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

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

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