bearing the prison officers with them, and threatening
them all with instant death if any secret
nook remained undisclosed, Defarge laid his
strong hand on the breast of one of these
men—a man with a grey head who had a lighted
torch in his hand—separated him from the
rest, and got him between himself and the
wall.

"Show me the North Tower!" said Defarge.
"Quick!"

"I will faithfully," replied the man, "if
you will come with me. But there is no one
there."

"What is the meaning of One Hundred
and Five, North Tower?" asked Defarge.
"Quick!"

"The meaning, monsieur?"

"Does it mean a captive, or a place of
captivity? Or do you mean that I shall strike you
dead?"

"Kill him!" croaked Jacques Three, who had
come close up.

"Monsieur, it is a cell."

"Show it me!"

"Pass this way then."

Jacques Three, with his usual craving on him,
and evidently disappointed by the dialogue
taking a turn that did not seem to promise
bloodshed, held by Defarge's arm as he held by
the turnkey's. Their three heads had been close
together during this brief discourse, and it had
been as much as they could do to hear one
another, even then: so tremendous was the noise
of the living ocean, in its irruption into the
Fortress, and its inundation of the courts and
passages and staircases. All around outside,
too, it beat the walls with a deep, hoarse roar,
from which, occasionally, some partial shouts
of tumult broke and leaped into the air like
spray.

Through gloomy vaults where the light of
day had never shone, past hideous doors of dark
dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps,
and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and
brick, more like dry waterfalls than staircases,
Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three, linked
hand and arm, went, with all the speed they could
make. Here and there, especially at first, the
inundation started on them and swept by; but,
when they had done descending, and were winding
and climbing up a tower, they were alone.
Hemmed in here by the massive thickness of walls
and arches, the storm within the fortress and
without was only audible to them in a dull,
subdued way, as if the noise out of which
they had come had almost destroyed their sense
of hearing.

The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a key
in a clashing lock, swung the door slowly open,
and said, as they all bent their heads and
passed in:

"One hundred and five, North Tower!"

There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed
window high in the wall, with a stone screen
before it, so that the sky could be only seen by
stooping low and looking up. There was a
small chimney, heavily barred across, a few feet
within. There was a heap of old feathery
wood ashes on the hearth. There were a stool,
and table, and a straw bed. There were the four
blackened walls, and a rusted iron ring in one
of them.

"Pass that torch slowly along these walls,
that I may see them," said Defarge to the
turnkey.

The man obeyed, and Defarge followed the
light closely with his eyes.

"Stop!—Look here, Jacques!"

"A. M.!" croaked Jacques Three, as he read
greedily.

"Alexandre Manette," said Defarge in his
ear, following the letters with his swart
forefinger, deeply engrained with gunpowder. "And
here he wrote 'a poor physician.' And it was
he, without doubt, who scratched a calendar on
this stone. What is that in your hand? A
crowbar? Give it me!"

He had still the linstock of his gun in his
own hand. He made a sudden exchange of the
two instruments, and turning on the wormeaten
stool and table, beat them to pieces in a few
blows.

"Hold the light higher!" he said, wrathfully,
to the turnkey. "Look among those
fragments with care, Jacques. And see! Here is
my knife," throwing it to him; "rip open that
bed, and search the straw. Hold the light
higher, you!"

With a menacing look at the turnkey he
crawled upon the hearth, and, peering up the
chimney, struck and prised at its sides with the
crowbar, and worked at the iron grating across
it. In a few minutes, some mortar and dust
came dropping down, which he averted his face
to avoid; and in it, and in the old wood-ashes,
and in a crevice in the chimney into which his
weapon had slipped or wrought itself, he groped
with a cautious touch.

"Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the
straw, Jacques?"

"Nothing."

"Let us collect them together, in the
middle of the cell. So! Light them, you!"

The turnkey fired the little pile, which blazed
high and hot. Stooping again to come out at
the low-arched door, they left it burning, and
retraced their way to the court-yard: seeming to
recover their sense of hearing as they came
down, until they were in the raging flood once
more.

They found it surging and tossing, in quest of
Defarge himself. Saint Antoine was clamorous
to have its wine-shop-keeper foremost in the
guard upon the governor who had defended the
Bastille and shot the people. Otherwise, the
governor would not be marched to the Hôtel de
Ville for judgment. Otherwise, the governor
would escape, and the people's blood (suddenly
of some value, after many years of worthlessness)
be unavenged.

In the howling universe of passion and contention
that seemed to encompass this grim old officer
conspicuous in his grey coat and red decoration,
there was but one quite steady figure, and that was