We see those were bad days for kings, even for painted ones. If the landlord had Jacobin blood in his veins he would not content himself with such harmless changes as removing the painted crowns. He would call his tavern no longer “Le Roi Maure,” but forthwith “Le Roi Mort,” and on the sign the picture of the dead king Louis XVI would testify to his stanch republicanism. Or he would choose as sign-hero Brutus the famous regicide. Dickens has introduced us to such a tavern, “The good Republican Brutus,” in the “Tale of Two Cities,” and his picture of the place, although in a book of fiction, shows clearly the colors of historical truth: “It had a quieter look than any other place of the same description they had passed, and though red with patriotic caps was not so red as the rest.” The guests were a rather suspicious-looking crowd. One workman with bare breast and arms reads aloud the latest terrible news to the rest who listen attentively. All are armed, some have laid their weapons aside to be resumed, if needed. In the classical chapter “The Wine-Shop,” where he describes the hopeless misery of the poor people crowded together in the narrow streets of the St. Antoine quarter, he sees even in the merchants’ signs symbols of misery or threats of future atrocities: “The trade-signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were all grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman painted up, only the leanest scraps of meat, the baker the coarsest of meager loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer.... Nothing was represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but the cutler’s knives and axes were sharp and bright, the smith’s hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker’s stock was murderous.”