| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: the people, in France especially, became merely masses, a swarm of
incoherent and disorganised things intent on the necessaries of
daily bread, like mites crawling over each other in a cheese.
Out of this mass were struggling upwards perpetually, all who had a
little ambition, a little scholarship, or a little money,
endeavouring to become members of the middle class by obtaining a
Government appointment. "A man," says M. de Tocqueville, "endowed
with some education and small means, thought it not decorous to die
without having been a Government officer." "Every man, according to
his condition," says a contemporary writer, "wants to be something
by command of the king."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: in the direct, cold glances of his brown-grey eyes,
in the very way he carried his head and wore his hat.
He came to be pointed out, and nodded about behind his back,
more than anyone else in the "House," and important men
sought his acquaintance, with an awkward show of civility,
who were notorious for their rude exclusiveness.
It might be, of course, that his "corner" would break
under him at any fortnightly settlement, but already he
had carried it much further than such things often went,
and the planning of the coup had been beyond doubt Napoleonic.
Had this small sandy Scot planned it, or was he merely
The Market-Place |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pierrette by Honore de Balzac: that of nature. Pierrette went where she liked, in a boat on the pond,
or roaming the village and the fields with Jacques Brigaut, her
comrade, exactly as Paul and Virginia might have done. Petted by
everybody, free as air, they gaily chased the joys of childhood. In
summer they ran to watch the fishing, they caught the many-colored
insects, they gathered flowers, they gardened; in winter they made
slides, they built snow-men or huts, or pelted each other with
snowballs. Welcomed by all, they met with smiles wherever they went.
When the time came to begin their education, disasters came, too.
Jacques, left without means at the death of his father, was
apprenticed by his relatives to a cabinet-maker, and fed by charity,
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