Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Book One: Recalled to Life
Chapter V.
The Wine-shop
A large cask of wine had been dropped and
broken, in the street.
The accident had happened in getting it out
of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a
run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the
stones just outside the door of the wine-
shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.
All the people within reach had suspended
their business, or their idleness, to run
to the spot and drink the wine.
The rough, irregular stones of the street,
pointing every way, and designed, one might
have thought, expressly to lame all living
creatures that approached them, had dammed
it into little pools; these were
surrounded, each by its own jostling group
or crowd, according to its size.
Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their
two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to
help women, who bent over their shoulders,
to sip, before the wine had all run out
between their fingers.
Others, men and women, dipped in the
puddles with little mugs of mutilated
earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs
from women's heads, which were squeezed dry
into infants' mouths; others made small
mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it
ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at
high windows, darted here and there, to cut
off little streams of wine that started
away in new directions; others devoted
themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed
pieces of the cask, licking, and even
champing the moister wine-rotted fragments
with eager relish.
There was no drainage to carry off the
wine, and not only did it all get taken up,
but so much mud got taken up along with it,
that there might have been a scavenger in
the street, if anybody acquainted with it
could have believed in such a miraculous
presence.
A shrill sound of laughter and of amused
voices--voices of men, women, and children-
-resounded in the street while this wine
game lasted.
There was little roughness in the sport,
and much playfulness.
There was a special companionship in it, an
observable inclination on the part of every
one to join some other one, which led,
especially among the luckier or lighter-
hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking
of healths, shaking of hands, and even
joining of hands and dancing, a dozen
together.
When the wine was gone, and the places
where it had been most abundant were raked
into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these
demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they
had broken out.
The man who had left his saw sticking in
the firewood he was cutting, set it in
motion again; the women who had left on a
door-step the little pot of hot ashes, at
which she had been trying to soften the
pain in her own starved fingers and toes,
or in those of her child, returned to it;
men with bare arms, matted locks, and
cadaverous faces, who had emerged into the
winter light from cellars, moved away, to
descend again; and a gloom gathered on the
scene that appeared more natural to it than
sunshine.
The wine was red wine, and had stained the
ground of the narrow street in the suburb
of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was
spilled.
It had stained many hands, too, and many
faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden
shoes.
The hands of the man who sawed the wood,
left red marks on the billets; and the
forehead of the woman who nursed her baby,
was stained with the stain of the old rag
she wound about her head again.
Those who had been greedy with the staves
of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear
about the mouth; and one tall joker so
besmirched, his head more out of a long
squalid bag of a nightcap than in it,
scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped
in muddy wine-lees--BLOOD.
The time was to come, when that wine too
would be spilled on the street-stones, and
when the stain of it would be red upon many
there.
And now that the cloud settled on Saint
Antoine, which a momentary gleam had driven
from his sacred countenance, the darkness
of it was heavy--cold, dirt, sickness,
ignorance, and want, were the lords in
waiting on the saintly presence--nobles of
great power all of them; but, most
especially the last.
Samples of a people that had undergone a
terrible grinding and regrinding in the
mill, and certainly not in the fabulous
mill which ground old people young,
shivered at every corner, passed in and out
at every doorway, looked from every window,
fluttered in every vestige of a garment
that the wind shook.
The mill which had worked them down, was
the mill that grinds young people old; the
children had ancient faces and grave
voices; and upon them, and upon the grown
faces, and ploughed into every furrow of
age and coming up afresh, was the sigh,
Hunger.
It was prevalent everywhere.
Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses,
in the wretched clothing that hung upon
poles and lines; Hunger was patched into
them with straw and rag and wood and paper;
Hunger was repeated in every fragment of
the small modicum of firewood that the man
sawed off; Hunger stared down from the
smokeless chimneys, and started up from the
filthy street that had no offal, among its
refuse, of anything to eat.
Hunger was the inscription on the baker's
shelves, written in every small loaf of his
scanty stock of bad bread; at the sausage-
shop, in every dead-dog preparation that
was offered for sale.
Hunger rattled its dry bones among the
roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder;
Hunger was shred into atomics in every
farthing porringer of husky chips of
potato, fried with some reluctant drops of
oil.
Its abiding place was in all things fitted
to it.
A narrow winding street, full of offence
and stench, with other narrow winding
streets diverging, all peopled by rags and
nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and
nightcaps, and all visible things with a
brooding look upon them that looked ill.
In the hunted air of the people there was
yet some wild-beast thought of the
possibility of turning at bay.
Depressed and slinking though they were,
eyes of fire were not wanting among them;
nor compressed lips, white with what they
suppressed; nor foreheads knitted into the
likeness of the gallows-rope they mused
about enduring, or inflicting.
The trade signs (and they were almost as
many as the shops) were, all, grim
illustrations of Want.
The butcher and the porkman painted up,
only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker,
the coarsest of meagre loaves.
The people rudely pictured as drinking in
the wine-shops, croaked over their scanty
measures of thin wine and beer, and were
gloweringly confidential together.
Nothing was represented in a flourishing
condition, save tools and weapons; but, the
cutler's knives and axes were sharp and
bright, the smith's hammers were heavy, and
the gunmaker's stock was murderous.
The crippling stones of the pavement, with
their many little reservoirs of mud and
water, had no footways, but broke off
abruptly at the doors.
The kennel, to make amends, ran down the
middle of the street--when it ran at all:
which was only after heavy rains, and then
it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the
houses.
Across the streets, at wide intervals, one
clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and pulley;
at night, when the lamplighter had let
these down, and lighted, and hoisted them
again, a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in
a sickly manner overhead, as if they were
at sea.
Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and
crew were in peril of tempest.
For, the time was to come, when the gaunt
scarecrows of that region should have
watched the lamplighter, in their idleness
and hunger, so long, as to conceive the
idea of improving on his method, and
hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys,
to flare upon the darkness of their
condition.
But, the time was not come yet; and 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 *** 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
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
herself in any of the reckonings over which
she presided.
Madame Defarge being sensitive to cold, was
wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of
bright shawl twined about her head, though
not to the concealment of her large
earrings.
Her knitting was before her, but she had
laid it down to pick her teeth with a
toothpick.
Thus engaged, with her right elbow
supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge
said nothing when her lord came in, but
coughed just one grain of cough.
This, in combination with the lifting of
her darkly defined eyebrows over her
toothpick by the breadth of a line,
suggested to her husband that he would do
well to look round the shop among the
customers, for any new customer who had
dropped in while he stepped over the way.
The wine-shop keeper accordingly rolled his
eyes about, until they rested upon an
elderly gentleman and a young lady, who
were seated in a corner.
Other company were there: two playing
cards, two playing dominoes, three standing
by the counter lengthening out a short
supply of wine.
As he passed behind the counter, he took
notice that the elderly gentleman said in a
look to the young lady, "This is our man."
"What the devil do _you_ do in that galley
there?" said Monsieur Defarge to himself;
"I don't know you."
But, he feigned not to notice the two
strangers, and fell into discourse with the
triumvirate of customers who were drinking
at the counter.
"How goes it, Jacques?" said one of these
three to Monsieur Defarge.
"Is all the spilt wine swallowed?"
"Every drop, Jacques," answered Monsieur
Defarge.
When this interchange of Christian name was
effected, Madame Defarge, picking her teeth
with her toothpick, coughed another grain
of cough, and raised her eyebrows by the
breadth of another line.
"It is not often," said the second of the
three, addressing Monsieur Defarge, "that
many of these miserable beasts know the
taste of wine, or of anything but black
bread and death.
Is it not so, Jacques?"
"It is so, Jacques," Monsieur Defarge
returned.
At this second interchange of the Christian
name, Madame Defarge, still using her
toothpick with profound composure, coughed
another grain of cough, and raised her
eyebrows by the breadth of another line.
The last of the three now said his say, as
he put down his empty drinking vessel and
smacked his lips.
"Ah! So much the worse!
A bitter taste it is that such poor cattle
always have in their mouths, and hard lives
they live, Jacques.
Am I right, Jacques?"
"You are right, Jacques," was the response
of Monsieur Defarge.
This third interchange of the Christian
name was completed at the moment when
Madame Defarge put her toothpick by, kept
her eyebrows up, and slightly rustled in
her seat.
"Hold then!
True!" muttered her husband.
"Gentlemen--my wife!"
The three customers pulled off their hats
to Madame Defarge, with three flourishes.
She acknowledged their homage by bending
her head, and giving them a quick look.
Then she glanced in a casual manner round
the wine-shop, took up her knitting with
great apparent calmness and repose of
spirit, and became absorbed in it.
"Gentlemen," said her husband, who had kept
his bright eye observantly upon her, "good
day.
The chamber, furnished bachelor-fashion,
that you wished to see, and were inquiring
for when I stepped out, is on the fifth
floor.
The doorway of the staircase gives on the
little courtyard close to the left here,"
pointing with his hand, "near to the window
of my establishment.
But, now that I remember, one of you has
already been there, and can show the way.
Gentlemen, adieu!"
They paid for their wine, and left the
place.
The eyes of Monsieur Defarge were studying
his wife at her knitting when the elderly
gentleman advanced from his corner, and
begged the favour of a word.
"Willingly, sir," said Monsieur Defarge,
and quietly stepped with him to the door.
Their conference was very short, but very
decided.
Almost at the first word, Monsieur Defarge
started and became deeply attentive.
It had not lasted a minute, when he nodded
and went out.
The gentleman then beckoned to the young
lady, and they, too, went out.
Madame Defarge knitted with nimble fingers
and steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.
Mr. Jarvis Lorry and Miss Manette, emerging
from the wine-shop thus, joined Monsieur
Defarge in the doorway to which he had
directed his own company just before.
It opened from a stinking little black
courtyard, and was the general public
entrance to a great pile of houses,
inhabited by a great number of people.
In the gloomy tile-paved entry to the
gloomy tile-paved staircase, Monsieur
Defarge bent down on one knee to the child
of his old master, and put her hand to his
lips.
It was a gentle action, but not at all
gently done; a very remarkable
transformation had come over him in a few
seconds.
He had no good-humour in his face, nor any
openness of aspect left, but had become a
secret, angry, dangerous man.
"It is very high; it is a little difficult.
Better to begin slowly."
Thus, Monsieur Defarge, in a stern voice,
to Mr. Lorry, as they began ascending the
stairs.
"Is he alone?" the latter whispered.
"Alone!
God help him, who should be with him!" said
the other, in the same low voice.
"Is he always alone, then?"
"Yes."
"Of his own desire?"
"Of his own necessity.
As he was, when I first saw him after they
found me and demanded to know if I would
take him, and, at my peril be discreet--as
he was then, so he is now."
"He is greatly changed?"
"Changed!"
The keeper of the wine-shop stopped to
strike the wall with his hand, and mutter a
tremendous curse.
No direct answer could have been half so
forcible.
Mr. Lorry's spirits grew heavier and
heavier, as he and his two companions
ascended higher and higher.
Such a staircase, with its accessories, in
the older and more crowded parts of Paris,
would be bad enough now; but, at that time,
it was vile indeed to unaccustomed and
unhardened senses.
Every little habitation within the great
foul nest of one high building--that is to
say, the room or rooms within every door
that opened on the general staircase--left
its own heap of refuse on its own landing,
besides flinging other refuse from its own
windows.
The uncontrollable and hopeless mass of
decomposition so engendered, would have
polluted the air, even if poverty and
deprivation had not loaded it with their
intangible impurities; the two bad sources
combined made it almost insupportable.
Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark
shaft of dirt and poison, the way lay.
Yielding to his own disturbance of mind,
and to his young companion's agitation,
which became greater every instant, Mr.
Jarvis Lorry twice stopped to rest.
Each of these stoppages was made at a
doleful grating, by which any languishing
good airs that were left uncorrupted,
seemed to escape, and all spoilt and sickly
vapours seemed to crawl in.
Through the rusted bars, tastes, rather
than glimpses, were caught of the jumbled
neighbourhood; and nothing within range,
nearer or lower than the summits of the two
great towers of Notre-Dame, had any promise
on it of healthy life or wholesome
aspirations.
At last, the top of the staircase was
gained, and they stopped for the third
time.
There was yet an upper staircase, of a
steeper inclination and of contracted
dimensions, to be ascended, before the
garret story was reached.
The keeper of the wine-shop, always going a
little in advance, and always going on the
side which Mr. Lorry took, as though he
dreaded to be asked any question by the
young lady, turned himself about here, and,
carefully feeling in the pockets of the
coat he carried over his shoulder, took out
a key.
"The door is locked then, my friend?" said
Mr. Lorry, surprised.
"Ay. Yes," was the grim reply of Monsieur
Defarge.
"You think it necessary to keep the
unfortunate gentleman so retired?"
"I think it necessary to turn the key."
Monsieur Defarge whispered it closer in his
ear, and frowned heavily.
"Why?"
"Why!
Because he has lived so long, locked up,
that he would be frightened--rave--tear
himself to pieces--die--come to I know not
what harm--if his door was left open."
"Is it possible!" exclaimed Mr. Lorry.
"Is it possible!" repeated Defarge,
bitterly.
"Yes.
And a beautiful world we live in, when it
_is_ possible, and when many other such
things are possible, and not only possible,
but done--done, see you!--under that sky
there, every day.
Long live the Devil.
Let us go on."
This dialogue had been held in so very low
a whisper, that not a word of it had
reached the young lady's ears.
But, by this time she trembled under such
strong emotion, and her face expressed such
deep anxiety, and, above all, such dread
and terror, that Mr. Lorry felt it
incumbent on him to speak a word or two of
reassurance.
"Courage, dear miss!
Courage!
Business!
The worst will be over in a moment; it is
but passing the room-door, and the worst is
over.
Then, all the good you bring to him, all
the relief, all the happiness you bring to
him, begin.
Let our good friend here, assist you on
that side.
That's well, friend Defarge.
Come, now.
Business, business!"
They went up slowly and softly.
The staircase was short, and they were soon
at the top.
There, as it had an abrupt turn in it, they
came all at once in sight of three men,
whose heads were bent down close together
at the side of a door, and who were
intently looking into the room to which the
door belonged, through some chinks or holes
in the wall.
On hearing footsteps close at hand, these
three turned, and rose, and showed
themselves to be the three of one name who
had been drinking in the wine-shop.
"I forgot them in the surprise of your
visit," explained Monsieur Defarge.
"Leave us, good boys; we have business
here."
The three glided by, and went silently
down.
There appearing to be no other door on that
floor, and the keeper of the wine-shop
going straight to this one when they were
left alone, Mr. Lorry asked him in a
whisper, with a little anger:
"Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette?"
"I show him, in the way you have seen, to a
chosen few."
"Is that well?"
"_I_ think it is well."
"Who are the few?
How do you choose them?"
"I choose them as real men, of my name--
Jacques is my name--to whom the sight is
likely to do good.
Enough; you are English; that is another
thing.
Stay there, if you please, a little
moment."
With an admonitory gesture to keep them
back, he stooped, and looked in through the
crevice in the wall.
Soon raising his head again, he struck
twice or thrice upon the door--evidently
with no other object than to make a noise
there.
With the same intention, he drew the key
across it, three or four times, before he
put it clumsily into the lock, and turned
it as heavily as he could.
The door slowly opened inward under his
hand, and he looked into the room and said
something.
A faint voice answered something.
Little more than a single syllable could
have been spoken on either side.
He looked back over his shoulder, and
beckoned them to enter.
Mr. Lorry got his arm securely round the
daughter's waist, and held her; for he felt
that she was sinking.
"A-a-a-business, business!" he urged, with
a moisture that was not of business shining
on his cheek.
"Come in, come in!"
"I am afraid of it," she answered,
shuddering.
"Of it?
What?"
"I mean of him.
Of my father."
Rendered in a manner desperate, by her
state and by the beckoning of their
conductor, he drew over his neck the arm
that shook upon his shoulder, lifted her a
little, and hurried her into the room.
He sat her down just within the door, and
held her, clinging to him.
Defarge drew out the key, closed the door,
locked it on the inside, took out the key
again, and held it in his hand.
All this he did, methodically, and with as
loud and harsh an accompaniment of noise as
he could make.
Finally, he walked across the room with a
measured tread to where the window was.
He stopped there, and faced round.
The garret, built to be a depository for
firewood and the like, was dim and dark:
for, the window of dormer shape, was in
truth a door in the roof, with a little
crane over it for the hoisting up of stores
from the street: unglazed, and closing up
the middle in two pieces, like any other
door of French construction.
To exclude the cold, one half of this door
was fast closed, and the other was opened
but a very little way.
Such a scanty portion of light was admitted
through these means, that it was difficult,
on first coming in, to see anything; and
long habit alone could have slowly formed
in any one, the ability to do any work
requiring nicety in such obscurity.
Yet, work of that kind was being done in
the garret; for, with his back towards the
door, and his face towards the window where
the keeper of the wine-shop stood looking
at him, a white-haired man sat on a low
bench, stooping forward and very busy,
making shoes.