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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: Venetian shutters were closed, darkness deepened the gloom in the
dismal chamber. The sick man himself had wasted greatly. All the life
in him seemed to have taken refuge in the still brilliant eyes. The
livid whiteness of his face was something horrible to see, enhanced as
it was by the long dank locks of hair that straggled along his cheeks,
for he would never suffer them to cut it. He looked like some
religious fanatic in the desert. Mental suffering was extinguishing
all human instincts in this man of scarce fifty years of age, whom all
Paris had known as so brilliant and so successful.
"One morning at the beginning of December 1824, he looked up at
Ernest, who sat at the foot of his bed gazing at his father with
Gobseck |
