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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: At eight o'clock, when the lights of the candles in the chandeliers
shone over the furniture, the hangings, and the flowers, the rooms
wore the festal air that gives to Parisian luxury the appearance of a
dream; and Lucien felt indefinable stirrings of hope and gratified
vanity and pleasure at the thought that he was the master of the
house. But how and by whom the magic wand had been waved he no longer
sought to remember. Florine and Coralie, dressed with the fanciful
extravagance and magnificent artistic effect of the stage, smiled on
the poet like two fairies at the gates of the Palace of Dreams. And
Lucien was almost in a dream.
His life had been changed so suddenly during the last few months; he
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