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He once described himself to one of his children as “a machine condemned to devour books and then throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history.”

Hamlet says such slightly off-kilter lines as “To be or not to be, I there’s the point” and “What a dunghill idiot slave am I!”

No question: If Barack Obama repeated Jefferson’s words, conservative Republicans would leap to their feet and the dunghill would hit the fan.

In a 2010 interview, Modiano referred to himself as “a product of the dunghill of the Occupation, that bizarre time when people who should have never met did meet and by chance produced a child.”

Jefferson said the work was like extracting diamonds from a dunghill.