| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: fields, and ponds and vineyards, and two dairies, which bring in a
thousand crowns a year, with a house which we both like,--all of which
we can have for sixty thousand francs; and, lo! Monsieur now wants to
become something under government! Recollect what we are,--perfumers.
If sixteen years before you invented the DOUBLE PASTE OF SULTANS and
the CARMINATIVE BALM some one had said, 'You are going to make enough
money to buy Les Tresorieres,' wouldn't you have been half sick with
joy? Well, you can acquire that property which you wanted so much that
you hardly opened your mouth about anything else, and now you talk of
spending on nonsense money earned by the sweat of our brow: I can say
ours, for I've sat behind the desk through all that time, like a poor
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: triumph flicker on her lips, a smile such as the monkeys wear after
playing a sly trick--if monkeys smile.
"Ah! I have him," thought she; and, indeed, she had him fast.
"But you are--" he said, raising his fine head and looking at her with
eyes of love.
"Virgin and martyr," she replied, smiling at the commonness of that
hackneyed expression, but giving it a freshness of meaning by her
smile, so full of painful gayety. "If I laugh," she continued, "it is
that I am thinking of that princess whom the world thinks it knows,
that Duchesse de Maufrigneuse to whom it gives as lovers de Marsay,
that infamous de Trailles (a political cutthroat), and that little
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake: Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are filled with thorns,
It is eternal winter there.
For where'er the sun does shine,
Songs of Innocence and Experience |
