Plot Summary
Book 2, Chapter 21 of A Tale of Two Cities opens in the peaceful Soho home of Lucie and Charles Darnay. describes several years of quiet domestic happiness through the metaphor of echoing footsteps—the sounds of time passing through their lives. Lucie gives birth to a daughter, little Lucie, and later a son who dies in childhood. The family’s intimate circle includes Dr. Manette, Miss Pross, and the occasional visit from Sydney Carton, who comes perhaps half a dozen times a year and never arrives drunk. Little Lucie develops a special affinity for Carton, sensing with childlike intuition the hidden sorrow of a man who loved and lost her mother.
Mr. Stryver, now wealthy and married to a widow with three sons, attempts to foist his boys on Darnay as pupils—and, when politely refused, nurses a bitter grudge. Meanwhile, Mr. Lorry arrives one July evening in 1789 with unsettling news from Tellson’s Bank: French customers are frantically sending their property to England, a sign of mounting panic in Paris.
The Storming of the Bastille
The chapter’s second half shifts dramatically to Saint Antoine, where the long-simmering fury of the French people explodes into revolution. On July 14, 1789, the neighborhood erupts as muskets, pikes, knives, and axes are distributed among the mob. Defarge coordinates the assault from his wine-shop, issuing orders and arming patriots, while Madame Defarge stands calmly beside him with an axe, a pistol, and a cruel knife.
Defarge rallies the crowd with the cry “The Bastille!” and the attack begins. describes four fierce hours of cannon fire and smoke before the fortress surrenders. Defarge is swept through the lowered drawbridge into the courtyard. He seizes a grey-haired turnkey and demands to see cell One Hundred and Five, North Tower—the cell where Dr. Manette was imprisoned. Inside, he finds the initials “A. M.” scratched into the wall and searches the cell’s chimney and furniture for a hidden document, collecting something before burning the debris.
Revolutionary Violence and Foreshadowing
Outside, the mob executes the governor of the Bastille. Madame Defarge remains immovable beside the doomed man as he is beaten to death, then places her foot on his neck and hews off his head with her knife. The chapter closes with a haunting tableau: seven freed prisoners carried overhead, seven severed heads mounted on pikes, and the “loudly echoing footsteps” of Saint Antoine marching through Paris. ends with a prayer that these bloody footsteps stay far from Lucie Darnay’s life—“for they are headlong, mad, and dangerous; and in the years so long after the breaking of the cask at Defarge’s wine-shop door, they are not easily purified when once stained red.”