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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: the exquisite beauty of the women, there may perhaps have been in
the depths of the revelers' hearts some struggling glimmer of
reverence for things divine and human, until it was drowned in
glowing floods of wine! Yet even then the flowers had been
crushed, eyes were growing dull, and drunkenness, in Rabelais'
phrase, had "taken possession of them down to their sandals."
During that brief pause a door opened; and as once the Divine
presence was revealed at Belshazzar's feast, so now it seemed to
be manifest in the apparition of an old white-haired servant, who
tottered in, and looked sadly from under knitted brows at the
revelers. He gave a withering glance at the garlands, the golden
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