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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: When the men who have shown such energy on the battlefield return to
ordinary civilization, most of those who have not risen to high rank
seem to have acquired no ideas, and to have no aptitude, no capacity,
for grasping new ideas. To the utter amazement of a younger
generation, those who made our armies so glorious and so terrible are
as simple as children, and as slow-witted as a clerk at his worst,
and the captain of a thundering squadron is scarcely fit to keep a
merchant's day-book. Old soldiers of this stamp, therefore being
innocent of any attempt to use their reasoning faculties, act upon
their strongest impulses. Castanier's crime was one of those matters
that raise so many questions, that, in order to debate about it, a
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