what the hell was i supposed to write?
Within my enrollment at the Bridgeton High School, I have encountered many different people with whom I spend my time. Unfortunately for me, not all encounters are pleasant; with some people, I find myself as relaxed and composed as a cat on a familiar lap, but, with others, the energies surrounding me are as taut and strained as cat fur reacting to a child playing carelessly with a tail. Reasons between myself and the Disagreeable Acquaintance are only of past events; they are obscured and distant in the minds of others. In my mind, however, they are fiery and burning, and, if my mind should happen to be distracted by happier things, well then, they remain as glowing embers, waiting to be alit and alive again.
Madame Defarge, procured from Charles Dickens' imagination for his novel, A Tale of Two Cities, and thusly imaginary herself, has experienced an all too realistic version of such a relation. Once a little girl of honest peasantry, her life at once was brutally sculpted by Fate with the crude tools of arrogance and cruelty in the form of the Evré monde brothers. These wealthy aristocrats, both readily and ever equipped with these tools, tormented her family mercilessly. As peasants, Madame Defarge and her family were accustomed to a life of servitude, if not slavery, in the name of their landlord. However, the brothers furthered their rule over this family because one of the brothers "saw her and admired her, and asked [her husband] to lend her to him." Though the husband would have submitted to the Evré mondes' request, Madame Defarge's older sister defied them so as to honour her marriage. As punishment, "they so harnessed him and drove him" by means of a cart. He, the husband, was to pull this cart "out in the unwholesome mists at night" and throughout the day, but he would not then concede for his wife. Finally relieved of the harness one day at noon, "he sobbed twelve times, once for every stroke of the bell, and died on [his wife's] bosom." This of course helps account for his wife's own hysteria, in which, presumably after being raped by her particular Evré monde admirer, she was lashed to a bed within their estate. Adding to her grief, her brother, after relaying news of the Evré monde brother's excursion with the Defarge sister to his father, whose "heart burst", trespassed into the Evré monde estate. At first "offered some money" and "then struck...with a whip", the Defarge brother struck back with a sword of his own. The Evré monde brother struck back, delivering a blow that left a fatal "wound in his breast." The boy consequently died soon after, but not before his sister began her "regular succession" of: " 'My husband, my father, my brother!' the counting to twelve, and 'Hush!' ". She, too, died of this torment regaled upon by the Evré monde brothers.
In a situation far less gruesome, I have encountered similar feelings of the spite and the wrath Madame Defarge undoubtedly felt. Both of us aware of how long these flames of fury linger, we, her shamelessly, I with perhaps disgrace, fed our fires with embittered memories. My months are the equivalent to the years she spent with a heavy heart, yet heavier still her fist. Years before a fervor incited "a vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro", or, the revolt of peasants against aristocracy, if you will, Madame Defarge kept her wrath with her dearly.
It was years before a letter was introduced to the captive courts, a letter written by the hand of Alexandre Manette, the father in law of Charles Darnay, he himself of the direct bloodline of the Evré monde brothers. This was, in turn, read aloud in a greater scheme of Madame Defarge's, one in which she would surely execute all those whose veins enclose the blood of Evré monde. Similarly enough, I found myself rather indirectly revealing my Disagreeable Acquaintance as, well, the self-explanatory. It was by pure chance, luck even, that her discreditation began, and all by her own hand as well. However, Madame Defarge's scheme concluded in a far more gruesome end than my preferred excommunication for my own rival: decapitation by the guillotine. In equality to my own request that my friends may judge her accordingly, she, too, solicited the counsel of her peasant-replaced courtroom. This, obviously, was unfair on her end, as well as maybe on mine, in that our influence over our respective groups was vast.
Like my own wrath, Madame Defarge's did not tame when it came to others associated with her particular sources. There was no graciousness in her that politely excused the Evré monde brothers' blood-bonded relations from her feelings, her spite, as my own feelings, my own spite, curls out its tendrils upon those nearby to my Disagreeable Acquaintance. Madame Defarge cared nothing for in-laws, as I care nothing for the classmates of my own set of Evré monde brothers; we are in it for those who mean to be in it, or those who find themselves within it. Charles Darnay, who to no advantage had changed his surname from Evré monde, was at stake to pay, as was his child of a daughter, Little Lucy.