| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: elegances then in fashion. A young man about twenty-eight years of age
advanced to meet them with a smiling face, for he saw Leon de Lora
first. Vauvinet held out his hand with apparent friendliness to
Bixiou, and bowed coldly to Gazonal as he motioned them to enter his
office, where bourgeois taste was visible beneath the artistic
appearance of the furniture, and in spite of the statuettes and the
thousand other little trifles applied to our little apartments by
modern art, which has made itself as small as its patrons.
Vauvinet was dressed, like other young men of our day who go into
business, with extreme elegance, which many of them regard as a
species of prospectus.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: yet precautions were none the less necessary; since rumours of
strange lights, started by chance nocturnal roamers, would soon
bring disaster on our enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole
thing a chemical laboratory if discovery should occur. Gradually
we equipped our sinister haunt of science with materials either
purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the college -- materials
carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes -- and provided
spades and picks for the many burials we should have to make in
the cellar. At the college we used an incinerator, but the apparatus
was too costly for our unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always
a nuisance -- even the small guinea-pig bodies from the slight
Herbert West: Reanimator |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: others as colorless and virtuous as those of Florian. In short, the
reader must have known the luxury of tears, must have felt the silent
pangs of a passing memory, the vision of a dear yet far-off Shade,--
memories which bring regret for all that earth has swallowed up, with
smiles for vanished joys.
And now, believe that the writer would not, for the wealth of England,
steal from poesy a single lie with which to embellish this narrative.
The following is a true history, on which you may safely spend the
treasures of your sensibility--if you have any.
In these days the French language has as many idioms and represents as
many idiosyncracies as there are varieties of men in the great family
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