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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: ideas, institutions, commerce, and commercial enterprises, all of
which, like noble races and dynasties, are born and rise and fall.
From whence comes the vigor with which this law of growth and decay
applies itself to all organized things in this lower world? Death
itself, in times of scourge, has periods when it advances, slackens,
sinks back, and slumbers. Our globe is perhaps only a rocket a little
more continuing than the rest. History, recording the causes of the
rise and fall of all things here below, could enlighten man as to the
moment when he might arrest the play of all his faculties; but neither
the conquerors, nor the actors, nor the women, nor the writers in the
great drama will listen to the salutary voice.
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
