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In the midst of this turmoil, we cannot stop to make reflections;

but Renzo, causing disturbance at night in another person's

house, and holding the master of it besieged in an inner room,

has all the appearance of an oppressor; when in fact he was the

oppressed. Don Abbondio, assaulted in his own house, while he was

tranquilly attending to his affairs, appeared the victim; when,

in fact, it was he who had inflicted the injury. Thus goes the

world, or rather, thus it went in the seventeenth century.