| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: be appointed as physician. Eugene remarked that I should lose a great
deal of time if I left Paris. We then conversed on various matters,
and I think you will be glad if I suppress the conversation.
When the Marquise de Listomere rose, about half-past two in the
afternoon of that day, her waiting-maid, Caroline, gave her a letter
which she read while Caroline was doing her hair (an imprudence which
many young women are thoughtless enough to commit).
"Dear angel of love," said the letter, "treasure of my life and
happiness--"
At these words the marquise was about to fling the letter in the fire;
but there came into her head a fancy--which all virtuous women will
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: the foreground. He loved his country, and wished to serve her, but
notoriety abashed him. To him the place of secretary to a Napoleon was
far more desirable than that of the minister himself. As soon as he
became the friend and secretary of Canalis he did a great amount of
labor for him, but by the end of eighteen months he had learned to
understand the barrenness of a nature that was poetic through literary
expression only. The truth of the old proverb, "The cowl doesn't make
the monk," is eminently shown in literature. It is extremely rare to
find among literary men a nature and a talent that are in perfect
accord. The faculties are not the man himself. This disconnection,
whose phenomena are amazing, proceeds from an unexplored, possibly an
Modeste Mignon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: volume of 'Modern Painters,' in the notion of returning as far as I
could to what I thought the better style of old English literature,
especially to that of my then favourite, in prose, Richard Hooker.
For these reasons,--though, as respects either art, policy, or
morality, as distinct from religion, I not only still hold, but
would even wish strongly to re-affirm the substance of what I said
in my earliest books,--I shall reprint scarcely anything in this
series out of the first and second volumes of 'Modern Painters'; and
shall omit much of the 'Seven Lamps' and 'Stones of Venice'; but all
my books written within the last fifteen years will be republished
without change, as new editions of them are called for, with here
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