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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: In the evening the lovers went to the theatre. This is the way of
Italian life: love in the morning; music in the evening; the night for
sleep. How far preferable is this existence to that of a country where
every one expends his lungs and strength in politics, without
contributing any more, single-minded, to the progress of affairs than
a grain of sand can make a cloud of dust. Liberty, in those strange
lands, consists in the right to squabble over public concerns, to take
care of oneself, to waste time in patriotic undertakings each more
futile than the last, inasmuch as they all weaken that noble, holy
self-concern which is the parent of all great human achievement. At
Venice, on the contrary, love and its myriad ties, the sweet business
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