Book II, Chapter 22 of A Tale of Two Cities, titled "The Sea Still Rises," takes place one week after the fall of the Bastille. The chapter opens in Saint Antoine, where Madame Defarge presides over the wine-shop with a quiet, watchful authority. The neighborhood has changed: even the most ragged citizens now carry themselves with a dangerous new sense of power, aware that their suffering has forged them into instruments of destruction.
The calm shatters when Monsieur Defarge rushes in with explosive news. Old Foulon, a despised official infamous for telling the starving poor that they "might eat grass," has been found alive. He had faked his own death and staged a mock funeral to escape the people's wrath, but has been discovered hiding in the countryside and brought to the Hôtel de Ville as a prisoner.
The announcement ignites Saint Antoine like a trail of gunpowder. Madame Defarge seizes her knife, The Vengeance beats her drum, and women pour from their homes in a frenzy of rage. Dickens portrays the women as even more terrifying than the men, driven mad by years of watching their children and parents starve while aristocrats mocked their suffering. The mob surges to the Hôtel de Ville, where they find Foulon bound with ropes and a bunch of grass tied mockingly to his back.
After hours of deliberation, the crowd breaks through. Defarge springs over a railing to seize Foulon, Madame Defarge grabs his ropes, and the mob drags the old man through the streets to a lamppost. Twice the hanging rope breaks, but on the third attempt it holds, and Foulon's head is mounted on a pike with grass stuffed in his mouth. The violence does not end there: Foulon's son-in-law is also captured, killed, and his head and heart are paraded on pikes alongside Foulon's.
As night falls, the people of Saint Antoine return to their children and their empty kitchens. They wait in long lines for bad bread, share meager suppers cooked over street fires, and yet find moments of human fellowship, even tenderness. The chapter closes with Defarge telling his wife, "At last it is come, my dear!" to which Madame Defarge chillingly replies, "Almost"—signaling that the revolution's bloodshed has only just begun.
Through this chapter, Dickens explores the terrifying momentum of mob violence while maintaining sympathy for a populace driven to madness by generations of cruelty and deprivation. The sea metaphor of the title suggests that the revolutionary tide continues to rise beyond all natural limits, portending even greater destruction ahead.