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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: asked for the shortest way, and hurried through the field paths
of the Bourbonnais, bearing, as it were, a dead man on my back.
The nearer I came to the Chateau de Montpersan, the more aghast I
felt at the idea of my strange self-imposed pilgrimage. Vast
numbers of romantic fancies ran in my head. I imagined all kinds
of situations in which I might find this Comtesse de Montpersan,
or, to observe the laws of romance, this Juliette, so
passionately beloved of my traveling companion. I sketched out
ingenious answers to the questions which she might be supposed to
put to me. At every turn of a wood, in every beaten pathway, I
rehearsed a modern version of the scene in which Sosie describes
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