The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: match in France.
The beauty, the great wealth, the intellectual qualities, of these two
children came entirely from their mother. The Comte de Lanty was a
short, thin, ugly little man, as dismal as a Spaniard, as great a bore
as a banker. He was looked upon, however, as a profound politician,
perhaps because he rarely laughed, and was always quoting M. de
Metternich or Wellington.
This mysterious family had all the attractiveness of a poem by Lord
Byron, whose difficult passages were translated differently by each
person in fashionable society; a poem that grew more obscure and more
sublime from strophe to strophe. The reserve which Monsieur and Madame
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