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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: sufferings of the retreat from Moscow; for, at nineteen years of age,
he had made the passage of the Beresins, and was almost the last man
left of his regiment. He described, in words of fire, the great
disaster of Waterloo. His voice was music itself to the Italian girl.
Brought up as a Corsican, Ginevra was, in some sense, a child of
Nature; falseness was a thing unknown to her; she gave herself up
without reserve to her impressions; she acknowledged them, or, rather,
allowed them to be seen without the affectations of petty and
calculating coquetry, characteristic of Parisian girlhood. During this
day she sat more than once with her palette in one hand, her brushes
in another, without touching a color. With her eyes fastened on the
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