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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Cousin Betty by Honore de Balzac: a thousand or twelve hundred perhaps, to clerks living in Paris; and
who want to secure our places for themselves as soon as the pay rises
to forty thousand?--who, finally, refuse to restore to the Crown a
piece of Crown property confiscated from the Crown in 1830--property
acquired, too, by Louis XVI. out of his privy purse!--If you had no
private fortune, Prince, you would be left high and dry, like my
brother, with your pay and not another sou, and no thought of your
having saved the army, and me with it, in the boggy plains of Poland."
"You have robbed the State! You have made yourself liable to be
brought before the bench at Assizes," said the Marshal, "like that
clerk of the Treasury! And you take this, monsieur, with such levity."
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