| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: expression, and chilled and stiffened her attitudes, her speech, her
looks. Loving and beloved, she dared to be eloquent or beautiful only
when alone. Unhappy and oppressed in the broad daylight of life, she
might have been enchanting could she have expanded in the shadow.
Often, to test the love thus offered to her, and at the risk of losing
it, she refused to wear the draperies that concealed some portion of
her defects, and her Spanish eyes grew entrancing when they saw that
Balthazar thought her beautiful as before.
Nevertheless, even so, distrust soiled the rare moments when she
yielded herself to happiness. She asked herself if Claes were not
seeking a domestic slave,--one who would necessarily keep the house?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: books, with the hope of getting others--and more marginal notes.
Thus shut out from human intercourse, and compelled to view nothing
but the prison of vexed spirits, to meet a wretch in the same
situation, was more surely to find a friend, than to imagine a
countryman one, in a strange land, where the human voice conveys
no information to the eager ear.
"Did you ever see the unfortunate being to whom these books
belong?" asked Maria, when Jemima brought her slipper. "Yes. He
sometimes walks out, between five and six, before the family is
stirring, in the morning, with two keepers; but even then his hands
are confined."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: the country was tranquil, for at such times it could be placed at par,
instead of at fifty per cent loss as in bad times; in war times resort
should be had to a land-tax.
"The invasion of 1814 and 1815," Rabourdin would say to his friends,
"founded in France and practically explained an institution which
neither Law nor Napoleon had been able to establish,--I mean Credit."
Unfortunately, Xavier considered the true principles of this admirable
machine of civil service very little understood at the period when he
began his labor of reform in 1820. His scheme levied a toll on the
consumption by means of direct taxation and suppressed the whole
machinery of indirect taxation. The levying of the taxes was
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