| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eve and David by Honore de Balzac: "Your brother, poor fellow, is in desperate straits," David told her.
"I have sent him three bills for a thousand francs at one, two, and
three months; just make a note of them," and he went out into the
fields to escape his wife's questionings.
But Eve had felt very uneasy already. It was six months since Lucien
had written to them. She talked over the news with her mother till her
forebodings grew so dark that she made up her mind to dissipate them.
She would take a bold step in her despair.
Young M. de Rastignac had come to spend a few days with his family. He
had spoken of Lucien in terms that set Paris gossip circulating in
Angouleme, till at last it reached the journalist's mother and sister.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pierrette by Honore de Balzac: the time when the coming of Brigaut threw such excitement into
Pierrette's life. But the doings of the pair after their arrival at
Provins are as necessary to relate as their life in Paris; for Provins
was destined to be not less fatal to Pierrette than the commercial
antecedents of her cousins!
III
PATHOLOGY OF RETIRED MERCERS
When the petty shopkeeper who has come to Paris from the provinces
returns to the provinces from Paris he brings with him a few ideas;
then he loses them in the habits and ways of provincial life into
which he plunges, and his reforming notions leave him. From this there
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways,
unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of
fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run
for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and
even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be
eternal. Do you imagine that Alcestis would have died to save Admetus, or
Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your own Codrus in order to preserve the
kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the memory of their
virtues, which still survives among us, would be immortal? Nay,' she said,
'I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the better they are the
more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortal virtue; for
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