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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Vendetta by Honore de Balzac: that easy, brilliant, half-ironical tone, and that freedom of judgment
which characterize painters.
He had carried his scrupulous precaution into the arrangements of the
locality where his pupils studied. The entrance to the attic above his
apartments was walled up. To reach this retreat, as sacred as a harem,
it was necessary to go up a small spiral staircase made within his own
rooms. The studio, occupying nearly the whole attic floor under the
roof, presented to the eye those vast proportions which surprise
inquirers when, after attaining sixty feet above the ground-floor,
they expect to find an artist squeezed into a gutter.
This gallery, so to speak, was profusely lighted from above, through
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