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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: Bourdon when the weather was fine. One passion only had power to draw
me from my studies; and yet, what was that passion but a study of
another kind? I used to watch the manners and customs of the Faubourg,
its inhabitants, and their characteristics. As I dressed no better
than a working man, and cared nothing for appearances, I did not put
them on their guard; I could join a group and look on while they drove
bargains or wrangled among themselves on their way home from work.
Even then observation had come to be an instinct with me; a faculty of
penetrating to the soul without neglecting the body; or rather, a
power of grasping external details so thoroughly that they never
detained me for a moment, and at once I passed beyond and through
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