The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: necessity,--and he did not possess one penny.
The maid brought a light to show him up.
"Felicie," he said, "don't you hear a noise in the street, shouts,
cries? Go and see what it means, and come and tell me."
His wife, in her white dressing-gown, was sitting at a table, reading
aloud to Francisque and Juan from a Spanish Cervantes, while the boys
followed her pronunciation of the words from the text. They all three
stopped and looked at Diard, who stood in the doorway with his hands
in his pockets; overcome, perhaps, by finding himself in this calm
scene, so softly lighted, so beautiful with the faces of his wife and
children. It was a living picture of the Virgin between her son and
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