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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: unfolded, glittered on the chimney-piece. Drawers stood open; flowers,
diamonds, gloves, a bouquet, a girdle, were littered about. The room
was full of vague sweet perfume. And--beneath all the luxury and
disorder, beauty and incongruity, I saw Misery crouching in wait for
her or for her adorer, Misery rearing its head, for the Countess had
begun to feel the edge of those fangs. Her tired face was an epitome
of the room strewn with relics of past festival. The scattered
gewgaws, pitiable this morning, when gathered together and coherent,
had turned heads the night before.
" 'What efforts to drink of the Tantalus cup of bliss I could read in
these traces of love stricken by the thunderbolt remorse--in this
Gobseck |
