| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: believe that I have your interests more at heart than you think for.
Young husbands are, sooner or later, jealous for the love of a wife
for her mother. Perhaps they are right. When you are thoroughly
united, when love has blended your two souls into one, then, my dear
son, you will not fear an opposing influence if I live in your house.
I know the world, and men, and things; I have seen the peace of many a
home destroyed by the blind love of mothers who made themselves in the
end as intolerable to their daughters as to their sons-in-law. The
affection of old people is often exacting and querulous. Perhaps I
could not efface myself as I should. I have the weakness to think
myself still handsome; I have flatterers who declare that I am still
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: would point out the ways in which men, really great in themselves, had
risen from obscurity; how they had started from the lowest ranks of
society, with no one to look to but themselves, and achieved noble
destinies.
These readings, and they were not the least useful of Louis' lessons,
took place while little Marie slept on his mother's knee in the quiet
of the summer night, and the Loire reflected the sky; but when they
ended, this adorable woman's sadness always seemed to be doubled; she
would cease to speak, and sit motionless and pensive, and her eyes
would fill with tears.
"Mother, why are you crying?" Louis asked one balmy June evening, just
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott: Elspat; she was unused to see him express a deep and bitter mood,
which reminded her so strongly of his father. But she resumed
her remonstrances in the same taunting manner in which she had
commenced them.
"Poor boy!" she said; "and you think that at the distance of
half the world your threats will be heard or thought of! But,
go--go--place your neck under him of Hanover's yoke, against whom
every true Gael fought to the death. Go, disown the royal
Stewart, for whom your father, and his fathers, and your mother's
fathers, have crimsoned many a field with their blood. Go, put
your head under the belt of one of the race of Dermid, whose
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