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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: at carnival time, when their exuberant wit, repressed for the rest of
the year, finds a vent in more or less ingenious buffoonery.
"What times we live in! What an irrational central power which allows
such tremendous energies to run to waste! There are diplomatists in
Bohemia quite capable of overturning Russia's designs, if they but
felt the power of France at their backs. There are writers,
administrators, soldiers, and artists in Bohemia; every faculty, every
kind of brain is represented there. Bohemia is a microcosm. If the
Czar would buy Bohemia for a score of millions and set its population
down in Odessa--always supposing that they consented to leave the
asphalt of the boulevards--Odessa would be Paris with the year. In
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