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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, an 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 women 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 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 nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger
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 sigh, Hunger. It
was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses,

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