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: Vandenesses, du Chatelet, and others. She would frequently receive a
man whose wife she would not admit, and her power was great enough to
induce certain ambitious men to submit to these hard conditions, such
as two famous royalist bankers, M. de Nucingen and Ferdinand du
Tillet. She had so thoroughly studied the strength and the weakness of
Paris life, that her conduct had never given any man the smallest
advantage over her. An enormous price might have been set on a note or
letter by which she might have compromised herself, without one being
produced.
If an arid soul enabled her to play her part to the life, her person
was no less available for it. She had a youthful figure. Her voice
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