Fathers and mothers who had had their full share in the worst of the day, played gently with their meagre children; and lovers, with such a world around them and before them, loved and hoped.
It was almost morning, when Defarge's wine-shop parted with its last knot of customers, and Monsieur Defarge said to madame his wife, in husky tones, while fastening the door:
"At last it is come, my dear!"
"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.
XXIII. Fire Rises
There 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 highway 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 do-beyond this: that it would probably not be what he was ordered.