| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: in his three years' stay in Paris, though he lived very poorly. This
fortune consisted of but a few thousand francs.
Lambert returned to Blois at the beginning of 1820, driven from Paris
by the sufferings to which the impecunious are exposed there. He must
often have been a victim to the secret storms, the terrible rage of
mind by which artists are tossed to judge from the only fact his uncle
recollected, and the only letter he preserved of all those which Louis
Lambert wrote to him at that time, perhaps because it was the last and
the longest.
To begin with the story. Louis one evening was at the Theatre-
Francais, seated on a bench in the upper gallery, near to one of the
Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: dimensions, and ages arrayed in unequal amounts--from the ancient
coins of Assyria, slender as the nail, to the ancient ones of Latium,
thicker than the hand, with the buttons of Egina, the tablets of
Bactriana, and the short bars of Lacedaemon; many were covered with
rust, or had grown greasy, or, having been taken in nets or from among
the ruins of captured cities, were green with the water or blackened
by fire. The Suffet had speedily calculated whether the sums present
corresponded with the gains and losses which had just been read to
him; and he was going away when he perceived three brass jars
completely empty. Abdalonim turned away his head to mark his horror,
and Hamilcar, resigning himself to it, said nothing.
Salammbo |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: merely from her expression. She looked--she looked"--he hesitated--
"like some one walking in her sleep."
To Cassandra the significant thing was that Katharine had gone out
without telling her, and she interpreted this to mean that she had
gone out to meet Ralph Denham. But to her surprise William drew no
comfort from this probability.
"Once throw conventions aside," he began, "once do the things that
people don't do--" and the fact that you are going to meet a young man
is no longer proof of anything, except, indeed, that people will talk.
Cassandra saw, not without a pang of jealousy, that he was extremely
solicitous that people should not talk about Katharine, as if his
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