| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: their ablest and bravest men; and a weaker and meaner generation was
left behind, to do the governing of the world. Let them live, and
keep what they had. If signs of vigour still appeared in France, in
the wars of Louis XIV. they were feverish, factitious, temporary--
soon, as the event proved, to droop into the general exhaustion. If
wars were still to be waged they were to be wars of succession, wars
of diplomacy; not wars of principle, waged for the mightiest
invisible interests of man. The exhaustion was general; and to it
we must attribute alike the changes and the conservatism of the
Ancien Regime. To it is owing that growth of a centralising
despotism, and of arbitrary regal power, which M. de Tocqueville has
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: "Madame, I received it myself from the valet of Monsieur le Baron de
Rastignac."
After that there was silence for some time.
"Does Madame intend to dress?" asked Caroline at last.
"No-- He is certainly a most impertinent man," reflected the marquise.
I request all women to imagine for themselves the reflections of which
this was the first.
Madame de Listomere ended hers by a formal decision to forbid her
porter to admit Monsieur de Rastignac, and to show him, herself,
something more than disdain when she met him in society; for his
insolence far surpassed that of other men which the marquise had ended
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