| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Camille by Alexandre Dumas: which I have set myself to carry out. I swear to you that I shall
never be myself again until I have seen Marguerite. It is perhaps
the thirst of the fever, a sleepless night's dream, a moment's
delirium; but though I were to become a Trappist, like M. de
Rance', after having seen, I will see."
"I understand," I said to Armand, "and I am at your service. Have
you seen Julie Duprat?"
"Yes, I saw her the day I returned, for the first time."
"Did she give you the papers that Marguerite had left for you?"
Armand drew a roll of papers from under his pillow, and
immediately put them back.
 Camille |
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: folly."
Madame Firmiani acknowledged to twenty-five. But the Practicals proved
that having married the invisible Firmiani (then a highly respectable
individual in the forties) in 1813, at the age of sixteen, she must be
at least twenty-eight in 1825. However the same persons also asserted
that at no period of her life had she ever been so desirable or so
completely a woman. She was now at an age when women are most prone to
conceive a passion, and to desire it, perhaps, in their pensive hours.
She possessed all that earth sells, all that it lends, all that it
gives. The Attaches declared there was nothing of which she was
ignorant; the Contradictors asserted that there was much she ought to
|