Chapter Five of Book the First in Dickens's A
Tale of Two Cities is a "set piece"; that is, it is a scene that stands on
its own from the narrative. "The Wine-Shop" introduces the reader to the DeFarges, who
are engaged with others called Jacques in bringing about the French Revolution. The
DeFarges run the wine-shop, a covert place for the Jacques to congregate, and the
villainous Mme. DeFarge, who sees nothing, but sees everything, knits the names of the
aristocrats to be killed.
One day, a large cask of wine
drops and breaks in the street. The cask, symbolic of the heads of the French
aristocrats who would be guillotined, tumbled and
lay on the stones just outside the door of the
wine-shop, shattered like a walnut
shell.
When
this accident occurs, all the people nearby suspend their business, "or their idleness,"
in order to rush to drink the wine. With "mutilated earthenware" they attempt to scoop
the wine up; women take handerchiefs from their heads, soak them in the wine and squeeze
the liquid into their infants' mouths. Cheered by the wine, the people return to their
preoccupations:
The man who had left his saw...set it in motion
again; the woman who had left on a door-step the little pot of hot-ashes, at which she
had been trying to soften the pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of
her child, returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who
had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved away to descend again; and a gloom
gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than
sunshine.
However, all the
starving people are stained with the red wine, and one "tall joker" scrawls upon a wall
with his finger dipped in muddy wine "BLOOD."
These
destitute and desperate people of Saint Antoine will soon join forces with other
revolutionaries and, as Dickens foreshadows, "the stain of it [blood] would be red upon
many there."
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