“Eh well!” returned madame. “Almost.”

Saint Antoine slept, the Defarges slept; even The Vengeance

slept with her starved grocer, and the drum was at rest. The

drum’s was the only voice in Saint Antoine that blood and hurry

had not changed. The Vengeance, as custodian of the drum, could

have wakened him up and had the same speech out of him as

before the Bastille fell, or old Foulon was seized; not so with the

hoarse tones of the men and women in Saint Antoine’s bosom.

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

Chapter XXIX

FIRE RISES

T

here was a change on the village where the fountain fell,

and where the mender of roads went forth daily to

hammer out of the stones on the high way such morsels of

bread as might serve for patches to hold his poor ignorant soul

and his poor reduced body together. The prison on the crag was

not so dominant as of yore; there were soldiers to guard it, but not

many; there were officers to guard the soldiers, but not one of

them knew what his men would dobeyond this: that it would

probably not be what he was ordered.

Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but

desolation. Every green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of

grain, was as shrivelled and poor as the miserable people.

Everything was bowed down, dejected, oppressed, and broken.

Habitations fences, domesti