| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: vivacious Baron, adjusting the side curl that had gone astray on his
temple.
"I should have asked you whether I had succeeded," Lucien answered;
"you have been before me in the field of verse."
"Pshaw!" said the other, "a few vaudevilles, well enough in their way,
written to oblige, a song now and again to suit some occasion, lines
for music, no good without the music, and my long Epistle to a Sister
of Bonaparte (ungrateful that he was), will not hand down my name to
posterity."
At this moment Mme. de Bargeton appeared in all the glory of an
elaborate toilette. She wore a Jewess' turban, enriched with an
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Frances Waldeaux by Rebecca Davis: his old haunts in the woods on the bay, and was seen no
more that day.
"He is inconsolable!" his mother told some of her old
neighbors who crowded to welcome her. "His heart is in
that grave in Vannes."
The women listened in surprise, for Frances was not in
the habit of exploiting her emotions in words.
"We understood," said one of them, with a sympathetic
shake of the head, "that it was a pure love match. Mrs.
George Waldeaux, we heard, was a French artist of
remarkable beauty?"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: unhorsed into a ditch and your legs broken. Listen to me. You still
have some forty-odd thousand francs a year from your property in the
Gironde. Good. Take your horses and servants and furnish your house in
Bordeaux; you can be king of Bordeaux, you can promulgate there the
edicts that we put forth in Paris; you can be the correspondent of our
stupidities. Very good. Play the rake in the provinces; better still,
commit follies; follies may win you celebrity. But--don't marry. Who
marries now-a-days? Only merchants, for the sake of their capital, or
to be two to drag the cart; only peasants who want to produce children
to work for them; only brokers and notaries who want a wife's 'dot' to
pay for their practice; only miserable kings who are forced to
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