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<h2> V. The Wine-shop </h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke, he
called to him across the way:</p>
<p>"Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?"</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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?"</p>
<p>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 jerked 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.</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>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 shoulder. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>"What the devil do <i>you</i> do in that galley there?" said Monsieur
Defarge to himself; "I don't know you."</p>
<p>But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discourse
with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter.</p>
<p>"How goes it, Jacques?" said one of these three to Monsieur Defarge. "Is
all the spilt wine swallowed?"</p>
<p>"Every drop, Jacques," answered Monsieur Defarge.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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?"</p>
<p>"It is so, Jacques," Monsieur Defarge returned.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his empty drinking
vessel and smacked his lips.</p>
<p>"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?"</p>
<p>"You are right, Jacques," was the response of Monsieur Defarge.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"Hold then! True!" muttered her husband. "Gentlemen—my wife!"</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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!"</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"Willingly, sir," said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped with him to
the door.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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.</p>
<p>"Is he alone?" the latter whispered.</p>
<p>"Alone! God help him, who should be with him!" said the other, in the same
low voice.</p>
<p>"Is he always alone, then?"</p>
<p>"Yes."</p>
<p>"Of his own desire?"</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>"He is greatly changed?"</p>
<p>"Changed!"</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"The door is locked then, my friend?" said Mr. Lorry, surprised.</p>
<p>"Ay. Yes," was the grim reply of Monsieur Defarge.</p>
<p>"You think it necessary to keep the unfortunate gentleman so retired?"</p>
<p>"I think it necessary to turn the key." Monsieur Defarge whispered it
closer in his ear, and frowned heavily.</p>
<p>"Why?"</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>"Is it possible!" exclaimed Mr. Lorry.</p>
<p>"Is it possible!" repeated Defarge, bitterly. "Yes. And a beautiful world
we live in, when it <i>is</i> 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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"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!"</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"I forgot them in the surprise of your visit," explained Monsieur Defarge.
"Leave us, good boys; we have business here."</p>
<p>The three glided by, and went silently down.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>"Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette?"</p>
<p>"I show him, in the way you have seen, to a chosen few."</p>
<p>"Is that well?"</p>
<p>"<i>I</i> think it is well."</p>
<p>"Who are the few? How do you choose them?"</p>
<p>"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."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>"A-a-a-business, business!" he urged, with a moisture that was not of
business shining on his cheek. "Come in, come in!"</p>
<p>"I am afraid of it," she answered, shuddering.</p>
<p>"Of it? What?"</p>
<p>"I mean of him. Of my father."</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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