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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: "While the Requiem was chanted, they diverted her thoughts to the
choice of mourning dresses. While the coffin was placed in the huge,
black and white, wax-besprinkled catafalque that does duty for some
three thousand dead in the course of its career--so I was informed by
a philosophically-minded mute whom I once consulted on a point over a
couple of glasses of petit blanc--while an indifferent priest mumbling
the office for the dead, do you know what the friends of the departed
were saying as, all dressed in black from head to foot, they sat or
stood in the church? (Here is the picture you ordered.) Stay, do you
see them?
" 'How much do you suppose old d'Aldrigger will leave?' Desroches
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