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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.

CHAPTER 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.