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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: fearless, terrible brow of his, and at length grew gay like a man
mounted on his hobby.
"How old are you?" I asked.
"Eighty-two."
"How long have you been blind?"
"For very nearly fifty years," he said, and there was that in his tone
which told me that his regret was for something more than his lost
sight, for great power of which he had been robbed.
"Then why do they call you 'the Doge'?" I asked.
"Oh, it is a joke. I am a Venetian noble, and I might have been a doge
like any one else."
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