| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: 'The poet is weak and effeminate; he is not like me, a Hercules in
diplomacy, and you will easily wring our secret from him.'--Well, we
will get everything out of this innocent."
And he sat tapping the edge of his table with the ivory paper-knife,
while Coquart copied Esther's letter.
How whimsical is the action of our faculties! Camusot conceived of
every crime as possible, and overlooked the only one that the prisoner
had now committed--the forgery of the will for Lucien's advantage. Let
those whose envy vents itself on magistrates think for a moment of
their life spent in perpetual suspicion, of the torments these men
must inflict on their minds, for civil cases are not less tortuous
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: he saw his heart's secret so carelessly handled, his passion
rent, torn to tatters, a young and unknown girl, whose life
seemed to be so modest, the victim of condemnation, right or
wrong, but pronounced with such reckless indifference. He
pretended to be moved by a spirit of contradiction, asking each
for proofs of his assertions, and their jests began again.
"But, my dear boy, have you seen the Baroness' shawl?" asked
Souchet.
"Have you ever followed the girl when she patters off to church
in the morning?" said Joseph Bridau, a young dauber in Gros'
studio.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: Statesman may be given here.
1. The excellence, importance, and metaphysical originality of the two
dialogues: no works at once so good and of such length are known to have
proceeded from the hands of a forger.
2. The resemblances in them to other dialogues of Plato are such as might
be expected to be found in works of the same author, and not in those of an
imitator, being too subtle and minute to have been invented by another.
The similar passages and turns of thought are generally inferior to the
parallel passages in his earlier writings; and we might a priori have
expected that, if altered, they would have been improved. But the
comparison of the Laws proves that this repetition of his own thoughts and
Statesman |
