| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: allow their idolized mother to see their tears.
"While the Requiem was chanted, they diverted her thoughts to the
choice of mourning dresses. While the coffin was placed in the huge,
black and white, wax-besprinkled catafalque that does duty for some
three thousand dead in the course of its career--so I was informed by
a philosophically-minded mute whom I once consulted on a point over a
couple of glasses of petit blanc--while an indifferent priest mumbling
the office for the dead, do you know what the friends of the departed
were saying as, all dressed in black from head to foot, they sat or
stood in the church? (Here is the picture you ordered.) Stay, do you
see them?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: by heart."
Athanase listened to his mother with a surprised but submissive air;
then he rose, took his cap, and went off to the mayor's office, saying
to himself, "Can my mother suspect my secret?"
He passed through the rue du Val-Noble, where Mademoiselle Cormon
lived,--a little pleasure which he gave himself every morning,
thinking, as usual, a variety of fanciful things:--
"How little she knows that a young man is passing before her house who
loves her well, who would be faithful to her, who would never cause
her any grief; who would leave her the entire management of her
fortune without interference. Good God! what fatality! here, side by
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: once.
"Hide! hide!" she exclaimed, looking up at him. "Seldom as we leave
the house, everything that we do is known, and every step is
watched----"
"What is it now?" asked another elderly woman, sitting by the fire.
"The man that has been prowling about the house yesterday and to-day,
followed me to-night----"
At those words all three dwellers in the wretched den looked in each
other's faces and did not try to dissimulate the profound dread that
they felt. The old priest was the least overcome, probably because he
ran the greatest danger. If a brave man is weighed down by great
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