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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: dressed in white, beautiful with naught but her own beauty, laying
down her rosary to answer love, might have inspired respect, even in a
Montefiore, if the silence, if the night, if Juana herself had not
seemed so amorous. Montefiore stood still, intoxicated with an unknown
happiness, possibly that of Satan beholding heaven through a rift of
the clouds which form its enclosure.
"As soon as I saw you," he said in pure Tuscan, and in the modest tone
of voice so peculiarly Italian, "I loved you. My soul and my life are
now in you, and in you they will be forever, if you will have it so."
Juana listened, inhaling from the atmosphere the sound of these words
which the accents of love made magnificent.
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