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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: and frolic carried rather too far; perhaps we may see in it the
/outrances/ of another age, the Eighteenth Century pushed to extremes;
it harks back to the Musketeers; it is an exploit stolen from
Champcenetz; nay, such light-hearted inconstancy takes us back to the
festooned and ornate period of the old court of the Valois. In an age
as moral as the present, we are bound to regard audacity of this kind
sternly; still, at the same time that 'cornet of sugar-plums' may
serve to warn young girls of the perils of lingering where fancies,
more charming than chastened, come thickly from the first; on the rosy
flowery unguarded slopes, where trespasses ripen into errors full of
equivocal effervescence, into too palpitating issues. The anecdote
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