you to have pity on me and not exercise any power that you

possess, against my innocent husband, but to use it in his behalf. O

sister-woman, think of me. As a wife and mother!”

Madame Defarge looked, coldly as ever, at the suppliant, and

said, turning to her friend The Vengeance:

“The wives and mothers we have been used to see, since we

were as little as this child, and much less, have not been greatly

considered? We have known their husbands and fathers laid in

prison and kept from them, often enough? All our lives, we have

seen our sister-women suffer, in themselves and in their children,

poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery, oppression,

and neglect of all kinds?”

“We have seen nothing else,” returned The Vengeance.

“We have borne this a long time,” said Madame Defarge,

turning her eyes again upon Lucie. “Judge you! Is it likely that the

trouble of one wife and mother would be much to us now?”

She resumed her knitting and went out. The Vengeance

followed. Defarge went last, and closed the door.

“Courage, my dear Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, as he raised her.

“Courage, courage! So far all goes well with usmuch, much

better than it has of late gone with many poor souls. Cheer up, and

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

have a thankful heart.”

“I am not thankless, I hope, but that dreadful woman seems to

throw a shadow on me and on all my hopes.”

“Tut, tut!” said Mr. Lorry; “what is this despondency in the

brave little beast? A shadow indeed! No substance in it, Lucie.”

But the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon

himself, for all that, and in his secret mind it troubled him greatly.

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

Chapter XXXIV

CALM IN STORM

D

octor Manette did not return until the morning of the

fourth day of his absence. So much of what had happened

in that dreadful time as could be kept from the

knowledge of Lucie was so well concealed from her, that not until

long afterwards, when France and she were far apart, did she

know that eleven hundred defenceless prisoners of both sexes and

all ages had been killed by the populace; that four days and nights

had been darkened by this deed of horror; and that the air around

her had been tainted by the slain. She only knew that there had

been an attack upon the prisons, that all political prisoners had

been in danger, and that some had been dragged out by the crowd

and murdered.

To Mr. Lorry, the Doctor communicated under an injunction of

secrecy on which he had no need to dwell, that the crowd had

taken him through a scene of carnage to the prison La Force.

That, in the prison he had found a self-appointed Tribunal sitting,

before which the prisoners were brought singly, and by which