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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: be up, when he would retire on a pension; he therefore showed the
utmost indifference to the political intrigues of the bureaus. Like
his elder brother, to whom retirement from active service had proved a
fatal blow, he would probably grow an old man when he could no longer
come from his home to the ministry, sit in the same chair and copy a
certain number of pages. Poiret's eyes were dim, his glance weak and
lifeless, his skin discolored and wrinkled, gray in tone and speckled
with bluish dots; his nose flat, his lips drawn inward to the mouth,
where a few defective teeth still lingered. His gray hair, flattened
to the head by the pressure of his hat, gave him the look of an
ecclesiastic,--a resemblance he would scarcely have liked, for he
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