| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: Saint-Cloud. Water flowed everywhere; it boiled, it leaped, it
murmured; it was black, white, blue, and green; it shrieked, it
bubbled under the broom of the portress, a toothless old woman used to
storms, who seemed to bless them as she swept into the street a mass
of scraps an intelligent inventory of which would have revealed the
lives and habits of every dweller in the house,--bits of printed
cottons, tea-leaves, artificial flower-petals faded and worthless,
vegetable parings, papers, scraps of metal. At every sweep of her
broom the old woman bared the soul of the gutter, that black fissure
on which a porter's mind is ever bent. The poor lover examined this
scene, like a thousand others which our heaving Paris presents daily;
Ferragus |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: Granville did penance and returned from her Jansenist errors.
It would be tiresome to describe minutely all the circumstances which
insensibly brought disaster on this household; it will be enough to
relate the simple facts without giving them in strict order of time.
The first misunderstanding between the young couple was, however, a
serious one.
When Granville took his wife into society she never declined solemn
functions, such as dinners, concerts, or parties given by the Judges
superior to her husband in the legal profession; but for a long time
she constantly excused herself on the plea of a sick headache when
they were invited to a ball. One day Granville, out of patience with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: "Those others!" he said, as though the thought had stung him for
the first time.
"What others?" I asked.
"Damn them!" said he.
"But what others?"
"All those damned stick-in-the-mud-and-die-slowly tradespeople:
Ruck, the butcher, Marbel, the grocer. Snape! Gord! George,
HOW they'll grin!"
I thought him over in the next few weeks, and I remember now in
great detail the last talk we had together before he handed over
the shop and me to his successor. For he had the good luck to
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