and a recompense to you for his mother.”

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

Chapter XXI

KNITTING

T

here had been earlier drinking than usual in the wineshop

of Monsieur Defarge. As early as six o’clock in the

morning, sallow faces peeping through its barred windows

had descried other faces within, bending over measures of wine.

Monsieur Defarge sold a very thin wine at the best of times, but it

would seem to have been an unusually thin wine that he sold at

this time. A sour wine, moreover, or a souring, for its influence on

the mood of those who drank it was to make them gloomy. No

vivacious Bacchanalian flame leaped out of the pressed grape of

Monsieur Defarge: but, a smouldering fire that burnt in the dark,

lay hidden in the dregs of it.

This had been the third morning in succession, on which there

had been early drinking at the wine-shop of Monsieur Defarge. It

had been begun on Monday, and here was Wednesday come.

There had been more of early brooding than drinking; for, many

men had listened and whispered and slunk about there from the

time of the opening of the door, who could not have laid a piece of

money on the counter to save their souls. These were to the full as

interested in the place, however, as if they could have commanded

whole barrels of wine; and they glided from seat to seat, and from

corner to corner, swallowing talk in lieu of drink, with greedy

looks.

Notwithstanding an unusual flow of company, the master of the

wine-shop was not visible. He was not missed; for, nobody who

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

crossed the threshold looked for him, nobody asked for him,

nobody wondered to see only Madame Defarge in her seat,

presiding over the distribution of wine, with a bowl of battered

small coins before her, as much defaced and beaten out of their

original impress as the small coinage of humanity from whose

ragged pockets they had come.

A suspended interest and a prevalent absence of mind, were

perhaps observed by the spies who looked in at the wine-shop, as

they looked in at every place, high and low, from the king’s palace

to the criminal’s gaol. Games at cards languished, players at

dominoes musingly built towers with them, drinkers drew figures

on the table with spilt drops of wine, Madame Defarge herself

picked out the pattern on her sleeve with her toothpick, and saw

and heard something invisible and inaudible a long way off.

Thus, Saint Antoine in this vinous feature of his, until midday.

It was high noontide, when two dusty men passed through his

streets and under his swinging lamps: of whom, one was Monsieur

Defarge: the other a mender of roads in a blue cap. All adust and

athirst, the two entered the wine-shop. Their arrival had lighted a

kind of fire in the breast of Saint Antoine, fast spreading as they