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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: periwig-maker to the play-actor--who like them had seen the
frivolity, the baseness, the profligacy, of the rulers to whose
vices they pandered, whom they despised while they adored! Figaro
himself may have looked up to his master the Marquis as a superior
being as long as the law enabled the Marquis to send him to the
Bastile by a lettre de cachet; yet Figaro may have known and seen
enough to excuse him, when lettres de cachet were abolished, for
handing the Marquis over to a Comite de Salut Public. Disappointed
play-actors, like Collet d'Herbois; disappointed poets, like Fabre
d'Olivet, were, they say, especially ferocious. Why not?
Ingenious, sensitive spirits, used as lap-dogs and singing-birds by
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