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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: twenty; the Marquis d'Esgrignon married her to continue his line. But
she died in childbirth, a victim to the unskilfulness of her
physician, leaving, most fortunately, a son to bear the name of the
d'Esgrignons. The old Marquis--he was but fifty-three, but adversity
and sharp distress had added months to every year--the poor old
Marquis saw the death of the loveliest of human creatures, a noble
woman in whom the charm of the feminine figures of the sixteenth
century lived again, a charm now lost save to men's imaginations. With
her death the joy died out of his old age. It was one of those
terrible shocks which reverberate through every moment of the years
that follow. For a few moments he stood beside the bed where his wife
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