| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: fair, fresh, with sparkling eyes, and dressed in a taste that wrings
approval from artists and her bitterest rivals.
Have you ever, for your happiness, met a woman whose harmonious voice
gives to her speech the same charm that emanates from her manners? a
woman who knows how to speak and to be silent, whose words are happily
chosen, whose language is pure, and who concerns herself in your
interests with delicacy? Her raillery is caressing, her criticism
never wounds; she neither discourses nor argues, but she likes to lead
a discussion and stop it at the right moment. Her manner is affable
and smiling, her politeness never forced, her readiness to serve
others never servile; she reduces the respect she claims to a soft
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland: on his forehead where he balanced it, the trident whirling
with the plate as though boring into his skull.
He next took a bamboo pole six feet long, with a nail in
the end on which he set the plate whirling. The plate, of
course, had a small indentation to keep it in its place on the
nail. He raised the plate in the air and inserted into the
first pole another of equal length, then another and still
another, which put the plate whirling in the air thirty feet
high.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: and by a sign of the cross, the seminary. He was a fine talker.
He allowed it to be thought that he was an educated man. Nevertheless,
the schoolmaster had noticed that he pronounced improperly.[12]
[12] Literally "made cuirs"; i. e., pronounced a t or an s at
the end of words where the opposite letter should occur, or used
either one of them where neither exists.
He composed the travellers' tariff card in a superior manner,
but practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical errors in it.
Thenardier was cunning, greedy, slothful, and clever. He did not
disdain his servants, which caused his wife to dispense with them.
This giantess was jealous. It seemed to her that that thin and yellow
Les Miserables |
