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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: heart than by the manifestation of prodigiously vulgar desires.
We become bond-slaves when we give ourselves body and soul, but a
man is bound to nothing by accepting the gift. Who will assure
me that love will last? The very love that I might show for you
at every moment, the better to keep your love, might serve you as
a reason for deserting me. I have no wish to be a second edition
of Mme de Beauseant. Who can ever know what it is that keeps you
beside us? Our persistent coldness of heart is the cause of an
unfailing passion in some of you; other men ask for an untiring
devotion, to be idolised at every moment; some for gentleness,
others for tyranny. No woman in this world as yet has really
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