Summary of Book II, Chapter 15: Knitting
Chapter 15 opens with an atmosphere of tense expectation inside the Defarge wine-shop in the Saint Antoine quarter of Paris. For three consecutive mornings, sallow-faced men have gathered there, drinking little but whispering constantly. Monsieur Defarge is conspicuously absent, and Madame Defarge presides at the counter with her knitting, appearing to see and hear "something inaudible and invisible a long way off." Government spies peer in through the windows but notice nothing beyond a general restlessness.
At midday Defarge arrives with a companion: a mender of roads in a blue cap, whom he introduces as "Jacques Five." The two men proceed upstairs to the old garret where Doctor Manette was once imprisoned. Three men who slipped out of the wine-shop earlier—Jacques One, Two, and Three—are already waiting. Defarge identifies himself as Jacques Four and instructs the road-mender to tell his story.
The Road-Mender's Testimony
The road-mender recounts how, roughly a year ago, he witnessed a tall man hiding beneath the Marquis St. Evrémonde's carriage. Months later, soldiers captured the same man and marched him through the village in chains. The prisoner was thrown into the local prison on the crag, where the road-mender glimpsed him behind bars, "bloody and dusty," unable to wave because his arms were bound. The village whispered about petitions to the King, rumors of a horrible parricide execution, and the historical torture of the regicide Damiens. Eventually soldiers erected a gallows forty feet high by the village fountain, and the man was hanged and left dangling—"poisoning the water."
The Register of the Doomed
After the road-mender finishes, the Jacques deliberate grimly. Defarge declares that the Marquis's château and "all the race" are to be "registered, as doomed to destruction"—a sentence of "Extermination." Jacques Three, a man with a hungry, restless manner, receives the verdict with rapturous approval. The chapter reveals that Madame Defarge's knitting is, in fact, a coded register of all those marked for death. Defarge assures the group that his wife's stitched record is as legible to her "as the sun" and that no one can erase a single letter from it.
The Visit to Versailles
The following Sunday, Defarge takes the road-mender to see the King and Queen at Versailles, with Madame Defarge accompanying them—knitting the entire way. When a bystander asks what she is making, she answers coolly: "shrouds." The road-mender, dazzled by the royal spectacle, cheers wildly for the King and Queen. Defarge approves: the peasants' adulation makes the aristocrats more "insolent," hastening the day of reckoning. Madame Defarge delivers the chapter's final lesson, comparing the royals to richly dressed dolls and fine-feathered birds that the common people will one day tear apart for their own advantage.