Madame DeFarge Essay

Screams rend the air. Your sisters husband was worked to death by the scum who call themselves nobles. Before your brother-in-law is even cold in his grave, these men take your sister away. For sport. Your father’s heart is broken, your brother outraged. You are taken away to the sea for protection, and your brother goes to seek revenge on the dogs, who took not only your family’s food and money, but your honor, which is more valuable to a poor man than all other things combined. Your brother is killed by the â€Å"nobles† and your sister dies of a broken heart, and crushed honor. What is your response to this situation. This was Madame Defarge’s situation, and her heart was turned to cold, hard pitiless stone. She nursed her hatred and bitterness. She was filled with a cold, calculating desire for revenge upon all those whom she could remotely connect to those demons who had taken everything from her and her family. She cared for no one and nothing that s tood in her way. She made them and all the other nobles pay, with oceans of blood. She gloried in her enemies downfall, and danced in their graves. Here thirst was unquenchable. She was hardened to the point of no return, and I believe she would have murdered her own husband if he stood in her way. Madame Defarge was bitter and cruel in the way she acted towards Charles Darnay and his family. She pretended that she was their friend, and she needed to see them for their protection. Instead she was just confirming them, so that she could put them on her registers of death. In her bitterness and hatred, she made the descendants of those who had wronged her responsible for their ancestors sins. She was ruthless in her killing and condemning of anyone who could be remotely connected to the aristocrats and she stopped at nothing, until they were dead. She spent hours knitting her registers, spelling out who would die, and why. She didn’t care if it was poor seamstress or the richest noble in the castle. If they were accused of being connected to the accursed race of aristocrats, they were her mortal enemies. When Darnay was supposedly on the way to his death at the guillotine, she went to see Lucie, both so she could gorge herself on Lucie’s pain, and also to make sure that Lucie and her child were at her fingertips, ready to be killed as soon as possible. She was barely stopped by Miss Pross, whom she tried to kill, but was herself killed in the attempt. Indeed, if it was not for Miss Pross, Madame Defarge’s plans would have succeeded nicely. Madame Defarge was a cold, bitter, and extremely vengeful person. Yes, she was shaped by the circumstances she was born into, but that alone did not change her into this awful person. It was the nurturing of these grudges, the careful plotting, scheming and brooding over her plans for vengeance that turned her into the dreadful wretch that she was. She was in fact, a slave to her own desire for revenge and even though it may seem that she had the victory, because she made the nobles pay. She let them steal her soul. Revenge is not victory. Reconciliation and forgiveness through Christ is victory.