| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: mouth, biting it so hard that her teeth were set in it: I never saw
finer limbs, but her body was writhing with pain like a harp-string
thrown on the fire. The poor creature had made a sort of struts of her
legs by setting her feet against a chest of drawers, and with both
hands she held on to the bar of a chair, her arms outstretched, with
every vein painfully swelled. She might have been a criminal
undergoing torture. But she did not utter a cry; there was not a
sound, all three speechless and motionless. The husband snored with
reassuring regularity. I wanted to study the waiting-woman's face, but
she had put on a mask, which she had removed, no doubt, during our
drive, and I could see nothing but a pair of black eyes and a
The Muse of the Department |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: princess. "It had a future in it. Chance had brought me, for once in a
way, the man of genius who is due to us, and yet so difficult to
obtain; there are more pretty women than men of genius. But the devil
interfered with the affair."
"Tell me about it, my dear; this is all news to me."
"I first noticed this beautiful passion about the middle of the winter
of 1829. Every Friday, at the opera, I observed a young man, about
thirty years of age, in the orchestra stalls, who evidently came there
for me. He was always in the same stall, gazing at me with eyes of
fire, but, seemingly, saddened by the distance between us, perhaps by
the hopelessness of reaching me."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe: apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect
and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in
unutterable horror at finding the grave cerements and corpse-like
mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by
any tangible form.
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He
had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the
revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each
in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony
clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of
the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held
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