"[150]
One group is wanting in this picture, that of the governors who
preside over this wretchedness, which group remains in the background;
one might say that it was so designed and composed by some great
artist, a lover of contrasts, an inexorable logician, whose invisible
hand traces human character unvaryingly, and whose mournful irony
unfailingly depicts side by side, in strong relief, the grotesqueness
of folly and the seriousness of death. How many perished on account
of this misery? Probably more than a million persons.[151] -
Try to take in at a glance the extraordinary spectacle presented on
twenty-six thousand square leagues of territory:
* The immense multitude of the starving in town and country,
* the long lines of women for three years waiting for bread in all the
cities,
* this or that town of twenty-three thousand souls in which one-third
of the population dies in the hospitals in three months,
* the crowds of paupers at the poor-houses,
* the file of poor wretches entering and the file of coffins going
out,
* the asylums deprived of their property, overcrowded with the sick,
unable to feed the multitude of foundlings pining away in their
cradles the very first week, their little faces in wrinkles like those
of old men,
* the malady of want aggravating all other maladies, the long
suffering of a persistent vitality amidst pain and which refuses to
succumb, the final death-rattle in a garret or in a ditch.
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