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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: man who lives closest to nature. Toussaint Louverture, after he was
caught, died without speaking a word. Napoleon, transplanted to a
rock, talked like a magpie--he wanted to account for himself. Z.
Marcas erred in the same way, but for our benefit only. Silence in all
its majesty is to be found only in the savage. There is never a
criminal who, though he might let his secrets fall with his head into
the basket of sawdust does not feel the purely social impulse to tell
them to somebody.
Nay, I am wrong. We have seen one Iroquois of the Faubourg Saint-
Marceau who raised the Parisian to the level of the natural savage--a
republican, a conspirator, a Frenchman, an old man, who outdid all we
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