| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: dimensions of an Egyptian pyramid. The hands of that man were in
Paris, his elbows in the Cloister of Saint-Gatien.
"He!" said the victim to himself, "HE to prevent the Baron de
Listomere from becoming peer of France!--and, perhaps, 'by the help of
the archbishop we may be able to stop the matter here'!"
In presence of such great interests Birotteau felt he was a mere worm;
he judged himself harshly.
The news of Birotteau's removal from Madame de Listomere's house
seemed all the more amazing because the reason of it was wholly
impenetrable. Madame de Listomere said that her nephew was intending
to marry and leave the navy, and she wanted the vicar's apartment to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: locusts and wild honey.
To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a
forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A
hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our
own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees
there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and
consolidated the fibers of men's thoughts. Ah! already I shudder
for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village,
when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, and we
no longer produce tar and turpentine.
The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained
Walking |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: tears. A sheriff's clerk was reading aloud a document. On a wretched
table was a meal, untouched. The light came in through the bars of a
window near the ceiling. It was a picture fit to make the bourgeois
shudder, and the bourgeois shuddered. Fougeres had simply been
inspired by the masterpiece of Gerard Douw; he had turned the group of
the "Dropsical Woman" toward the window, instead of presenting it full
front. The condemned man was substituted for the dying woman--same
pallor, same glance, same appeal to God. Instead of the Dutch doctor,
he had painted the cold, official figure of the sheriff's clerk
attired in black; but he had added an old woman to the young one of
Gerard Douw. The cruelly simple and good-humored face of the
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