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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: upon Birotteau. The way in which she delighted in plotting against the
poor vicar's domestic comfort bore all the marks of what we must call
a profoundly malignant genius. Yet she so managed that she was never,
so far as eye could see, in the wrong.
III
Eight days after the date on which this history began, the new
arrangements of the household and the relations which grew up between
the Abbe Birotteau and Mademoiselle Gamard revealed to the former the
existence of a plot which had been hatching for the last six months.
As long as the old maid exercised her vengeance in an underhand way,
and the vicar was able to shut his eyes to it and refuse to believe in
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