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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: departing and arriving in Paris at fixed hours, which produced,
naturally, a fierce competition. Beaten on the long distances of
twelve to eighteen miles, the coucou came down to shorter trips, and
so lived on for several years. At last, however, it succumbed to
omnibuses, which demonstrated the possibility of carrying eighteen
persons in a vehicle drawn by two horses. To-day the coucous--if by
chance any of those birds of ponderous flight still linger in the
second-hand carriage-shops--might be made, as to its structure and
arrangement, the subject of learned researches comparable to those of
Cuvier on the animals discovered in the chalk pits of Montmartre.
These petty enterprises, which had struggled since 1822 against the
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