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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: four thousand livres, lost herself in arithmetical exercises that
muddled her wits.
" 'I have ALWAYS had six thousand francs for our dress allowance,' she
said to Malvina. 'Why, how did your father find money? We shall have
nothing now with twenty-four thousand francs; it is destitution! Oh!
if my father could see me so come down in the world, it would kill him
if he were not dead already! Poor Wilhelmine!' and she began to cry.
"Malvina, puzzled to know how to comfort her mother, represented to
her that she was still young and pretty, that rose-color still became
her, that she could continue to go to the Opera and the Bouffons,
where Mme. de Nucingen had a box. And so with visions of gaieties,
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