| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: poverty, stifled by necessity, drowned in drink, and consumed by
ardent spirits.
You would not imagine how many adventures, how many tragedies, lie
buried away out of sight in that Dolorous City; how much horror and
beauty lurks there. No imagination can reach the Truth, no one can go
down into that city to make discoveries; for one must needs descend
too low into its depths to see the wonderful scenes of tragedy or
comedy enacted there, the masterpieces brought forth by chance.
I do not know how it is that I have kept the following story so long
untold. It is one of the curious things that stop in the bag from
which Memory draws out stories at haphazard, like numbers in a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri: their psycho-pathological conditions, corresponding to abnormal
organic conditions.
In like manner, certain indecent assaults, incests, &c., are
largely the outcome of social environment, which, condemning a
number of persons to live in hovels without air or light,
with a promiscuity of sex between parents and children such as
obtains amongst the brutes, effaces or deadens all normal sense of
modesty. On the other hand, there are cases of rape and the like
which are mostly due to the biological condition of the
individual, either in manifest forms of sexual disease or, less
manifest though none the less actual, of biological anomaly.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: the crater of a volcano. May not any inkstand nowadays become a
Vesuvius? The pens, all twisted, served to clean the stems of our
pipes; and, in opposition to all the laws of credit, paper was even
scarcer than coin.
How can young men be expected to stay at home in such furnished
lodgings? The students studied in the cafes, the theatre, the
Luxembourg gardens, in /grisettes'/ rooms, even in the law schools--
anywhere rather than in their horrible rooms--horrible for purposes of
study, delightful as soon as they were used for gossiping and smoking
in. Put a cloth on the table, and the impromptu dinner sent in from
the best eating-house in the neighborhood--places for four--two of
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