|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: when I was twenty-five years old, engineer-in-ordinary. I was
sent, as you know, to a sub-prefecture, with a salary of twenty-
five hundred francs. The question of money is nothing. Certainly
my fate has been more brilliant than the son of a carpenter might
expect; but where will you find a grocer's boy, who, if thrown
into a shop at sixteen, will not in ten years be on the high-road
to an independent property?
I learned then to what these terrible efforts of mental power,
these gigantic exertions demanded by the State were to lead. The
State now employed me to count and measure pavements and heaps of
stones on the roadways; I had to keep in order, repair, and
|
