| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: teach an old constable how to know a gallows-bird? Our two lodgers
were on terms with la Porette, that heretic jade from Denmark or
Norway, whose last cries you heard from here. She was a brave witch;
she never blenched at the stake, which was proof enough of her compact
with the Devil. I saw her as plain as I see you; she preached to the
throng, and declared she was in heaven and could see God.
"And since that, I tell you, I have never slept quietly in my bed. My
lord, who lodges over us, is of a surety more of a wizard than a
Christian. On my word as an officer, I shiver when that old man passes
near me; he never sleeps of nights; if I wake, his voice is ringing
like a bourdon of bells, and I hear him muttering incantations in the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: Namur, rendering him unfit for the service, it was thought expedient he
should return to England, in order, if possible, to be set to rights.
He was four years totally confined,--part of it to his bed, and all of it
to his room: and in the course of his cure, which was all that time in
hand, suffer'd unspeakable miseries,--owing to a succession of exfoliations
from the os pubis, and the outward edge of that part of the coxendix called
the os illium,--both which bones were dismally crush'd, as much by the
irregularity of the stone, which I told you was broke off the parapet,--as
by its size,--(tho' it was pretty large) which inclined the surgeon all
along to think, that the great injury which it had done my uncle Toby's
groin, was more owing to the gravity of the stone itself, than to the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: husband's career.
She was the only child of an old servant of Louis XVIII., a valet who
had followed his master in his wanderings in Italy, Courland, and
England, till after the Restoration the King awarded him with the one
place that he could fill at Court, and made him usher by rotation to
the royal cabinet. So in Amelie's home there had been, as it were, a
sort of reflection of the Court. Thirion used to tell her about the
lords, and ministers, and great men whom he announced and introduced
and saw passing to and fro. The girl, brought up at the gates of the
Tuileries, had caught some tincture of the maxims practised there, and
adopted the dogma of passive obedience to authority. She had sagely
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