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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: that they would never subject the woman they chose to ordinary laws.
Here begins one of those unseen comedies, played in the secret regions
of the consciousness between two beings of whom one will be the dupe
of the other, though it keeps on this side of wickedness; one of those
dark and comic dramas to which that of Tartuffe is mere child's play,
--dramas that do not enter the scenic domain, although they are
natural, conceivable, and even justifiable by necessity; dramas which
may be characterized as not vice, only the other side of it.
The princess began by sending for d'Arthez's books, of which she had
never, as yet, read a single word, although she had managed to
maintain a twenty minutes' eulogism and discussion of them without a
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