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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: without other bed than snow, without other food than snow or a few
frozen beet-roots, a few handfuls of flour, or a little horseflesh.
Dying of hunger, thirst, fatigue, and want of sleep, these
unfortunates reached a shore where they saw before them wood,
provisions, innumerable camp equipages, and carriages,--in short a
whole town at their service. The village of Studzianka had been wholly
taken to pieces and conveyed from the heights on which it stood to the
plain. However forlorn and dangerous that refuge might be, its
miseries and its perils only courted men who had lately seen nothing
before them but the awful deserts of Russia. It was, in fact, a vast
asylum which had an existence of twenty-four hours only.
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