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you. O my brothers below, I will tell them of your nakedness. I will
rise up with a bundle of the people's rags in my hand. I will shake off
over the masters the misery of the slaves; and these favoured and
arrogant ones shall no longer be able to escape the remembrance of the
wretched, nor the princes the itch of the poor; and so much the worse,
if it be the bite of vermin; and so much the better, if it awake the
lions from their slumber."
Here Gwynplaine turned towards the kneeling under-clerks, who were
writing on the fourth woolsack.
"Who are those fellows kneeling down?--What are you doing? Get up; you
are men."
These words, suddenly addressed to inferiors whom a lord ought not even
to perceive, increased the merriment to the utmost.
They had cried, "Bravo!" Now they shouted, "Hurrah!" From clapping their
hands they proceeded to stamping their feet. One might have been back in
the Green Box, only that there the laughter applauded Gwynplaine; here
it exterminated him. The effort of ridicule is to kill. Men's laughter
sometimes exerts all its power to murder.
The laughter proceeded to action. Sneering words rained down upon him.
Humour is the folly of assemblies. Their ingenious and foolish ridicule
shuns facts instead of studying them, and condemns questions instead of
solving them. Any extraordinary occurrence is a point of interrogation;
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