The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: make a stockbroker or a banker happy at a fixed price. To this
good-natured beauty, Euphrasia by name, an unbounded ambition had led
a notary's clerk to aspire. In short, the second clerk in the office
of Maitre Crottat, notary, had fallen in love with her, as youth at
two-and-twenty can fall in love. The scrivener would have murdered the
Pope and run amuck through the whole sacred college to procure the
miserable sum of a hundred louis to pay for a shawl which had turned
Euphrasia's head, at which price her waiting-woman had promised that
Euphrasia should be his. The infatuated youth walked to and fro under
Madame Euphrasia's windows, like the polar bears in their cage at the
Jardin des Plantes, with his right hand thrust beneath his waistcoat
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