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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: 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
visible presentment of a life of luxury, extravagance, and riot. There
were faint red marks on her young face, signs of the fineness of the
skin; but her features were coarsened, as it were, and the circles
about her eyes were unwontedly dark. Nature nevertheless was so
vigorous in her, that these traces of past folly did not spoil her
beauty. Her eyes glittered. She looked like some Herodias of da
Vinci's (I have dealt in pictures), so magnificently full of life and
Gobseck |
