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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: Marie came with him as far as the gateway. There Louis gave solemn
parting words of the tenderest counsel, telling Marie that he would
now be left alone in the world. He looked at his brother for a moment,
and put his arms about him, took one more long look, brushed a tear
from his eyes, and went, turning again and again till the very last to
see his brother standing there in the gateway of the school.
A month later Louis-Gaston, now an apprentice on board a man-of-war,
left the harbor of Rochefort. Leaning over the bulwarks of the
corvette Iris, he watched the coast of France receding swiftly till it
became indistinguishable from the faint blue horizon line. In a little
while he felt that he was really alone, and lost in the wide ocean,
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