suffered much; you have seen him today; you have observed his

face when the paper was read.”

“I have observed his face!” repeated madame, contemptuously

and angrily. “Yes. I have observed his face. I have observed his

face to be not the face of a true friend of the Republic. Let him

take care of his face!”

“And you have observed, my wife,” said Defarge, in a

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

deprecatory manner, “the anguish of his daughter, which must be

a dreadful anguish to him!”

“I have observed his daughter,” repeated madame; “yes, I have

observed his daughter, more times than one. I have observed her

today, and I have observed her other days. I have observed her in

the court, and I have observed her in the street by the prison. Let

me but lift my finger!” She seemed to raise it (the listener’s eyes

were always on his paper), and to let it fall with a rattle on the

ledge before her, as if the axe had dropped.

“The citizeness is superb!” croaked the Juryman.

“She is an Angel!” said The Vengeance, and embraced her.

“As to thee,” pursued madame, implacably, addressing her

husband, “if it depended on theewhich, happily, it does not

thou wouldst rescue this man even now.”

“No!” protested Defarge. “Not if to lift this glass would do it!

But I would leave the matter there. I say, stop there.”

“See you then, Jacques,” said Madame Defarge, wrathfully;

“and see you, too, my little Vengeance: see you both! Listen! For

other crimes as tyrants and oppressors, I have this race a long

time on my register, doomed to destruction and extermination.

Ask my husband, is that so.”

“It is so,” assented Defarge, without being asked.

“In the beginning of the great days, when the Bastille falls, he

finds this paper of today, and he brings it home, and in the middle

of the night when this place is clear and shut, we read it, here on

this spot, by the light of this lamp. Ask him, is that so.”

“It is so,” assented Defarge.

“That night, I tell him, when the paper is read through, and the

lamp is burnt out, and the day is gleaming in above those shutters

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and between those iron bars, that I have now a secret to

communicate. Ask him, is that so.”

“It is so,” assented Defarge again.

“I communicate to him that secret. I smite this bosom with

these two hands as I smite it now, and I tell him, ‘Defarge, I was

brought up among the fishermen of the seashore, and that peasant

family so injured by the two Evremonde brothers, as that Bastille

paper describes, is my family. Defarge, that sister of the mortally

wounded boy upon the ground was my sister, that husband was

my sister’s husband, that unborn child was their child, that

brother was my brother, that father was my father, those dead are

my dead, and that summons to answer for those things descends