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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: chair, a table, and a truckle-bed comprised the whole of the
furniture. The commandant had never seen anything so poor and bare,
not even in Russia, where the moujik's huts are like the dens of wild
beasts. Nothing within it spoke of ordinary life; there were not even
the simplest appliances for cooking food of the commonest description.
It might have been a dog-kennel without a drinking-pan. But for the
truckle-bed, a smock-frock hanging from a nail, and some sabots filled
with straw, which composed the invalid's entire wardrobe, this cottage
would have looked as empty as the others. The aged peasant woman upon
her knees was devoting all her attention to keeping the sufferer's
feet in a tub filled with a brown liquid. Hearing a footstep and the
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