《A Tale of Two Cities》　Book1　CHAPTER V The Wine-shop
　　　　by Charles Dickens

A LARGE cask of wine had been
dropped and broken, 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 spot 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 woman
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 night-cap
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 re-grinding 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 shock. 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 sign, 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 atomies 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 comer shop, better than most other' 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'' 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 joke 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.



`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 re-crossed the road and
entered the wine-shop.



This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked', martial-looking man of thirty, and he should
have bean 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.



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 profoundcomposure, 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 court-yard 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 other company just before. It opened
from a stinking little black court-yard, 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