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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: The world is very foolish, very blind, very ignorant; it can penetrate
no secrets but those which amuse it and serve its malice: noble
things, great things, it puts its hand before its eyes to avoid
seeing. But, as I look back, it seems to me that I had an attitude and
aspect of indignant innocence, with movements of pride, which a great
painter would have recognized. I must have enlivened many a ball with
my tempests of anger and disdain. Lost poesy! such sublime poems are
only made in the glowing indignation which seizes us at twenty. Later,
we are wrathful no longer, we are too weary, vice no longer amazes us,
we are cowards, we fear. But then--oh! I kept a great pace! For all
that I played the silliest personage in the world; I was charged with
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