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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: reviews, books, and dramas. This eternal subject grew more and more
the fashion. The lover, that nightmare of husbands, was everywhere,
except perhaps in homes, where, in point of fact, under the bourgeois
regime, he was less seen than formerly. It is not when every one
rushes to their window and cries "Thief!" and lights the streets, that
robbers abound. It is true that during those years so fruitful of
turmoil--urban, political, and moral--a few matrimonial catastrophes
took place; but these were exceptional, and less observed than they
would have been under the Restoration. Nevertheless, women talked a
great deal together about books and the stage, then the two chief
forms of poesy. The lover thus became one of their leading topics,--a
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