| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: much the more if the reader is to comprehend the position of one of
the principal characters in the story--Mme. de Bargeton.
The old city of Angouleme is perched aloft on a crag like a sugar-
loaf, overlooking the plain where the Charente winds away through the
meadows. The crag is an outlying spur on the Perigord side of a long,
low ridge of hill, which terminates abruptly just above the road from
Paris to Bordeaux, so that the Rock of Angouleme is a sort of
promontory marking out the line of three picturesque valleys. The
ramparts and great gateways and ruined fortress on the summit of the
crag still remain to bear witness to the importance of this stronghold
during the Religious Wars, when Angouleme was a military position
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: dead, left them where they lay.
"Why did you not tell me that you contemplated ambushing
those fellows?" asked the sheik in a hurt tone. "We might
have had them all if the seven of us had stopped to meet them."
"Then it would have been useless to stop at all," replied
Tarzan, "for had we simply ridden on toward Bou Saada they
would have been upon us presently, and all could have been
engaged. It was to prevent the transfer of my own quarrel
to another's shoulders that Abdul and I stopped off to
question them. Then there is your daughter--I could not be the
cause of exposing her needlessly to the marksmanship of six men."
The Return of Tarzan |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: with bows, her face is wrinkled, her nose sharp, voice hard, carries a
prayer-book in her hand): "What was that Madame Firmiani's maiden
name?"--The Second (small face red as a crab-apple, gentle voice):
"She was a Cadignan, my dear, niece of the old Prince de Cadignan,
consequently cousin to the present Duc de Maufrigneuse."
Madame Firmiani is a Cadignan. She might have neither virtue, nor
wealth, nor youth, but she would still be a Cadignan; it is like a
prejudice, always alive and working.
An Original: "My dear fellow, I've seen no galoshes in her
antechamber; consequently you can visit her without compromising
yourself, and play cards there without fear; if there ARE any
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