will. The horses there; are they right?”
Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time,
Monsieur the Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being
driven away with the air of a gentleman who had accidentally
broken some common thing, and had paid for it, and could afford
to pay for it; when his ease was suddenly disturbed by a coin flying
into his carriage, and ringing on its floor.
“Hold!” said Monsieur the Marquis. “Hold the horses! Who
threw that?”
He looked to the spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had
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stood, a moment before; but the wretched father was grovelling on
his face on the pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood
beside him was the figure of a dark stout woman, knitting.
“You dogs,” said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an
unchanged front, except as to the spots on his nose: “I would ride
over any of you very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth.
If I knew which rascal threw at the carriage, and if that brigand
were sufficiently near it, he should be crushed under the wheels.”
So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their
experience of what such a man could do to them, within the law
and beyond it, that not a voice, or a hand, or even an eye was
raised. Among the men, not one. But the woman who stood
knitting looked up steadily, and looked the Marquis in the face. It
was not for his dignity to notice it; his contemptuous eyes passed
over her, and over all the other rats; and he leaned back in his seat
again, and gave the word, “Go on!”
He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in
quick succession; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-
General, the Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand
Opera, the Comedy, the whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous
flow, came whirling by. The rats had crept out of their holes to
look on, and they remained looking on for hours; soldiers and
police often passing between them and the spectacle, and making
a barrier behind which they slunk, and through which they
peeped. The father had long ago taken up his bundle and hidden
himself away with it, when the women who had tended the bundle
while it lay on the base of the fountain, sat there watching the
running of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball—when the
one woman who had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on
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with the steadiness of Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the
swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life in the city
ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited for no man,
the rats were sleeping close together in their dark holes again, the
Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all things ran their courses.
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Chapter XIV
MonSEIGNEUR IN THE COUNTRY
Abeautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it, but not
abundant. Patches of poor rye where corn should have
been, patches of poor peas and beans, patches of most
coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat. On inanimate nature, as on
the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent tendency
towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly—a dejected
disposition to give up, and wither away.
Monsieur the Marquis in his travelling carriage (which might
have been lighter), conducted by four post-horses and two
postilions, fagged up a steep hill. A blush on the countenance of
Monsieur the Marquis was no impeachment of his high breeding;
it was not from within; it was occasioned by an external
circumstance beyond his control—the setting sun.
The suns"};
