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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: --a species of uncompleted suicide which kept him at once in the
miseries of life and in those of death.
Never was a Vice more punished by itself. A miser, locked by accident
into the subterranean strong-room that contains his treasures, has,
like Sardanapalus, the happiness of dying in the midst of his wealth.
But Cornelius, the robber and the robbed, knowing the secret of
neither the one nor the other, possessed and did not possess his
treasure,--a novel, fantastic, but continually terrible torture.
Sometimes, becoming forgetful, he would leave the little gratings of
his door wide open, and then the passers in the street could see that
already wizened man, planted on his two legs in the midst of his
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