| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: probability one of the greatest captains of the age would be foisted
that very day into the place and power of her son, the king of France,
under the formidable title of lieutenant-general of the kingdom.
Before this peril she stood alone, without power of action, without
defence. She might have been likened to a phantom, as she stood there
in her mourning garments (which she had not quitted since the death of
Henri II.) so motionless was her pallid face in the grasp of her
bitter reflections. Her black eyes floated in that species of
indecision for which great statesmen are so often blamed, though it
comes from the vast extent of the glance with which they embrace all
difficulties,--setting one against the other, and adding up, as it
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: this new religion,--he! a man whose two ears were worth all of a
hundred thousand crowns apiece. He must have had secrets to reveal to
induce the king and the Duchesse de Valentinois to be present at his
torture."
"And terrible secrets, too!" said the furrier. "The Reformation, my
friends," he continued in a low voice, "will give back to the
bourgeoisie the estates of the Church. When the ecclesiastical
privileges are suppressed the Reformers intend to ask that the
/vilain/ shall be imposed on nobles as well as on burghers, and they
mean to insist that the king alone shall be above others--if indeed,
they allow the State to have a king."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: Slaves are we of their roving fancies,
Fools of their devilish glee. -- You think me,
I know, in this maundering way designing
To lighten the load of my guilt and cast it
Half on the shoulders of God. But hear me!
I'm partly a man, -- for all my weakness, --
If weakness it were to stand and murder
Before men's eyes the man who had murdered
Me, and driven my burning forehead
With horns for the world to laugh at. Trust me!
And try to believe my words but a portion
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