| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: nothing which conduced to their personal enjoyment, and gave them,
more especially, excellent dinners.
Toward seven o'clock on this memorable evening, her guests were all
assembled in a wide circle around the fireplace. The mistress of the
house, sustained in her part by the sympathizing glances of the old
merchant, submitted with wonderful courage to the minute questioning
and stupid, or frivolous, comments of her visitors. At every rap upon
her door, every footfall echoing in the street, she hid her emotions
by starting topics relating to the interests of the town, and she
raised such a lively discussion on the quality of ciders, which was
ably seconded by the old merchant, that the company almost forgot to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: began to roll out of the chapel as fast as his bulk and his holy robes
would permit, roaring "Sacrilege!" with all his monks at his heels,
who were, like himself, more intent to go at once than to stand upon
the order of their going. The abbot, thus pressed from behind,
and stumbling over his own drapery before, fell suddenly prostrate
in the door-way that connected the chapel with the abbey,
and was instantaneously buried under a pyramid of ghostly carcasses,
that fell over him and each other, and lay a rolling chaos of
animated rotundities, sprawling and bawling in unseemly disarray,
and sending forth the names of all the saints in and out of heaven,
amidst the clashing of swords, the ringing of bucklers, the clattering
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: of nothing more notable than the child-eating beast of Gevaudan,
the Napoleon Bonaparte of wolves. But now I was to go down into
the scene of a romantic chapter - or, better, a romantic footnote
in the history of the world. What was left of all this bygone dust
and heroism? I was told that Protestantism still survived in this
head seat of Protestant resistance; so much the priest himself had
told me in the monastery parlour. But I had yet to learn if it
were a bare survival, or a lively and generous tradition. Again,
if in the northern Cevennes the people are narrow in religious
judgments, and more filled with zeal than charity, what was I to
look for in this land of persecution and reprisal - in a land where
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