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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: her happiness, others did not forgive her propriety. Now nothing is so
dangerous in Paris as unfounded suspicions,--for the reason that it is
impossible to destroy them.
This sketch of a woman who was admirably natural gives only a faint
idea of her. It would need the pencil of an Ingres to render the pride
of that brow, with its wealth of hair, the dignity of that glance, and
the thoughts betrayed by the changing colors of her cheeks. In her
were all things; poets could have found an Agnes Sorel and a Joan of
Arc, also the woman unknown, the Soul within that form, the soul of
Eve, the knowledge of the treasures of good and the riches of evil,
error and resignation, crime and devotion, the Donna Julia and the
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