| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: "Natural!" said he. "Natural! No, I consider on the contrary
that it is against nature, and it is I, a perverted man, who have
reached this conviction. What would it be, then, if I had not
known corruption? To a young girl, to every unperverted young
girl, it is an act extremely unnatural, just as it is to
children. My sister married, when very young, a man twice her
own age, and who was utterly corrupt. I remember how astonished
we were the night of her wedding, when, pale and covered with
tears, she fled from her husband, her whole body trembling,
saying that for nothing in the world would she tell what he
wanted of her.
The Kreutzer Sonata |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: fine kingdom of France without carrying away with him a farthing, and
who ought to have been touched by the devotion of the chevalier. It is
certain, however, that Cesarine, the residuary legate of the old man,
received from his estate only six hundred francs a year. The chevalier
returned to Alencon, cruelly weakened by grief and by fatigue; he died
on the very day when Charles X. arrived on a foreign shore.
Madame du Val-Noble and her protector, who was just then afraid of the
vengeance of the liberal party, were glad of a pretext to remain
incognito in the village where Suzanne's mother died. At the sale of
the chevalier's effects, which took place at that time, Suzanne,
anxious to obtain a souvenir of her first and last friend, pushed up
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: far-reaching power would the counsel of that Creole nature have on a
mind so subservient! The whole future of these lives might be
determined by one single speech. No code, no human institution can
prevent the crime that kills by words. There lies the weakness of
social law; in that is the difference between the morals of the great
world and the morals of the people: one is frank, the other
hypocritical; one employs the knife, the other the venom of ideas and
language; to one death, to the other impunity.
The next morning, about mid-day, Madame Evangelista was half seated,
half lying on the edge of her daughter's bed. During that waking hour
they caressed and played together in happy memory of their loving
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