| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: de la Garde. A concise history of certain events in the cashier's past
life must be given in order to explain these facts, and to give a
complete presentment of the crisis when he yielded to temptation.
Mme. de la Garde said that she was a Piedmontese. No one, not even
Castanier, knew her real name. She was one of those young girls, who
are driven by dire misery, by inability to earn a living, or by fear
of starvation, to have recourse to a trade which most of them loathe,
many regard with indifference, and some few follow in obedience to the
laws of their constitution. But on the brink of the gulf of
prostitution in Paris, the young girl of sixteen, beautiful and pure
as the Madonna, had met with Castanier. The old dragoon was too rough
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs: looking at her for a moment--it was one of the strange
contradictions of Billy Byrne's personality that he could hold
his eyes quite steady and level, meeting the gaze of another
unwaveringly--and in that moment something happened to
Billy Byrne's perceptive faculties. It was as though scales
which had dimmed his mental vision had partially dropped
away, for suddenly he saw what he had not before seen--a
very beautiful girl, brave and unflinching before the brutal
menace of his attitude, and though the mucker thought that
he still hated her, the realization came to him that be must not
raise a hand against her--that for the life of him he could
The Mucker |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: "Charles, my love, will be a man," replied he. "Fifteen hundred francs
are enough for him. With so much for certain, a man of courage is
above poverty. And if by chance your son should turn out a nonentity,
I do not wish him to be able to play the fool. If he is ambitious,
this small income will give him a taste for work.--Eugenie is a girl;
she must have a little fortune."
The father then turned to play with his boy, whose effusive affection
showed the independence and freedom in which he was brought up. No
sort of shyness between the father and child interfered with the charm
which rewards a parent for his devotion; and the cheerfulness of the
little family was as sweet as it was genuine. In the evening a magic-
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