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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: by, said, "That is his house," and respected it. The morning he gave
to the poor, the mid-day hours to criminals, the evening to law work.
Thus the gift of observation that characterized Popinot was
necessarily bifrons; he could guess the virtues of a pauper--good
feelings nipped, fine actions in embryo, unrecognized self-sacrifice,
just as he could read at the bottom of a man's conscience the faintest
outlines of a crime, the slenderest threads of wrongdoing, and infer
all the rest.
Popinot's inherited fortune was a thousand crowns a year. His wife,
sister to M. Bianchon SENIOR, a doctor at Sancerre, had brought him
about twice as much. She, dying five years since, had left her fortune
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