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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: happened that in the dawn of my first great happiness I found the same
sufferings that assailed me elsewhere; but in Paris, at college, at
school I evaded them by abstinence; there my privations were negative,
at Frapesle they were active; so active that I was possessed by the
impulse to theft, by visions of crime, furious desperations which rend
the soul and must be subdued under pain of losing our self-respect.
The memory of what I suffered through my mother's parsimony taught me
that indulgence for young men which one who has stood upon the brink
of the abyss and measured its depths, without falling into them, must
inevitably feel. Though my own rectitude was strengthened by those
moments when life opened and let me see the rocks and quicksands
The Lily of the Valley |
