Madame Defarge
Madame Thérèse Defarge is a fictional character in the book A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. She is a tricoteuse, a tireless worker for the French Revolution, and the wife of Ernest Defarge.
She is arguably the main villain of the novel, and ruthlessly seeks revenge against the Evrémondes, including Charles Darnay, his wife Lucie Manette and their child, for crimes a prior generation of the Evrémonde family had committed. These crimes include the deaths of her sister, brother, and father. Eventually, her quest for vengeance becomes her own undoing and results in her downfall and death.
Defarge represents one aspect of the Fates. The Moirai (the Fates as represented in Greek mythology) used yarn to measure out the life of a man, and cut it to end it; Defarge knits, and her knitting secretly encodes the names of people to be killed.
Read more about Madame Defarge: Cinematic and Theatrical Portrayals
Other articles related to "defarge, madame, madame defarge":
... Manette has been taken care of by a friend, Ernest Defarge (Mitchell Lewis), and his wife (Blanche Yurka) ... The long-suffering commoners vent their fury on the aristocrats, condemning scores daily to Madame Guillotine ... Manette pleads for mercy for his son-in-law, but Madame Defarge, seeking revenge against all the Evremondes, regardless of guilt or innocence, convinces the tribunal to sentence him to death ...
... In the 1935 film A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge is played by Blanche Yurka ... In the 1958 film A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge is played by Rosalie Crutchley ... In the 1981 Mel Brooks film, History of the World, Part I, Madame Defarge (played by Cloris Leachman) is the chief conspirator in the plot to overthrow King Louis XVI ...
... Lucie Manette is the light and Madame Defarge is darkness ... Lorry rides to Dover it is dark in the prisons dark shadows follow Madame Defarge dark, gloomy doldrums disturb Dr ... Lorry feel the dark threat that is Madame Defarge ...
... Defarge, Ernest Husband of Madame Defarge and keeper of a wine shop in Paris ... Defarge, Madame Wife of wine shop keeper, Ernest Defarge, and a leader among the revolutionaries ... Madame Defarge is killed in a struggle with Miss Pross in Paris in A Tale of Two Cities ...
Famous quotes containing the word madame:
“And since the average lifetime—the relative longevity—is far greater for memories of poetic sensations than for those of heartbreaks, since the very long time that the grief I felt then because of Gilbert, it has been outlived by the pleasure I feel, whenever I wish to read, as in a sort of sundial, the minutes between twelve fifteen and one o’clock, in the month of May, upon remembering myself chatting ... with Madame Swann under the reflection of a cradle of wisteria.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)