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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: displaying more true diplomacy than ambassadors themselves, who, for
the most part, know only the forms of it. No one in France can doubt
the powers of the commercial traveller; that intrepid soul who dares
all, and boldly brings the genius of civilization and the modern
inventions of Paris into a struggle with the plain commonsense of
remote villages, and the ignorant and boorish treadmill of provincial
ways. Can we ever forget the skilful manoeuvres by which he worms
himself into the minds of the populace, bringing a volume of words to
bear upon the refractory, reminding us of the indefatigable worker in
marbles whose file eats slowly into a block of porphyry? Would you
seek to know the utmost power of language, or the strongest pressure
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