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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: returned to the inn after a long meditation to which he abandoned
himself on the bank of the Rhine, resting his elbow on a rock, he
could, he said to me, not have slept, but have watched untempted
beside millions of gold. At the moment when his virtue rose proudly
and vigorously from the struggle, he knelt down, with a feeling of
ecstasy and happiness, and thanked God. He felt happy, light-hearted,
content, as on the day of his first communion, when he thought himself
worthy of the angels because he had passed one day without sinning in
thought, or word, or deed.
He returned to the inn and closed the window without fearing to make a
noise, and went to bed at once. His moral and physical lassitude was
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