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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: Bartolommeo Belvidero, at the age of sixty, had fallen in love
with an angel of peace and beauty. Don Juan had been the sole
fruit of this late and short-lived love. For fifteen years the
widower had mourned the loss of his beloved Juana; and to this
sorrow of age, his son and his numerous household had attributed
the strange habits that he had contracted. He had shut himself up
in the least comfortable wing of his palace, and very seldom left
his apartments; even Don Juan himself must first ask permission
before seeing his father. If this hermit, unbound by vows, came
or went in his palace or in the streets of Ferrara, he walked as
if he were in a dream, wholly engrossed, like a man at strife
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