| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: Professor Clyde's is welcome." Then, with a gesture which
included the two women, he added dryly: "My wife and daughter
often talk of Professor Clyde."
"Oh yes--he used to make me such nice toast; they don't
understand toast in Italy," said Mrs. Lombard in a high plaintive
voice.
It would have been difficult, from Doctor Lombard's manner and
appearance to guess his nationality; but his wife was so
inconsciently and ineradicably English that even the silhouette
of her cap seemed a protest against Continental laxities. She
was a stout fair woman, with pale cheeks netted with red lines.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: deserts, while at the merely periodic states of siege and the transitory
savings of society at the behest of this or that bourgeois faction, very
little solid matter fell to them except some dead and wounded, besides
some friendly bourgeois grimaces. Should not the military, finally, in
and for its own interest, play the game of "state of siege," and
simultaneously besiege the bourgeois exchanges? Moreover, it must not
be forgotten, and be it observed in passing, that Col. Bernard, the same
President of the Military Committee, who, under Cavaignac, helped to
deport 15,000 insurgents without trial, moves at this period again at
the head of the Military Committees now active in Paris.
Although the honest, the pure republicans built with the state of siege
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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: science. Yes, it proceeds from a science which the Germans are already
calling Anthropology. Ah! if I had not already solved the mystery of
life by pleasure, if I had not a profound antipathy for those who
think instead of act, if I did not despise the ninnies who are silly
enough to believe in the truth of a book, when the sands of the
African deserts are made of the ashes of I know not how many unknown
and pulverized Londons, Romes, Venices, and Parises, I would write a
book on modern marriages made under the influence of the Christian
system, and I'd stick a lantern on that heap of sharp stones among
which lie the votaries of the social 'multiplicamini.' But the
question is, Does humanity require even an hour of my time? And
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