Dear Decathletes:

One of my previous entries made indirect reference to it, but I want to address this particular motif once more--the motif of "footsteps."

Chapter 21 (starting on page 216) is titled Echoing Footsteps. Dickens frequently uses "footsteps" as a symbol of the French revolutionary mobs. On page 216 he writes "Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody's life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, the footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in the dark London window."

He closes out this chapter (about the storming of the Bastille) with the quote I mentioned previously..."Now, Heaven defeat the fancy of Lucie Darnay, and keep these dangerous feet far out of her life! For they are headlong, mad and dangerous."

We will see more references to "footsteps" in the last fifty pages of the book,w hen all the characters and the action moves to Paris. Remember this when we get to that point in the book.