The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: intercessions of his gentle love, later on women of other kinds,--
blacks, mulattoes, whites, and Indian dancing-girls,--orgies and
adventures in many lands, completely effaced all recollection of his
cousin, of Saumur, of the house, the bench, the kiss snatched in the
dark passage. He remembered only the little garden shut in with
crumbling walls, for it was there he learned the fate that had
overtaken him; but he rejected all connection with his family. His
uncle was an old dog who had filched his jewels; Eugenie had no place
in his heart nor in his thoughts, though she did have a place in his
accounts as a creditor for the sum of six thousand francs.
Such conduct and such ideas explain Charles Grandet's silence. In the
Eugenie Grandet |