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good sense.
A certain logic, very supple, very implacable, and very agile, is at the
service of evil, and excels in stabbing truth in the dark. These are
blows struck by the devil at Providence.
The worst of it was that Barkilphedro had a presentiment. He was
undertaking a heavy task, and he was afraid that after all the evil
achieved might not be proportionate to the work.
To be corrosive as he was, to have within himself a will of steel, a
hate of diamond, a burning curiosity for the catastrophe, and to burn
nothing, to decapitate nothing, to exterminate nothing; to be what he
was, a force of devastation, a voracious animosity, a devourer of the
happiness of others, to have been created (for there is a creator,
whether God or devil), to have been created Barkilphedro all over, and
to inflict perhaps after all but a fillip of the finger--could this be
possible? could it be that Barkilphedro should miss his aim? To be a
lever powerful enough to heave great masses of rock, and when sprung to
the utmost power to succeed only in giving an affected woman a bump in
the forehead--to be a catapult dealing ruin on a pole-kitten! To
accomplish the task of Sisyphus, to crush an ant; to sweat all over with
hate, and for nothing at all. Would not this be humiliating, when he
felt himself a mechanism of hostility capable of reducing the world to
powder! To put into movement all the wheels within wheels, to work in
the darkness all the mechanism of a Marly machine, and to succeed
perhaps in pinching the end of a little rosy finger! He was to turn over
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