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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: soon dismissed. No longer able to serve the State, Pere Fourchon ended
by becoming a manufacturer. In the country a poor man can always get
something to do, and make at least a pretence of gaining an honest
livelihood. At sixty-eight years of age the old man started his rope-
walk, a manufactory which requires the very smallest capital. The
workshop is, as we have seen, any convenient wall; the machinery costs
about ten francs. The apprentice slept, like his master, in a hay-
loft, and lived on whatever he could pick up. The rapacity of the law
in the matter of doors and windows expires "sub dio." The tow to make
the first rope can be borrowed. But the principal revenue of Pere
Fourchon and his satellite Mouche, the natural son of one of his
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