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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: indeed surprised to see him display all the talents and various
aptitudes of a statesman; still it might yet be a question whether he
would prove to be a solid politician, or had merely been moulded in
the fire of circumstance. This question had just been asked by a man
whom he had made a prefet, a man of wit and observation, who had for a
long time been a journalist, and who admired de Marsay without
infusing into his admiration that dash of acrid criticism by which, in
Paris, one superior man excuses himself from admiring another.
"Was there ever," said he, "in your former life, any event, any
thought or wish which told you what your vocation was?" asked Emile
Blondet; "for we all, like Newton, have our apple, which falls and
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