| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: to Clochegourde."
"Are you aware, monsieur," resumed the marquise, turning to Eugene,
"that what you have just said is a great impertinence?"
"If I did not know the strictness of your principles," he answered,
naively, "I should think that you wished either to give me ideas which
I deny myself, or else to tear a secret from me. But perhaps you are
only amusing yourself with me."
The marquise smiled. That smile annoyed Eugene.
"Madame," he said, "can you still believe in an offence I have not
committed? I earnestly hope that chance may not enable you to discover
the name of the person who ought to have read that letter."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: done by the putting it in execution must be put to the account of the
public benefit.
It is doubtful to this day whether, in the whole, it contributed
anything to the stop of the infection; and indeed I cannot say it did, for
nothing could run with greater fury and rage than the infection did
when it was in its chief violence, though the houses infected were shut
up as exactly and as effectually as it was possible. Certain it is that if
all the infected persons were effectually shut in, no sound person
could have been infected by them, because they could not have come
near them. But the case was this (and I shall only touch it here):
namely, that the infection was propagated insensibly, and by such
A Journal of the Plague Year |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: reached the uppermost circle of Hell. Already, from afar, I could see
the glory of Paradise shining at a vast distance; I was still in
darkness, but on the borders of day. I flew, upheld by my Guide, borne
along by a power akin to that which, during our dreams, wafts us to
spheres invisible to the eye of the body. The halo that crowned our
heads seared away the shades as we passed, like impalpable dust. Far
above us the suns of all the worlds shone with scarce so much light as
the twinkling fireflies of my native land. I was soaring towards the
fields of air where, round about Paradise, the bodies of light are in
closer array, where the azure is easy to pass through, where worlds
innumerable spring like flowers in a meadow.
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