payment page
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.
This passage, taken from Book the First,
Chapter 5, describes the scramble after a
wine cask breaks outside Defarge’s wine shop. This episode opens
the novel’s examination of Paris and acts as a potent depiction
of the peasants’ hunger. These oppressed individuals are not only
physically starved—and thus willing to slurp wine from the city
streets—but are also hungry for a new world order, for justice and
freedom from misery. In this passage, Dickens foreshadows the lengths
to which the peasants’ desperation will take them. This scene is
echoed later in the novel when the revolutionaries—now similarly
smeared with red, but the red of blood—gather around the grindstone
to sharpen their weapons. The emphasis here on the idea of staining,
as well as the scrawling of the word
