|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: institutions.
There are examples and lessons for the future in all this. For
if there were not still a future before the French aristocracy,
there would be no need to do more than find a suitable
sarcophagus; it were something pitilessly cruel to burn the dead
body of it with fire of Tophet.
But though the surgeon's scalpel is ruthless, it sometimes gives
back life to a dying man; and the Faubourg Saint-Germain may wax
more powerful under persecution than in its day of triumph, if it
but chooses to organise itself under a leader.
And now it is easy to give a summary of this semi-political
| 
