In the novel, A Tale of Two Cities, the connection that Dickens makes between blood and wine represents death and violence, but also shows the life that can be found in even the darkest of times. When Dickens first takes the scene to the streets of Paris, a wine barrel has tipped and broken apart on the stones. The people make a desperate dash to lap it up, using their hands, tongues, and rags to soak it all up. It is a kind of bright spot in their day; a break from the monotony and depression. As soon as it is gone, they return to their former positions of boredom and gloom. Dickens says, “The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street...it had stained many hands, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden …show more content…
They have simply learned to accept it. However, in the midst of the grey are now smears of the red wine. Dickens gives a premonition of Paris in the near future, saying, “The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there” (32). The comparison between the wine running through the cobblestones and the bloodshed to come is clear in this passage. If this was not enough, “Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a night-cap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees--BLOOD” (32). Just as Monsieur and Madame Defarge are distributors of wine in Paris, they are also greatly responsible for the widespread bloodshed that flows through its streets. The Defarges run the wine shop whose wall is painted with the lees in the beginning of the novel. The Monsieur tends to the business of the shop while Madame sits silently and knits. While it seems that she is