| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: "We'll amaze you a good deal more, my dear cousin," said Leon de Lora.
"We'll take Paris as an artist takes his violoncello, and show you how
it is played,--in short, how people amuse themselves in Paris."
"It is a kaleidoscope with a circumference of twenty miles," cried
Gazonal.
"Before piloting monsieur about, I have to see Gaillard," said Bixiou.
"But we can use Gaillard for the cousin," replied Leon.
"What sort of machine is that?" asked Gazonal.
"He isn't a machine, he is a machinist. Gaillard is a friend of ours
who has ended a miscellaneous career by becoming the editor of a
newspaper, and whose character and finances are governed by movements
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: idea until she hatches it. A strange assemblage of virtues and
defects! which her Spanish nature had strengthened in Madame
Evangelista, and over which her French experience had cast the glaze
of its politeness.
This character, slumbering in married happiness for sixteen years,
occupied since then with the trivialities of social life, this nature
to which a first hatred had revealed its strength, awoke now like a
conflagration; at the moment of the woman's life when she was losing
the dearest object of her affections and needed another element for
the energy that possessed her, this flame burst forth. Natalie could
be but three days more beneath her influence! Madame Evangelista,
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