|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: creditors waiting. Ah! and for yet others, for me not so very long
ago, for you to-day--she is a white-robed angel with many-colored
wings, bearing a green palm branch in the one hand, and in the other a
flaming sword. An angel, something akin to the mythological
abstraction which lives at the bottom of a well, and to the poor and
honest girl who lives a life of exile in the outskirts of the great
city, earning every penny with a noble fortitude and in the full light
of virtue, returning to heaven inviolate of body and soul; unless,
indeed, she comes to lie at the last, soiled, despoiled, polluted, and
forgotten, on a pauper's bier. As for the men whose brains are
encompassed with bronze, whose hearts are still warm under the snows
|
