| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: get on without the wit of journalism, even here?"
"In this lamentable business, the bourgeoisie plays the same /role/ as
the pioneers of America," continued Clousier. "It buys up great
estates, which the peasantry could not otherwise acquire. It cuts them
up and then sells, either at auction or in small lots at private sale,
to the peasants. Everything is judged by figures in these days, and I
know none more eloquent than these. France has ninety-nine million
acres, which, subtracting highways, roads, dunes, canals, and barren,
uncultivated regions deserted by capital, may be reduced to eighty
millions. Now out of eighty millions of acres to thirty-two millions
of inhabitants we find one hundred and twenty-five millions of small
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: door still retains its Ionic cornice; and the western entrance,
looking on the bay, is surmounted by carved fruit and flowers,
and is crowned, as is the roof, with that pineapple in whose
symbolic wealth the rich merchants of the last century
delighted.
Like most of the statelier houses in that region of Oldport,
this abode had its rumors of a ghost and of secret chambers.
The ghost had never been properly lionized nor laid, for Aunt
Jane, the neatest of housekeepers, had discouraged all silly
explorations, had at once required all barred windows to be
opened, all superfluous partitions to be taken down, and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: an enchanted slumber and surrounded by the fires of hell lest she
should overthrow a Church corrupted by its alliance with
government. On the fourth evening, we find her swearing a
malicious lie to gratify her personal jealousy, and then plotting
a treacherous murder with a fool and a scoundrel. In the original
draft of Siegfried's Death, the incongruity is carried still
further by the conclusion, at which the dead Brynhild, restored
to her godhead by Wotan, and again a Valkyrie, carries the slain
Siegfried to Valhalla to live there happily ever after with its
pious heroes.
As to Siegfried himself, he talks of women, both in this second
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