Dr. Manette and his daughter, in England.”
“Yes?” said Defarge.
“You don’t hear much about them now?” said the spy.
“No,” said Defarge.
“In effect,” madame struck in, looking up from her work and
her little song, “we never hear about them. We received the news
of their safe arrival, and perhaps another letter, or perhaps two;
but, since then, they have gradually taken their road in life—we,
ours—and we have held no correspondence.”
“Perfectly so, madame,” replied the spy. “She is going to be
married.”
“Going?” echoed madame. “She was pretty enough to have
been married long ago. You English are cold, it seems to me.”
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A Tale of Two Cities
“Oh! You know I am English.”
“I perceive your tongue is,” returned madame, “and what the
tongue is, I suppose the man is.”
He did not take the identification as a compliment; but he made
the best of it, and turned it off with a laugh. After sipping his
cognac to the end, he added:
“Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to an
Englishman; to one who, like herself, is French by birth. And
speaking of Gaspard (ah, poor Gaspard! It was cruel, cruel!), it is a
curious thing that she is going to marry the nephew of Monsieur
the Marquis, for whom Gaspard was exalted to that height of so
many feet; in other words, the present Marquis. But he lives
unknown in England, he is no Marquis there; he is Mr. Charles
Darnay. D’Aulnais is the name of his mother’s family.”
Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence had a
palpable effect upon her husband. Do what he would, behind the
little counter, as to the striking of a light and the lighting of his
pipe, he was troubled, and his hand was not trustworthy. The spy
would have been no spy if he had failed to see it, or to record it in
his mind.
Having made, at least, this one hit, whatever it might prove to
be worth, and no customers coming in to help him to any other,
Mr. Barsad paid for what he had drunk, and took his leave: taking
occasion to say, in a genteel manner, before he departed, that he
looked forward to the pleasure of seeing Monsieur and Madame
Defarge again. For some minutes after he had emerged into the
outer presence of Saint Antoine, the husband and wife remained
exactly as he had left them, lest he should come back.
“Can it be true,” said Defarge, in a low voice, looking down at
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A Tale of Two Cities
his wife as he stood smoking with his hand on the back of her
chair: “what he has said of Mam’selle Manette?”
“As he has said it,” returned madame, lifting her eyebrows a
little, “it is probably false. But it may be true.”
“If it is—” Defarge began, and stopped.
“If it is?” repeated his wife.
“—And if it does come, while we live to see it triumph—I hope,
for her sake, Destiny will keep her husband out of France.”
“Her husband’s destiny,” said Madame Defarge, with her usual
composure, “will take him where he is to go, and will lead him to
the end that is to end him. That is all I know.”
“But it is very strange—now, at least, is it not very strange”—
said Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to induce her to admit
it, “that, after all our sympathy for Monsieur her father, and
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