|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: noticeable from Paris to Pekin, was the gentle paternity of his manner
to grisettes. They reminded him of the illustrious operatic queens of
his early days, whose celebrity was European during a good third of
the eighteenth century. It is certain that the old gentleman, who had
lived in days gone by with that feminine nation now as much forgotten
as many other great things,--like the Jesuits, the Buccaneers, the
Abbes, and the Farmers-General,--had acquired an irresistible good-
humor, a kindly ease, a laisser-aller devoid of egotism, the self-
effacement of Jupiter with Alcmene, of the king intending to be duped,
who casts his thunderbolts to the devil, wants his Olympus full of
follies, little suppers, feminine profusions--but with Juno out of the
|
