|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: fact they will all be found in the blood of the last gentleman who is
indeed a gentleman. In other words, every bourgeois is cousin to a
bourgeois, and every noble is cousin to a noble. A splendid page of
biblical genealogy shows that in one thousand years three families,
Shem, Ham, and Japhet, peopled the globe. One family may become a
nation; unfortunately, a nation may become one family. To prove this
we need only search back through our ancestors and see their
accumulation, which time increases into a retrograde geometric
progression, which multiplies of itself; reminding us of the
calculation of the wise man who, being told to choose a reward from
the king of Persia for inventing chess, asked for one ear of wheat for
|
