While these things were happening in London, the one city of this tale, other very different events were occurring in the other city of the story—Paris, the French capital.

The indifference and harsh oppression of the court and the nobles toward the poor had gone on increasing day by day, and day by day the latter had grown more sullen and resentful. All the while the downtrodden people of Paris were plotting secretly to rise in rebellion, kill the king and queen and all the nobles, seize their riches and govern France themselves.

The center of this plotting was Defarge, the keeper of the wine shop, who had cared for Doctor Manette when he had first been released from prison. Defarge and those he trusted met and planned often in the very room where Mr. Lorry and Lucie had found her father making shoes. They kept a record of all acts of cruelty toward the poor committed by the nobility, determining that, when they themselves should be strong enough, those thus guilty should be killed, their fine houses burned, and all their descendants put to death, so that not even their names should remain in France. This was a wicked and awful determination, but these poor, wretched people had been[Pg 368] made to suffer all their lives, and their parents before them, and centuries of oppression had killed all their pity and made them as fierce as wild beasts that only wait for their cages to be opened to destroy all in their path.

They were afraid, of course, to keep any written list of persons whom they had thus condemned, so Madame Defarge, the wife of the wine seller, used to knit the names in fine stitches into a long piece of knitting that she seemed always at work on.

Madame Defarge was a stout woman with big coarse hands and eyes that never seemed to look at any one, yet saw everything that happened. She was as strong as a man and every one was somewhat afraid of her. She was even crueler and more resolute than her husband. She would sit knitting all day long in the dirty wine shop, watching and listening, and knitting in the names of people whom she hoped soon to see killed.

One of the hated names that she knitted over and over again was "Evrémonde." The laborer who, in the madness of his grief for his dead child, had murdered the Marquis de St. Evrémonde, Darnay\'s hard-hearted uncle, had been caught and hanged; and, because of this, Defarge and his wife and the other plotters had condemned all of the name of Evrémonde to death.

Meanwhile the king and queen of France and all their gay and careless court of nobles feasted and danced as heedlessly as ever. They did not see[Pg 369] the storm rising. The bitter taxes still went on. The wine shop of Defarge looked as peaceful as ever, but the men who drank there now were dreaming of murder and revenge. And the half-starved women, who sat and looked on as the gilded coaches of the rich rolled through the streets, were sullenly waiting—watching Madame Defarge as she silently knitted, knitted into her work names of those whom the people had condemned to death without mercy.

One day this frightful human storm, which for so many years had been gathering in France, burst over Paris. The poor people rose by thousands, seized whatever weapons they could get—guns, axes, or even stones of the street—and, led by Defarge and his tigerish wife, set out to avenge their wrongs. Their rage turned first of all against the Bastille, the old stone prison in which so many of their kind had died, where Doctor Manette for eighteen years had made shoes. They beat down the thick walls and butchered the soldiers who defended it, and released the prisoners. And wherever they saw one of the king\'s uniforms they hanged the wearer to the nearest lamp post. It was the beginning of the terrible Revolution in France that was to end in the murder of thousands of innocent lives. It was the beginning of a time when Paris\'s streets were to run with blood, when all the worst passions of the people were loosed, and when they went mad with the joy of revenge.[Pg 370]

The storm spread over France—to the village where stood the great chateau of the Evrémonde family, and the peasants set fire to it and burned it to the ground. And Gabelle (the servant who had been left in charge by Darnay, the new Marquis de St. Evrémonde, whom they had never seen, but yet hated) they seized and put in prison. They stormed the royal palace and arrested the king and queen, threw all who bore noble names or titles into dungeons, and, as they had planned, set up a government of their own.

Darnay, safe in London with Lucie, knew little and thought less of all this, till he received a pitiful letter from Gabelle, who expected each morning to be dragged out to be killed, telling of the plight into which his faithfulness had brought him, and beseeching his master\'s aid.

This letter made Darnay most uneasy. He blamed himself, because he knew it was his fault that Gabelle had been left so long in such a dangerous post. He did not forget that his own family, the Evrémondes, had been greatly hated. But he thought the fact that he himself had refused to be one of them, and had given his sympathy rather to the people they oppressed, would make it possible for him to obtain Gabelle\'s release. And with this idea he determined to go himself to Paris.

He knew the very thought of his going, now that France was mad with violence, would frighten Lucie, so he determined not to tell her............