| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: most exacting painter in water-colors; while everything therein was
redolent of the Bohemian life of a young man of fashion, the dressing-
closet was like a shrine--white, spotless, neat, and warm. There were
no draughts from door or window, the carpet had been made soft for
bare feet hastily put to the floor in a sudden panic of alarm--which
stamps him as your thoroughbred dandy that knows life; for here, in a
few moments, he may show himself either a noodle or a master in those
little details in which a man's character is revealed. The Marquise
previously quoted--no, it was the Marquise de Rochefide--came out of
that dressing-closet in a furious rage, and never went back again. She
discovered nothing 'improper' in it. Godefroid used to keep a little
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: reading and seemed genuinely astonished at our intrusion. By-
and-by more men came in. Not one of them looked like a tourist.
Not a single woman appeared. These men seemed to know each other
with some intimacy, but I cannot say they were a very talkative
lot. The bald-headed man sat down gravely at the head of the
table. It all had the air of a family party. By-and-by, from
one of the vigorous servant-girls in national costume, we
discovered that the place was really a boarding-house for some
English engineers engaged at the works of the St. Gothard Tunnel;
and I could listen my fill to the sounds of the English language,
as far as it is used at a breakfast-table by men who do not
Some Reminiscences |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: modern sense, or transitional intermixture of town and down.
It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining,
clean-cut and distinct, like a chess-board on a green
tablecloth. The farmer's boy could sit under his barley-mow
and pitch a stone into the office-window of the town-clerk;
reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances
standing on the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when
he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the
tune of Baa, that floated in at the window from the
remainder of the flock browsing hard by; and at executions
the waiting crowd stood in a meadow immediately before the
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
