Madame Defarge

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Madame Thérèse Defarge is a fictional character in the book A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. She is the wife of Ernest Defarge and a tireless worker for the French Revolution.

She is arguably the main villain of the book, and ruthlessly seeks revenge against the Evrèmondes, including Charles Darnay, his wife Lucie Manette and their child for crimes against her family. These crimes include the deaths of her sister, father, and brother.

Symbolically, she represents one aspect of the Fates. She knits, and her knitting secretly encodes the names of those people she will have killed. The Fates used yarn to measure out the life of a man, and cut it to end it.

In the 1981 Mel Brooks film, History of the World, Part I, Mme Defarge (played by Cloris Leachman) is the chief conspirator in the plot to overthrow King Louis. She has become so poor, she has run out of wool, simply rubbing her knitting needles together.