Previous - Next

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
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 recrossed 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 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 predicated that she did not often make mistakes against

Previous - Next