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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: long as they are alive, and their talent leaves no trace when
they are gone. Actors and surgeons, like great singers too, like
the executants who by their performance increase the power of
music tenfold, are all the heroes of a moment.
Desplein is a case in proof of this resemblance in the destinies
of such transient genius. His name, yesterday so famous, to-day
almost forgotten, will survive in his special department without
crossing its limits. For must there not be some extraordinary
circumstances to exalt the name of a professor from the history
of Science to the general history of the human race? Had Desplein
that universal command of knowledge which makes a man the living
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