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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: though he was only fifty; and this premature old age had destroyed the
honorable likeness. His tall figure was slightly bent,--either because
his labors, whatever they were, obliged him to stoop, or that the
spinal column was curved by the weight of his head. He had a broad
chest and square shoulders, but the lower parts of his body were lank
and wasted, though nervous; and this discrepancy in a physical
organization evidently once perfect puzzled the mind which endeavored
to explain this anomalous figure by some possible singularities of the
man's life.
His thick blond hair, ill cared-for, fell over his shoulders in the
Dutch fashion, and its very disorder was in keeping with the general
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