the more insolent, and it is the nearer ended.”
“Hey!” cried the mender of roads, reflectively; “that’s true.”
“These fools know nothing. While they despise your breath, and
would stop it for ever and ever, in you or in a hundred like you
rather than in one of their own horses or dogs, they only know
what your breath tells them. Let it deceive them then, a little
longer; it cannot deceive them too much.”
Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client, and
nodded in /confirm/iation.
“As to you,” said she, “you would shout and shed tears for
anything, if it made a show and a noise. Say! Would you not?”
“Truly, madame, I think so. For the moment.”
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A Tale of Two Cities
“If you were shown a great heap of dolls, and were set upon
them to pluck them to pieces and despoil them for your own
advantage, you would pick out the richest and gayest. Say! Would
you not?”
“Truly yes, Madame.”
“Yes. And if you were shown a flock of birds, unable to fly, and
were set upon them to strip them of their feathers for your own
advantage, you would set upon the birds of the finest feather:
would you not?”
“It is true, madame.”
“You have seen both dolls and birds today,” said Madame
Defarge, with a wave of her hand towards the place where they
had last been apparent; “now go home!”
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A Tale of Two Cities
Chapter XXII
STILL KNITTING
Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned
amicably to the bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck
in a blue cap toiled through the darkness, and through
the dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by the wayside,
slowly tending towards that point of the compass where the
chateau of Monsieur the Marquis, now in his grave, listened to the
whispering trees. Such ample leisure had the stone faces, now, for
listening to the trees and to the fountain, that the few village
scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat and fragments of
dead stick to burn, strayed within sight of the great stone
courtyard and terrace staircase, had it borne in upon their starved
fancy that the of the faces was altered. A rumour just
lived in the village—had a faint and bare existence there, as its
people had—that when the knife struck home, the faces changed,
from faces of pride to faces of anger and pain; also, that when that
dangling figure was hauled up forty feet above the fountain, they
changed again, and bore a cruel look of being avenged, which they
would henceforth bear for ever. In the stone face over the great
window of the bed-chamber where the murder was done, two fine
dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose, which everybody
recognised, and which nobody had seen of old; and on the scarce
occasions when two or three ragged peasants emerged from the
crowd to take a hurried peep at Monseigneur the Marquis
petrified, a skinny finger would not have pointed to it for a minute,
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before they all started away among the moss and leaves, like the
more fortunate hares who could find a living there.
Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain
on the stone floor, and the pure water in the village well—
thousands of acres of land—a whole province of France—all
France itself—lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint
hairbreadth line. So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses
and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human
knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its
composit"};
