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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: Duphot, in an apartment costing two thousand francs a year. Deduct the
dress and the carriage of Madame before you estimate the gross
expenses of the family, for dress precedes everything; then see what
remains for the education of the children (a girl of eight and a boy
of nine, whose maintenance must cost at least two thousand francs
besides) and you will find that Madame Rabourdin could barely afford
to give her husband thirty francs a month. That is the position of
half the husbands in Paris, under penalty of being thought monsters.
Thus it was that this woman who believed herself destined to shine in
the world was condemned to use her mind and her faculties in a sordid
struggle, fighting hand to hand with an account-book. Already,
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