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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: Brought up in a gloomy house in the Marais, by a woman of narrow mind,
a "devote" who, being sustained by a sense of duty (sacred phrase!),
had fulfilled her tasks as a mother religiously, Marie-Angelique and
Marie Eugenie de Granville reached the period of their marriage--the
first at eighteen, the second at twenty years of age--without ever
leaving the domestic zone where the rigid maternal eye controlled
them. Up to that time they had never been to a play; the churches of
Paris were their theatre. Their education in their mother's house had
been as rigorous as it would have been in a convent. From infancy they
had slept in a room adjoining that of the Comtesse de Granville, the
door of which stood always open. The time not occupied by the care of
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