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
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.”
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