| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: thought Dutocq, alarmed on finding himself anticipated; "he has
reached the ear of the administration, while I am left out in the
cold. I shouldn't have thought it!"
To all his other motives of aversion to Rabourdin he now added the
jealousy of one man to another man of the same calling,--a most
powerful ingredient in hatred.
When des Lupeaulx was left alone, he dropped into a strange
meditation. What power was it of which Rabourdin was the instrument?
Should he, des Lupeaulx, use this singular document to destroy him, or
should he keep it as a weapon to succeed with the wife? The mystery
that lay behind this paper was all darkness to des Lupeaulx, who read
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: discovered by trickery."
Was the comedy of the "Fille mal Gardee" being played here,--as it is
everywhere and forever,--under the noses of these faithful spies,
these honest Bartholos, these Pyrenean hounds, without their being
able to ferret out, detect, nor even surmise the lover, the love-
affair, or the smoke of the fire? At any rate it was certainly not the
result of a struggle between the jailers and the prisoner, between the
despotism of a dungeon and the liberty of a victim,--it was simply the
never-ending repetition of the first scene played by man when the
curtain of the Creation rose; it was Eve in Paradise.
And now, which of the two, the mother or the watch-dog, had the right
Modeste Mignon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne: exhausted. But Pencroft was not at all uneasy, they would supply themselves
on the way. Top, whose share had been very much to his taste, would know
how to find some fresh game among the brushwood. Moreover, the sailor
thought of simply asking the engineer to manufacture some powder and one or
two fowling-pieces; he supposed there would be no difficulty in that.
On leaving the plateau, the captain proposed to his companions to return
to the Chimneys by a new way. He wished to reconnoiter Lake Grant, so
magnificently framed in trees. They therefore followed the crest of one of
the spurs, between which the creek that supplied the lake probably had its
source. In talking, the settlers already employed the names which they had
just chosen, which singularly facilitated the exchange of their ideas.
The Mysterious Island |
