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useless efforts, and in which there struggled so much weariness:
families devoured by society, morals tortured by the laws, wounds
gangrened by penalties, poverty gnawed by taxes, wrecked intelligence
swallowed up by ignorance, rafts in distress alive with the famished,
feuds, dearth, death-rattles, cries, disappearances. He felt the vague
oppression of a keen, universal suffering. He saw the vision of the
foaming wave of misery dashing over the crowd of humanity. He was safe
in port himself, as he watched the wreck around him. Sometimes he laid
his disfigured head in his hands and dreamed.
What folly to be happy! How one dreams! Ideas were born within him.
Absurd notions crossed his brain.
Because formerly he had succoured an infant, he felt a ridiculous desire
to succour the whole world. The mists of reverie sometimes obscured his
individuality, and he lost his ideas of proportion so far as to ask
himself the question, "What can be done for the poor?" Sometimes he was
so absorbed in his subject as to express it aloud. Then Ursus shrugged
his shoulders and looked at him fixedly. Gwynplaine continued his
reverie.
"
Oh; were I powerful, would I not aid the wretched? But what am I? An
atom. What can I do? Nothing."
He was mistaken. He was able to do a great deal for the wretched. He
could make them laugh; and, as we have said, to make people laugh is to
make them forget. What a benefactor on earth is he who can bestow
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