| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Domestic Peace by Honore de Balzac: "Why did you come in with the Colonel?" asked the Baron.
"I met him in the hall," she replied. "But leave me now; everybody is
looking at us."
Martial returned to the Colonel of Cuirassiers. Then it was that the
little blue lady had become the object of the curiosity which agitated
in such various ways the Colonel, Soulanges, Martial, and Madame de
Vaudremont.
When the friends parted, after the challenge which closed their
conversation, the Baron flew to Madame de Vaudremont, and led her to a
place in the most brilliant quadrille. Favored by the sort of
intoxication which dancing always produces in a woman, and by the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: either in dashing parties on horseback, or in the light and elegant
carriages which powder the philosophical pedestrian with dust. The
hope of meeting some women of fashion, and of being seen by them--and
the hope, less often disappointed, of seeing young peasant girls, as
wily as judges--crowds the ballroom at Sceaux with numerous swarms of
lawyers' clerks, of the disciples of Aesculapius, and other youths
whose complexions are kept pale and moist by the damp atmosphere of
Paris back-shops. And a good many bourgeois marriages have had their
beginning to the sound of the band occupying the centre of this
circular ballroom. If that roof could speak, what love-stories could
it not tell!
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