A) varied
Varied/variety means there's many, which is said in the next sentence.
Answer: The theme of Fate and free will
Explanation: In the story, Mrs. Mallard's sister is afraid to tell her the news that she is now a widow, she is afraid that she might suffer a heart attack. Nevertheless, when Mrs. Mallard isolates herself in her room, she starts feeling a sensation of freeness. She realizes that she will finally be liberated from her oppressing marriage. This reaction is ironic since the reader is expecting her to be devastated. The theme of fate and free will is suggested because regardless of how liberated she starts to feel, she is destined to perish from joy at the end of the story.
The facts that are told at the end of the story are in sharp contrast to those that unleash the tragedy that Desiree and her son have to live. Only in the last few lines we discover that her husband knows the true cause of the dark color of the child's skin, which derives from the color of his own mother and has nothing to do with the unknown facts that cover the real origin of Desiree, since his filiation was not known from the beggining.
The irony is graphed in the fact that Desiree's husband could not have ignored that his mother was a dark-skinned woman, as he lived with her for the first eight years of his life and in addition to that, in the end, we also got to know that he was in possession of that letter that informed him the truth, in the probably event that he had forgotten it over the years.
The mistreatment he gave to his slaves was then the most important contradiction, although we can observe that his character softens after the birth of his son, even so having to see him daily was probably a permanent reminder of a shame he was trying to leave behind.
A theme that Geoffrey Chaucer develops through these two excerpts is that of treachery, since both King Peter of Spain and King Peter of Cyprus were betrayed and their lives ended tragically. King Peter of Spain was betrayed by a man named Bertrand, who had agreed to protect him in exchange for a great compensation, but who eventually handed him over to his half-brother, Henry, who promised him an even greater reward and who assassinated Peter in his tent in 1369, becoming the new king. This is narrated in the excerpt, where Bertrand is compared not with Oliver of Charlemagne, friend of Charlemagne, but with the knight that betrayed him ("No, Oliver of Charlemagne... such a trap!").
Peter I of Cyprus devoting his short yet intense life to fight Islam, and he led the short yet devastating Alexandrian Crusade, but his life ended abruptly. Betrayed by his wife and by some of his closer knights, he was assassinated in his bed also in 1369. This is also referred in the poem ("That conquered Alexandria... on thy bed!").
To sum up, both excerpts revolve around this theme, which they present very similarly: after emphasizing the deeds of the two historical characters, they finalize by regretting their tragic endings.
