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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Two Brothers by Honore de Balzac: and submissive to paternal discipline as a child of twelve years old.
That timidity ought to explain his childhood, youth, and after-life to
those who are reluctant to admit the existence of such characters, or
such facts as this history relates,--though proofs of them are, alas,
common everywhere, even among princes; for Sophie Dawes was taken by
the last of the Condes under worse circumstances than the
Rabouilleuse. There are two species of timidity,--the timidity of the
mind, and the timidity of the nerves; a physical timidity, and a moral
timidity. The one is independent of the other. The body may fear and
tremble, while the mind is calm and courageous, or vice versa. This is
the key to many moral eccentricities. When the two are united in one
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