so, madame," replied the spy. "She is going to be married."
"Going?" echoed madame. "She was pretty enough to have been married long
ago. You English are cold, it seems to me."
"Oh! You know I am English."
"I perceive your tongue is," returned madame; "and what the tongue is, I
suppose the man is."
He did not take the identification as a compliment; but he made the best
of it, and turned it off with a laugh. After sipping his cognac to the
end, he added:
"Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to an Englishman; to
one who, like herself, is French by birth. And speaking of Gaspard (ah,
poor Gaspard! It was cruel, cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is
going to marry the nephew of Monsieur the Marquis, for whom Gaspard
was exalted to that height of so many feet; in other words, the present
Marquis. But he lives unknown in England, he is no Marquis there; he is
Mr. Charles Darnay. D'Aulnais is the name of his mother's family."
Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence had a palpable
effect upon her husband. Do what he would, behind the little counter,
as to the striking of a light and the lighting of his pipe, he was
troubled, and his hand was not trustworthy. The spy would have been no
spy if he had failed to see it, or to record it in his mind.
Having made, at least, this one hit, whatever it might prove to be
worth, and no customers coming in to help him to any other, Mr. Barsad
paid for what he had drunk, and took his leave: taking occasion to say,
in a genteel manner, before he departed, that he looked forward to the
pleasure of seeing Monsieur and Madame Defarge again. For some minutes
after he had emerged into the outer presence of Saint Antoine, the
husband and wife remained exactly as he had left them, lest he should
come back.
"Can it be true," said Defarge, in a low voice, looking down at his wife
as he stood smoking with his hand on the back of her chair: "what he has
said of Ma'amselle Manette?"
"As he has said it," returned madame, lifting her eyebrows a little, "it
is probably false. But it may be true."
"If it is--" Defarge began, and stopped.
"If it is?" repeated his wife.
"--And if it does come, while we live to see it triumph--I hope, for her
sake, Destiny will keep her husband out of France."
"Her husband's destiny," said Madame Defarge, with her usual composure,
"will take him where he is to go, and will lead him to the end that is
to end him. Tha
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