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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: Bastile by a lettre de cachet; yet Figaro may have known and seen
enough to excuse him, when lettres de cachet were abolished, for
handing the Marquis over to a Comite de Salut Public. Disappointed
play-actors, like Collet d'Herbois; disappointed poets, like Fabre
d'Olivet, were, they say, especially ferocious. Why not?
Ingenious, sensitive spirits, used as lap-dogs and singing-birds by
men and women whom they felt to be their own flesh and blood, they
had, it may be, a juster appreciation of the actual worth of their
patrons than had our own Pitt and Burke. They had played the valet:
and no man was a hero to them. They had seen the nobleman expose
himself before his own helots: they would try if the helot was not
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