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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: "All material well-being is based upon arithmetic. You to whom Paris
is known down to its very excrescences, will see that Beaudenord must
have acquired about seventeen thousand livres per annum; for he paid
some seventeen francs of taxes and spent a thousand crowns on his own
whims. Well, dear boys, when Godefroid came of age, the Marquis
d'Aiglemont submitted to him such an account of his trust as none of
us would be likely to give a nephew; Godefroid's name was inscribed as
the owner of eighteen thousand livres of rentes, a remnant of his
father's wealth spared by the harrow of the great reduction under the
Republic and the hailstorms of Imperial arrears. D'Aiglemont, that
upright guardian, also put his ward in possession of some thirty
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