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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: familiar is like the soft wood of savages, which, when rubbed against
the hard wood, strikes fire. Sometimes great geniuses illumine
themselves in this way. Napoleon lived with Berthier, Richelieu with
Pere Joseph; des Lupeaulx was the familiar of everybody. He continued
friends with fallen ministers and made himself their intermediary with
their successors, diffusing thus the perfume of the last flattery and
the first compliment. He well understood how to arrange all the little
matters which a statesman has no leisure to attend to. He saw
necessities as they arose; he obeyed well; he could gloss a base act
with a jest and get the whole value of it; and he chose for the
services he thus rendered those that the recipients were not likely to
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