restless hand and the craving air. “The name of that prisoner was

Damiens, and it was all done in open day, in the open streets of

this city of Paris; and nothing was more noticed in the vast

concourse that saw it done, than the crowd of ladies of quality and

fashion, who were full of eager attention to the lastto the last.

Jacques, prolonged until nightfall, when he had lost two legs and

an arm, and still breathed! And it was donewhy, how old are

you?”

“Thirty-five,” said the mender of roads, who looked sixty.

“It was done when you were more than ten years old; you might

have seen it.”

“Enough!” said Defarge, with grim impatience. “Long live the

Devil! Go on.”

“Well! Some whisper this, some whisper that; they speak of

nothing else; even the fountain appears to fall to that tune. At

length, on Sunday night when all the village is asleep, come

soldiers, winding down from the prison, and their guns ring on the

stones of the little street. Workmen dig, workmen hammer,

soldiers laugh and sing; in the morning, by the fountain, there is

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raised a gallows forty feet high, poisoning the water.”

The mender of roads looked through rather than at the low

ceiling, and pointed as if he saw the gallows somewhere in the sky.

“All work is stopped, all assemble there, nobody leads the cows

out, the cows are there with the rest. At midday, the roll of drums.

Soldiers have marched into the prison in the night, and he is in the

midst of many soldiers. He is bound as before, and in his mouth

there is a gagtied so, with a tight string, making him look almost

as if he laughed.” He suggested it, by creasing his face with his two

thumbs, from the corners of his mouth to his ears. “On the top of

the gallows is fixed the knife, blade upwards, with its point in the

air. He is hanged there forty feet highand is left hanging,

poisoning the water.”

They looked at one another, as he used his blue cap to wipe his

face, on which the perspiration had started afresh while he

recalled the spectacle.

“It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and the children

draw water! Who can gossip of an evening, under that shadow!

Under it, have I said? When I left the village, Monday evening as

the sun was going to bed, and looked back from the hill, the

shadow struck across the church, across the mill, across the

prisonseemed to strike across the earth, messieurs, to where the

sky rests upon it!”

The hungry man gnawed one of his fingers as he looked at the

other three, and his finger quivered with the craving that was on

him.

“That’s all, messieurs. I left at sunset (as I had been warned to

do), and I walked on, that night and half next day, until I met (as I

was warned I should) this comrade. With him, I came on, now

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics