In Tale of Two Cities, where does Monsieur Defarge ask a guard to take him during the attack on the Bastille?What does he do there? What is the...

In the midst of the chaos of the storming of the Bastille, Monsier Defarge lays "his strong hand on the breast of one of (the prison officers), a man with a grey head, who (has) a lighted torch in his hand, separate(s) him from the rest, and (gets) him between himself and the wall", and demands that he show him the North Tower.  The guard responds that he will be glad to comply, but that "there is no one there".  Defarge asks the guard what is the meaning of the phrase, "One Hundred and Five, North Tower", a phrase often repeated absently by Dr. Manette during his periods of mental separation from reality.  The guard tells Defarge that the phrase refers to a particular cell, to which response Defarge demands urgently, "Show it me!"

The guard takes Defarge, along with Jacques Three, "through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shown, past hideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps, and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick".  Finally, the guard stops at "a low door", opens it, and shows Defarge and Jacques Three a cell with "a small, heavily-grated, unglazed window high in the wall, with a stone screen before it".  In the cell is "a small chimney, heavily barred across...a heap of old feathery wood-ashes on the hearth...a stool, and table, and a straw bed...four blackened walls, and a rusted iron ring in one of them".  Defarge instructs the guard to "pass (the) torch slowly along (the) walls" so that he can examine them, and he quickly discovers Alexandre Manette's initials, along with a calendar, scratched into the stone.  Defarge then systematically searches every inch of the tiny cell, smashing the wooden furniture and ripping open the bed of straw.  He even peers up the chimney, prising at its sides with a crowbar, and groping into a crevice which the tool has exposed.  It is not clear at this point whether Defarge finds anything in the chimney or not, but having determined that there is "nothing in the wood, and nothing in the straw", he collects the debris in the middle of the cell and tells the guard to burn it (Chapter 21).

In 1789, the festering rage which had been fermenting among the peasants of France erupted in a violent attack on the Bastille, a prison in Paris which was representative of the oppression perpetrated upon them for so long by the ruling class.  The Fall of the Bastille was a central event in the French Revolution.