| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Domestic Peace by Honore de Balzac: The old lady took Madame de Vaudremont's hand, and they rose.
"There," said Madame de Lansac, and her eyes showed her the stranger,
sitting pale and tremulous under the glare of the candles, "that is my
grandniece, the Comtesse de Soulanges; to-day she yielded at last to
my persuasion, and consented to leave the sorrowful room, where the
sight of her child gives her but little consolation. You see her? You
think her charming? Then imagine, dear Beauty, what she must have been
when happiness and love shed their glory on that face now blighted."
The Countess looked away in silence, and seemed lost in sad
reflections.
The Duchess led her to the door into the card-room; then, after
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: hemmed in on the horizon by the summits of the Correze. These
mountains have neither the abrupt rise of the Alpine ranges nor their
splendid ridges; neither the warm gorges and desolate peaks of the
Appenines, nor the picturesque grandeur of the Pyrenees. Their
undulating slopes, due to the action of water, prove the subsidence of
some great natural catastrophe in which the floods retired slowly.
This characteristic, common to most of the earth convulsions in
France, has perhaps contributed, together with the climate, to the
epitaph of /douce/ bestowed by all Europe on our sunny France.
Though this abrupt transition from the smiling landscapes of the
Limousin to the sterner aspects of La Marche and Auvergne may offer to
|
