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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: directions, and wearing the double wreath of myrtle and of laurel. A
government situation worth eight thousand francs, three thousand
francs' annuity from the literary fund, two thousand from the Academy,
three thousand more from the paternal estate (less the taxes and the
cost of keeping it in order),--a total fixed income of fifteen
thousand francs, plus the ten thousand bought in, one year with
another, by his poetry; in all twenty-five thousand francs,--this for
Modeste's hero was so precarious and insufficient an income that he
usually spent five or six thousand francs more every year; but the
king's privy purse and the secret funds of the foreign office had
hitherto supplied the deficit. He wrote a hymn for the king's
 Modeste Mignon |