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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: terms with the Duc de Navarreins, who had married his daughter for a
first wife, and to whom he very reluctantly rendered his accounts. The
Duc de Maufrigneuse, early in life, had had relations with the
Duchesse d'Uxelles. About the year 1814, when Monsieur de Maufrigneuse
was forty-six years of age, the duchess, pitying his poverty, and
seeing that he stood very well at court, gave him her daughter Diane,
then in her seventeenth year, and possessing, in her own right, some
fifty or sixty thousand francs a year, not counting her future
expectations. Mademoiselle d'Uxelles thus became a duchess, and, as
her mother very well knew, she enjoyed the utmost liberty. The duke,
after obtaining the unexpected happiness of an heir, left his wife
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