| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Collection of Antiquities by Honore de Balzac: son; but he gave him his own valet Josephin, a man who can be trusted
to take care of his young master, and to watch faithfully over his
interests. The poor father must do without Josephin, and hope to
replace him with a young lad.
"Remember that you are a Carol, my boy," he said; "remember that you
come of an unalloyed descent, and that your scutcheon bears the motto
Cil est nostre; with such arms you may hold your head high everywhere,
and aspire to queens. Render grace to your father, as I to mine. We
owe it to the honor of our ancestors, kept stainless until now, that
we can look all men in the face, and need bend the knee to none save a
mistress, the King, and God. This is the greatest of your privileges."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: majesty's culverin. Now one market day it happened that the king had
caused to be hanged a young citizen of Tours, who had violated a noble
lady of a certain age, believing that she was a young maiden. There
would have been no harm in this, and it would have been a thing
greatly to the credit of the said lady to have been taken for a
virgin; but on finding out his mistake, he had abominably insulted
her, and suspecting her of trickery, had taken it into his head to rob
her of a splendid silver goblet, in payment of the present he had just
made her. This young man had long hair, and was so handsome that the
whole town wished to see him hanged, both from regret and out of
curiosity. You may be sure that at this hanging there were more caps
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: CHAPTER 18
Roxana Commands
Gratitude and treachery are merely the two extremities of
the same procession. You have seen all of it that is worth
staying for when the band and the gaudy officials have gone by.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
THANKSGIVING DAY. Let us all give humble, hearty, and
sincere thanks now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they
do not use turkeys; they use plumbers. It does not become you
and me to sneer at Fiji.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
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