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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: on his way back the old man had met him in the Palais-Royal,
hesitating before the entrance to a gambling-house.
This was the 14th. At dinner Cesar could not eat. His stomach,
violently contracted, rejected food. The evening hours were terrible.
The shaken man went through, for the hundredth time, one of those
frightful alternations of hope and despair which, by forcing the soul
to run up the scale of joyous emotion and then precipitating it to the
last depths of agony, exhaust the vital strength of feeble beings.
Derville, Birotteau's advocate, rushed into the handsome salon where
Madame Cesar was using all her persuasion to retain her husband, who
wished to sleep on the fifth floor,--"that I may not see," he said,
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
