| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: understood, for she was silent to let her mother speak.
"They brought a priest--to hear my confession, as they said.--Beware,
Caroline!" cried the old woman with an effort, "the priest made me
tell him your benefactor's name."
"But who can have told you, poor mother?"
The old woman died, trying to look knowingly cunning. If Mademoiselle
de Bellefeuille had noted her mother's face she might have seen what
no one ever will see--Death laughing.
To enter into the interests that lay beneath this introduction to my
tale, we must for a moment forget the actors in it, and look back at
certain previous incidents, of which the last was closely concerned
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: when spring is still hesitating on the threshold and the garden
holds its breath in expectation. There is <56> the same mildness
in the air, and the sky and grass have the same look as then;
but the leaves tell a different tale, and the reddening creeper
on the house is rapidly approaching its last and loveliest glory.
My roses have behaved as well on the whole as was to be expected,
and the Viscountess Folkestones and Laurette Messimys have been
most beautiful, the latter being quite the loveliest things in the garden,
each flower an exquisite loose cluster of coral-pink petals, paling at
the base to a yellow-white. I have ordered a hundred standard tea-roses
for planting next month, half of which are Viscountess Folkestones,
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
