| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Two Brothers by Honore de Balzac: "Do you understand French?"
They fought near by, in the allee de Frapesle, three against three;
for Potel and Renard would not allow Max to deal with the officers
alone. Max killed his man. Major Potel wounded his so severely, that
the unfortunate young man, the son of a good family, died in the
hospital the next day. As for the third, he got off with a sword cut,
after wounding his adversary, Captain Renard. The battalion left for
Bourges that night. This affair, which was noised throughout Berry,
set Max up definitely as a hero.
The Knights of Idleness, who were all young, the eldest not more than
twenty-five years old, admired Maxence. Some among them, far from
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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: abundance of limpid warmth and a great fire of life, which he was
afraid to shoot out--child that he was.
Now in the evening, as the seneschal's wife sat thoughtfully in her
chair in the corner of the fireplace, old Bruyn interrogated her as to
her trouble.
"I am thinking." said she, "that you must have fought the battles of
love very early, to be thus completely broken up."
"Oh!" smiled he, smiling like all old men questioned upon their
amorous remembrances, "at the age of thirteen and a half I had
overcome the scruples of my mother's waiting woman."
Blanche wished to hear nothing more, but believed the page Rene should
Droll Stories, V. 1 |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: Comedy, with its careless merriment and quick replies, first heard
on the lips of the Sicilian vine-dressers? Nay, did not the purple
and red stain of the wine-froth on face and limbs give the first
suggestion of the charm and fascination of disguise - the desire
for self-concealment, the sense of the value of objectivity thus
showing itself in the rude beginnings of the art? At any rate,
wherever he lay - whether in the little vineyard at the gate of the
Gothic town, or in some dim London churchyard amidst the roar and
bustle of our great city - no gorgeous monument marked his resting-
place. His true tomb, as Shakespeare saw, was the poet's verse,
his true monument the permanence of the drama. So had it been with
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