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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: sleeping partner of small traders. No one at the Courts, no one in
Paris, knew of this secret life of Popinot's. There are virtues so
splendid that they necessitate obscurity; men make haste to hide them
under a bushel. As to those whom the lawyer succored, they, hard at
work all day and tired at night, were little able to sing his praises;
theirs was the gracelessness of children, who can never pay because
they owe too much. There is such compulsory ingratitude; but what
heart that has sown good to reap gratitude can think itself great?
By the end of the second year of his apostolic work, Popinot had
turned the storeroom at the bottom of his house into a parlor, lighted
by the three iron-barred windows. The walls and ceiling of this
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