|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: to make acquaintance; but he did not lightly entrust to others
the secrets of his life. He was the idol of a necessitous mother,
who had brought him up at the cost of the severest privations.
Mademoiselle Schinner, the daughter of an Alsatian farmer, had
never been married. Her tender soul had been cruelly crushed,
long ago, by a rich man, who did not pride himself on any great
delicacy in his love affairs. The day when, as a young girl, in
all the radiance of her beauty and all the triumph of her life,
she suffered, at the cost of her heart and her sweet illusions,
the disenchantment which falls on us so slowly and yet so
quickly--for we try to postpone as long as possible our belief in
|