. .What Injury You Have Done My Horses

" ...What Injury You Have Done My Horses?" Sumanta Banerjee WHILE Monsieur the Marquis was driving his carriage down the streets of Paris, his horses knocked down and killed the child of a worker. As the workers stood in sullen silence, he made a speech: "It is extraordinary to me that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is for ever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses?" He then shouted at his driver: "The horses there! Are they right?" That was Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities describing the behaviour of a French aristocrat, 200 years ago on the eve on the French Revolution.