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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: quite in harmony with Dinah. All these Marvels, so soon to be the
rage, struck the imagination of the strangers introduced to her; they
came expecting something unusual; and they found their expectations
surpassed when, behind a bower of flowers, they saw these catacombs
full of old things, piled up as Sommerard used to pile them--that "Old
Mortality" of furniture. And then these finds served as so many
springs which, turned on by a question, played off an essay on Jean
Goujon, Michel Columb, Germain Pilon, Boulle, Van Huysum, and Boucher,
the great native painter of Le Berry; on Clodion, the carver of wood,
on Venetian mirrors, on Brustolone, an Italian tenor who was the
Michael-Angelo of boxwood and holm oak; on the thirteenth, fourteenth,
 The Muse of the Department |