The wine-shop keeper accordingly rolled his eyes about, until
they rested upon an elderly gentleman and a young lady, who
were seated in a corner. Other company were there; two playing
cards, two playing dominoes, three standing by the counter
lengthening out a short supply of wine. As he passed behind the
counter, he took notice that the elderly gentleman said in a look to
the young lady, “This is our man.”
“What the devil do you do in that galley there?” said Monsieur
Defarge to himself; “I don’t know you.”
But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into
discourse with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at
the counter.
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“How goes it, Jacques?” said one of these three to Monsieur
Defarge. “Is all the spilt wine swallowed?”
“Every drop, Jacques,” answered Monsieur Defarge.
When this interchange of christian name was effected, Madame
Defarge, picking her teeth with her toothpick, coughed another
grain of cough, and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another
line.
“It is not often,” said the second of the three, addressing
Monsieur Defarge, “that many of these miserable beasts know the
taste of wine, or of anything but black bread and death. Is it not so,
Jacques?”
“It is so, Jacques,” Monsieur Defarge returned. At this second
interchange of the christian name, Madame Defarge, still using
her toothpick with profound composure, coughed another grain of
cough, and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.
The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his empty
drinking vessel and smacked his lips.
“Ah! So much the worse! A bitter taste it is that such poor cattle
always have in their mouths, and hard lives they live, Jacques. Am
I right, Jacques?”
“You are right, Jacques,” was the response of Monsieur
Defarge.
This third interchange of the christian name was completed at
the moment when Madame Defarge put her toothpick by, kept her
eyebrows up, and slightly rustled in her seat.
“Hold then! True!” muttered her husband. “Gentlemen—my
wife!”
The three customers pulled off their hats to Madame Defarge,
with three flourishes. She acknowledged their homage by bending
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her head, and giving them a quick look. Then she glanced in a
casual manner round the wine-shop, took up her knitting with
great apparent calmness and repose of spirit and became
absorbed in it.
“Gentlemen,” said her husband, who had kept his bright eye
observantly upon her, “good day. The chamber, furnished
bachelor-fashion, that you wished to see, and were inquiring for
when I stepped out, is on the fifth floor. The doorway of the
staircase gives on the little courtyard close to the left here,”
pointing with his hand, “near to the window of my establishment.
But, now that I remember, one of you has already been there, and
can show the way. Gentlemen, adieu!”
They paid for their wine and left the place. The eyes of
Monsieur Defarge were studying his wife at her knitting when the
elderly gentleman advanced from his corner, and begged the
favour of a word.
“Willingly, sir,” said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped
with him to the door.
Their conference was very short, but very decided. Almost at
the first word, Monsieur Defarge started and became deeply
attentive. It had not lasted a minute, when he nodded and went
out. The gentleman then beckoned to the young lady, and they,
too, went out. Madame Defarge knitted with nimble fingers and
steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.
Mr. Jarvis Lorry and Miss Manette, emerging from the wine-
shop thus, joined Monsieur Defarge in the doorway to which he
had directed his other company just before. It opened from a
stinking little black courtyard, and was the general public
entrance to a great pile of houses, inhabited by a great number of
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people. In the gloomy tile-paved entry to the gloomy tile-paved
staircase, Monsieur Defarge bent down on one knee to the child of
his old master, and put her hand to his lips. It was a gentle action,
but not at all gently done; a very remarkable transformation had
come over him in a few seconds. He had no good-humour in his
face, nor any openness of aspect left, but had become a secret,
angry, dangerous man.
“It is very high; it is a little difficult. Better to begin slowly.”
Thus, Monsieur Defarge, in a stern voice, to Mr. Lorry, as they
began ascending the stairs.
“Is he alone?” the latter whispered.
“Alone! God help him, who should be with him!” said the other,
in the same low voice.
“Is he always alone, then?”
“Yes.”
“Of his own desire?”
“Of his own necessity. As he was, when I first saw him after
they found me and demanded to know if I would take him, and, at
my peril be discreet—as he was then, so he is now.”
“He is greatly changed?”
“Changed!”
The keeper of the wine-shop stopped to strike the wall with his
hand, and mutter a tremendous curse. No direct answer could
have been half so forcible. Mr. Lorry’s spirits grew heavier and
heavier, as he and his two companions ascended higher and
higher.
Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more
crowded parts of Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that
time, it was vile indeed to unaccustomed and unhardened senses.
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Every little habitation within the great foul nest of one high
building—that is to say, the room or rooms within every door that
opened on the general staircase—left its own heap of refuse on its
own landing, besides flinging other refuse from its own windows.
The uncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so
engendered, would have polluted the air, even if poverty and
deprivation had not loaded it with their intangible impurities; the
two bad sources combined made it almost insupportable. Through
such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt and poison, the
way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to his young
companion’s agitation, which became greater every instant, Mr.
Jarvis Lorry twice stopped to rest. Each of these stoppages was
made at a doleful grating, by which any languishing good airs that
were left uncorrupted seemed to escape, and all spoilt and sickly
vapours seemed to crawl in. Through the rusted bars, tastes,
rather than glimpses, were caught of the jumbled neighbourhood;
and nothing within range, nearer or lower than the summits of the
two great towers of Notre-Dame, had any promise on it of healthy
life or wholesome aspirations.
At last, the top of the staircase was gained, and they stopped for
the third time. There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper
inclination and of contracted dimensions, to be ascended, before
the garret story was reached. The keeper of the wine-shop, always
going a little in advance, and always going on the side which Mr.
Lorry took, as though he dreaded to be asked any question by the
young lady, turned himself about here, and, carefully feeling in the
pockets of the coat he carried over his shoulder, took out a key.
“The door is locked then, my friend?” said Mr. Lorry, surprised.
“Ay. Yes,” was the grim reply of Monsieur Defarge.
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“You think it necessary to keep the unfortunate gentleman so
retired?”
“I think it necessary to turn the key.” Monsieur Defarge
whispered it closer in his ear, and frowned heavily.
“Why?”
“Why! Because he has lived so long, locked up, that he would
be frightened—rave, tear himself to pieces—die—come to I know
not what harm—if his door was left open.”
“Is it possible?” exclaimed Mr. Lorry.
“Is it possible!” repeated Defarge, bitterly. “Yes. And a
beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many
other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done—
done, see you!—under that sky there, every day. Long live the
Devil. Let us go on.”
This dialogue had been held in so very low a whisper, that not a
word of it had reached the young lady’s ears. But, by this time she
trembled under such strong emotion, and her face expressed such
deep anxiety, and, above all, such dread and terror, that Mr. Lorry
felt it incumbent on him to speak a word or two of reassurance.
“Courage, dear miss! Courage! Business! The worst will be over
in a moment; it is but passing the room-door, and the worst is
over. Then, all the good you bring to him, all the relief, all the
happiness you bring to him, begin. Let our good friend here, assist
you on that side. That’s well, friend Defarge. Come, now. Business,
business!” They went up slowly and softly. The staircase was
short, and they were soon at the top. There, as it had an abrupt
turn in it, they came all at once in sight of three men, whose heads
were bent down close together at the side of a door, and who were
intently looking into the room to which the door belonged,
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through some chinks or holes in the wall. On hearing footsteps
close at hand, these three turned, and rose, and showed
themselves to be the three of one name who had been drinking in
the wine-shop.
“I forgot them in the surprise of your visit,” explained Monsieur
Defarge. “Leave us, good boys; we have business here.”
The three glided by, and went silently down.
There appearing to be no other door on that floor, and the
keeper of the wine-shop going straight to this one when they were
left alone, Mr. Lorry asked him in a whisper with a little anger:
“Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette?”
“I show him, in the way you have seen, to a chosen few.”
“Is that well?”
“I think it is well.”
“Who are the few? How do you choose them?”
“I choose them as real men, of my name—Jacques is my
name—to whom the sight is likely to do good. Enough; you are
English; that is another thing. Stay there, if you please, a little
moment.”
With an admonitory gesture to keep them back, he stooped, and
looked in through the crevice in the wall. Soon raising his head
again, he struck twice or thrice upon the door—evidently with no
other object than to make a noise there. With the same intention,
he drew the key across it, three or four times, before he put it
clumsily into the lock, and turned it as heavily as he could.
The door slowly opened inward under his hand, and he looked
into the room and said something. A faint voice answered
something. Little more than a single syllable could have been
spoken on either side.
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
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He looked back over his shoulder, and beckoned them to enter.
Mr. Lorry got his arm securely round the daughter’s waist, and
held her; for he felt that she was sinking.
“A—a—a—business, business!” he urged with a moisture that
was not of business shining on his cheek. “Come in, come in!”
“I am afraid of it,” she answered, shuddering.
“Of it? What?”
“I mean of him. Of my father.”
Rendered in a manner desperate, by her state and by the
beckoning of their conductor, he drew over his neck the arm that
shook upon his shoulder, lifted her a little, and hurried her into
the room. He set her down just within the door, and held her,
clinging to him.
Defarge drew out the key, closed the door, locked it on the
inside, took out the key again, and held it in his hand. All this he
did, methodically, and with as loud and harsh an accompaniment
of noise as he could make. Finally, he walked across the room with
a measured tread to where the window was. He stopped there and
faced round.
The garret, built to be a depository for firewood and the like,
was dim and dark; for, the window of dormer shape, was in truth a
door in the roof, with a little crane over it for the hoisting up of
stores from the street: unglazed, and closing up the middle in two
pieces, like any other door of French construction. To exclude the
cold, one half of this door was fast closed, and the other was
opened but a very little way. Such a scanty portion of light was
admitted through these means, that it was difficult, on first coming
in, to see anything; and long habit alone could have slowly formed
in any one, the ability to do any work requiring nicety in such
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obscurity. Yet, work of that kind was being done in the garret; for,
with his back towards the door, and his face towards the window
where the keeper of the wine-shop stood looking at him, a white-
haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy,
making shoes.
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
Chapter VI
THE SHOEMAKER
G ood day!” said Monsieur Defarge, looking down at the
white head that bent low over the shoemaking.
It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice
responded to the salutation, as if it were at a distance: “Good day!”
“You are still hard at work, I see?”
After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment,
and the voice replied, “Yes—I am working.” This time, a pair of
haggard eyes had looked at the questioner, before the face had
dropped again.
The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not
the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard
fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was,
that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last
feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it
lost the life and resonance of the human voice, that it affected the
senses like a once beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak
