| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: refuge and protection at the court of Louis XI. The king was conscious
of the advantages he could gain from a man connected with all the
principal commercial houses of Flanders, Venice, and the Levant; he
naturalized, ennobled, and flattered Maitre Cornelius; all of which
was rarely done by Louis XI. The monarch pleased the Fleming as much
as the Fleming pleased the monarch. Wily, distrustful, and miserly;
equally politic, equally learned; superior, both of them, to their
epoch; understanding each other marvellously; they discarded and
resumed with equal facility, the one his conscience, the other his
religion; they loved the same Virgin, one by conviction, the other by
policy; in short, if we may believe the jealous tales of Olivier de
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: color does in painting. And whereas each sound produced by a sonorous
body is invariably allied with its major third and fifth, whereas it
acts on grains of fine sand lying on stretched parchment so as to
distribute them in geometrical figures that are always the same,
according to the pitch,--quite regular when the combination is a true
chord, and indefinite when the sounds are dissonant,--I say that music
is an art conceived in the very bowels of nature.
"Music is subject to physical and mathematical laws. Physical laws are
but little known, mathematics are well understood; and it is since
their relations have been studied, that the harmony has been created
to which we owe the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Rossini,
Gambara |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: bailiff's officer grew more and more striking, and one morning after
seven fruitless attempts he succeeded in penetrating into the Count's
presence. Suzon, the old man-servant, albeit he was by no means in his
novitiate, at last mistook the visitor for a petitioner, come to
propose a thousand crowns if Maxime would obtain a license to sell
postage stamps for a young lady. Suzon, without the slightest
suspicion of the little scamp, a thoroughbred Paris street-boy into
whom prudence had been rubbed by repeated personal experience of the
police-courts, induced his master to receive him. Can you see the man
of business, with an uneasy eye, a bald forehead, and scarcely any
hair on his head, standing in his threadbare jacket and muddy boots--"
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