| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: be sure, he is kept waiting. His friends have named him "dull
weather,"--aptly enough, for there is neither clear light nor total
darkness about him. He is like all the ministers who have succeeded
one another in France since the Charter. A woman with principles could
not have fallen into better hands. It is certainly a great thing for a
virtuous woman to have married a man incapable of follies.
Occasionally some fops have been sufficiently impertinent to press the
hand of the marquise while dancing with her. They gained nothing in
return but contemptuous glances; all were made to feel the shock of
that insulting indifference which, like a spring frost, destroys the
germs of flattering hopes. Beaux, wits, and fops, men whose sentiments
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe: apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of
golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the
roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle
within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed
the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod,
bearing a brazier of fire, that projected its rays through the
tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were
produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in
the western or black chamber the effect of the fire-light that
streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes,
was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: together. A set of Bixiou's drawings to illustrate life in the
debtors' prison, led the conversation to take this particular turn;
and from debtors' prisons they went to debts.
It was midnight. They had broken up into little knots round the table
and before the fire, and gave themselves up to the burlesque fun which
is only possible or comprehensible in Paris and in that particular
region which is bounded by the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Chaussee
d'Antin, the upper end of the Rue de Navarin and the line of the
boulevards.
In ten minutes' time they had come to an end of all the deep
reflections, all the moralizings, small and great, all the bad puns
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