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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: beside himself. He was cold; then suddenly he felt a fire burning in
the secret depths of his being, in what, for lack of a better word, we
call the heart. He did not applaud, he said nothing; he felt a mad
impulse, a sort of frenzy of the sort that seizes us only at the age
when there is a something indefinably terrible and infernal in our
desires. Sarrasine longed to rush upon the stage and seize that woman.
His strength, increased a hundredfold by a moral depression impossible
to describe,--for such phenomena take place in a sphere inaccessible
to human observation,--insisted upon manifesting itself with
deplorable violence. Looking at him, you would have said that he was a
cold, dull man. Renown, science, future, life, prizes, all vanished.
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