And such a pacifying, indifferent calmness refuted, almost without effort, the old images of scourges, Athens, plagued and deserted by the birds, the Chinese cities full of people agonizing in silence, the convicts of Marseille piling decomposing corpses in holes, the construction in Provence of the great wall that would stop the furious winds of pestilence, Jaffa and its hideous beggars, the moist, rotten beds stuck to the earthen floor of the Constantinople hospital, the sick dragged with hooks, the carnival of masked doctors during the Black Plague, the living people coupling in the
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