nd stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

thrust into his face by hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting,

bleeding, yet always entreating and beseeching for mercy; now full

of vehement agony of action, with a small clear space about him as

the people drew one another back that they might see; now, a log

of dead wood drawn through a forest of legs; he was hauled to the

nearest street corner where one of the fatal lamps swung, and

there Madame Defarge let him goas a cat might have done to a

mouseand silently and composedly looked at him while they

made ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately

screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to

have him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he went aloft, and

the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went

aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the

rope was merciful, and held him, and his head was soon upon a

pike, with grass enough in the mouth for all Saint Antoine to

dance at the sight of.

Nor was this the end of the day’s bad work, for Saint Antoine so

shouted and danced his angry blood up, that it boiled again, on

hearing when the day closed in that the son-in-law of the

despatched, another of the people’s enemies and insulters, was

coming into Paris under a guard five hundred strong, in cavalry

alone. Saint Antoine wrote his crimes on flaring sh