t you go and fetch things, instead of standing
there staring at me? I am not so much to look at, am I? Why don’t
you go and fetch things? I’ll let you know, if you don’t bring
smelling-salts, cold water, and vinegar, quick, I will.”
There was an immediate dispersal for these restoratives, and
she softly laid the patient on a sofa, and tended her with great skill
and gentleness: calling her “my precious!” and “my bird!” and
spreading her golden hair aside over her shoulders with great
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pride and care.
“And you in brown!” she said, indignantly turning to Mr. Lorry;
“couldn’t you tell her what you had to tell her, without frightening
her to death? Look at her, with her pale face and her cold hands.
Do you call that being a Banker?”
Mr. Lorry was so exceedingly disconcerted by a question so
hard to answer, that he could only look on, at a distance, with
much feebler sympathy and humility, while the strong woman,
having banished the inn servants under the mysterious penalty of
“letting them know” something not mentioned if they stayed
there, staring, recovered her charge by a regular series of
gradations, and coaxed her to lay her drooping head upon her
shoulder.
“I hope she will do well now,” said Mr. Lorry.
“No thanks to you in brown, if she does. My darling pretty!”
“I hope,” said Mr. Lorry, after another pause of feeble
sympathy and humility, “that you accompany Miss Manette to
France?”
“A likely thing, too!” replied the strong woman. “If it was ever
intended that I should go across salt water, do you suppose
Providence would have cast my lot in an island?”
This being another question hard to answer, Mr. Jarvis Lorry
withdrew to consider it.
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
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Chapter V
THE WINE SHOP
Alarge cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the
street. The accident had happened in getting it out of a
cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had
burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine-
shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.
All the people within reach had suspended their business, or
their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough,
irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed,
one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that
approached them, had damned it into little pools; these were
surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to
its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands
joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their
shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their
fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little
mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from
women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths;
others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran;
others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here
and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new
directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed
pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-
rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry
off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud
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got taken up along with it that there might have been a scavenger
in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in
such a miraculous presence.
A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices—voices of men,
women, and children—resounded in the street while this wine
game lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much
playfulness. There was a special companionship in it, and
observable inclination on the part of every one to join some other
one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to
frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and
even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the
wine was gone, and the places where it had been most abundant
were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these
demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The
man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting,
set it in motion again; the woman who had left on a door-step the
little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the
pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child,
returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous
faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved
away, to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene that
appeared more natural to it than sunshine.
The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the
narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it
was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and
many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man
who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the
forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the
stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who
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had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a
tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched,
his head more out of a long squalid bag of a night-cap than in it,
scrawled upon a wall with his fingers dipped in muddy wine-lees—
BLOOD.
The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on
the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many
there.
And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a
momentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the
darkness of it was heavy—cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and
want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence—nobles of
great power all of them; but, most especially the last. Samples of a
people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in
the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old
people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every
doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a
garment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them
down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had
ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the
grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up
afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere.
Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched
clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into
them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was
repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that
the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless
chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal,
among its refuse, or anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription
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on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty
stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog
preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones
among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was
shred into atomies in every farthing porringer of husky chips of
potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.
Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding
street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding
streets diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all
smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a
brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the
people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of
turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of
fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white
with what they suppressed; or foreheads knitted into the likeness
of the gallows-rope they mused about enduring, or inflicting. The
trade signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were, all,
grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman painted
up only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of
meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the
wine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and
beer, and were gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was
represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons;
but, the cutler’s knives and axes were sharp and bright, the
smith’s hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker’s stock was
murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement, with their many
little reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but broke off
abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down the
middle of the street—when it ran at all: which was only after heavy
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rains, and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses.
Across the streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung
by a rope and pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these
down, and lighted, and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim
wicks swung in a sickly manner overhead, as if they were at sea.
Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and crew were in peril of
tempest.
For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that
region should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and
hunger, so long, as to conceive the idea of improving on his
method, and hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare
upon the darkness of their condition. But, the time was not come
yet; and every wind that blew over France shook the rags of the
scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took no
warning.
The wine-shop was a corner shop, better than most others in its
appearance and degree, and the master of the wine-shop had
stood outside it, in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking
on at the struggle for the lost wine. “It’s not my affair,” said he,
with a final shrug of the shoulders. “The people from the market
did it. Let them bring another.”
There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his
joke, he called to him across the way:
“Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?”
The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as is
often the way with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely
failed, as is often the way with his tribe too.
“What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?” said the
wine-shop keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with
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a handful of mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it.
“Why do you write in the public streets? Is there—tell me thou—is
there no other place to write such words in?”
In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps
accidentally, perhaps not) upon the joker’s heart. The joker
rapped it with his own, took a nimble spring upward, and came
down in a fantastic dancing attitude, with one of his stained shoes
jerked off his foot into his hand, and held out. A joker of an
extremely, not to say wolfishly practical character, he looked,
under those circumstances.
“Put it on, put it on,” said the other. “Call wine, wine; and finish
there.” With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon the joker’s
dress, such as it was—quite deliberately, as having dirtied the
hand on his account; and then re-crossed the road and entered the
wine-shop.
This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked, martial-looking man
of thirty, and he should have been of a hot temperament, for,
although it was a bitter day, he wore no coat, but carried one slung
over his shoulder. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and his
brown arms were bare to the elbows. Neither did he wear
anything more on his head than his own crisply-curling short dark
hair. He was a dark man altogether, with good eyes and a good
bold breadth between them. Good-humoured looking on the
whole, but implacable-looking, too; evidently a man of a strong
resolution and a set purpose; a man not desirable to be met,
rushing down a narrow pass with a gulf on either side, for nothing
would turn the man.
Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter
as he came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his
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own age, with a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at
anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong
features, and great composure of manner. There was a character
about Madame Defarge from which one might have predicted that
she did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the
reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being
sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright
shawl twined about her head, though not to the concealment of
her large ear-rings. Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it
down to pick her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, with her
right elbow supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge said
nothing when her lord came in, but coughed just one grain of
cough. This, in combination with the lifting of her darkly defined
eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth of a line, suggested to
her husband that he would do well to look round the shop among
the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while he
stepped over the way.
