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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: office where legal documents had never yet been scribbled, had bought
new tables, and white boxes edged with blue, also new. His staff was
made up of clerks coming from other officers, without mutual ties, and
surprised, as one may say, to find themselves together. Godeschal, who
had served his apprenticeship under Maitre Derville, was not the sort
of clerk to allow the precious tradition of the "welcome" to be lost.
This "welcome" is a breakfast which every neophyte must give to the
"ancients" of the office into which he enters.
Now, about the time when Oscar came to the office, during the first
six months of Desroches' installation, on a winter evening when the
work had been got through more quickly than usual, and the clerks were
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