Today's Stichomancy for Voltaire

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac:

found you so pure, so absolutely truthful, gifted with noble qualities, capable of noblest things, and already so tried! Man and child, timid yet brave! What joy to find we both were consecrated by a common grief! Ever since that evening when we confided our childhoods to each other, I have known that to lose you would be death,--yes, I have kept you by me selfishly. The certainty felt by Monsieur de la Berge that I should die if I lost you touched him deeply, for he read my soul. He knew how necessary I was to my children and the count; he did not command me to forbid you my house, for I promised to continue pure in deed and thought. "Thought," he said to me, "is involuntary, but it can be

The Lily of the Valley

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton:

He had formed his own opinion from the papers entrusted to him, and did not especially want to go into the matter with his senior partner. Mr. Letterblair was a widower, and they dined alone, copiously and slowly, in a dark shabby room hung with yellowing prints of "The Death of Chatham" and "The Coronation of Napoleon." On the sideboard, between fluted Sheraton knife-cases, stood a decanter of Haut Brion, and another of the old Lanning port (the gift of a client), which the wastrel Tom Lanning had sold off a year or two before his mysterious and discreditable death in

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac:

ladies of the two queens were grouped.

"You have come from Paris; which route did you take?" said the cardinal.

"I came by water, monseigneur," replied the reformer.

"How did you enter Blois?" asked the grand-master.

"By the docks, monseigneur."

"Did no one question you?" exclaimed the duke, who was watching the young man closely.

"No, monseigneur. To the first soldier who looked as if he meant to stop me I said I came on duty to the two queens, to whom my father was furrier."

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 Lucile by Owen Meredith:

You Cassandra in breeches and boots! turn your back To the ruins of Troy. Prophet, seek not for glory Amongst thine own people. I follow my story.

CANTO V.

Up!--forth again, Pegasus!--"Many's the slip," Hath the proverb well said, "'twixt the cup and the lip!" How blest should we be, have I often conceived, Had we really achieved what we nearly achieved! We but catch at the skirts of the thing we would be,