| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: pointed noise expressed the shrewdness of the people, and his
countenance revealed an intelligence capable of conducting itself well
on a single point of the circumference, without having the faculty of
seeing all around it. His eyes, the arching brows of which, scarcely
covered with a whitish down, projected like an awning, were strongly
circled by a pale-blue band, the skin being white and shining at the
spring of the nose,--a sign which almost always denotes excessive
enthusiasm. Christophe was of the people,--the people who devote
themselves, who fight for their devotions, who let themselves be
inveigled and betrayed; intelligent enough to comprehend and serve an
idea, too upright to turn it to his own account, too noble to sell
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Blix by Frank Norris: condemned rifles was to be regretted only because the ring
manipulating it was broken up. The appropriation of a schooner in
the harbor of Callao was a story in itself; while the robbery of
thirty thousand dollars' worth of sea-otter skins from a Russian
trading-post in Alaska, accomplished chiefly through the agency of
a barrel of rum manufactured from sugar-cane, was a veritable
achievement.
He had been born, so he told them, in Winchester, in England, and--
Heaven save the mark!--had been brought up with a view of taking
orders. For some time he was a choir boy in the great Winchester
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: before her, and examined them as a gambler examines the thirty-six
numbers at roulette before he risks his stake. Gazonal's bones were
freezing; he seemed not to know where he was; but his amazement grew
greater and greater when this hideous old woman in a green bonnet,
stout and squat, whose false front was frizzed into points of
interrogation, proceeded, in a thick voice, to relate to him all the
particular circumstances, even the most secret, of his past life: she
told him his tastes, his habits, his character; the thoughts of his
childhood; everything that had influenced his life; a marriage broken
off, why, with whom, the exact description of the woman he had loved;
and, finally, the place he came from, his lawsuit, etc.
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