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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: the staircase, he will hardly fail to pause and look at the picture
presented by the interior of this house. To the left is a square
garden-plot, allowing of not more than four long steps in each
direction, a garden of black soil, with trellises bereft of vines, and
where, in default of vegetation under the shade of two trees, papers
collect, old rags, potsherds, bits of mortar fallen from the roof; a
barren ground, where time has shed on the walls, and on the trunks and
branches of the trees, a powdery deposit like cold soot. The two parts
of the house, set at a right angle, derive light from this garden-
court shut in by two adjoining houses built on wooden piers, decrepit
and ready to fall, where on each floor some grotesque evidence is to
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