| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: to the will of Providence, who chastens and consoles, who bestows and
takes away worldly wealth? I confess that, after passing through a
period of sneering incredulity, I have come during my life here to
recognize the value of the rites of religion and of religious
observances in the family, and to discern the importance of household
customs and domestic festivals. The family will always be the basis of
human society. Law and authority are first felt there; there, at any
rate, the habit of obedience should be learned. Viewed in the light of
all their consequences, the spirit of the family and paternal
authority are two elements but little developed as yet in our new
legislative system. Yet in the family, the commune, the department,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ten Years Later by Alexandre Dumas: deeply. The ladies present -- for nothing escapes a woman's
glance -- Mademoiselle Montalais, for instance -- did not
fail to say to each other, "the king sighed," and "Madame
sighed too." This had been indeed the case. Madame had
sighed very noiselessly, but with an accompaniment very far
more dangerous for the king's repose. Madame had sighed,
first closing her beautiful black eyes, next opening them,
and then, laden, as they were, with an indescribable
mournfulness of expression, she had raised them towards the
king, whose face at that moment visibly heightened in color.
The consequence of these blushes, of these interchanged
Ten Years Later |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: least worked-out part of the entire cycle. Here lies the sole
German superiority; they bunch and crowd in the rush, they are
inferior at the scrap, but they do dig like moles. The weakness
of the British is their failure to settle down. they like the
rush and the scrap; they press on too far, they get outflanked
and lost "in the blue"; they are not naturally clever at the
excavating part of the work, and they are not as yet well trained
in making dug-outs and shelter-pits rapidly and intelligently.
they display most of the faults that were supposed to be most
distinctively French before this war came to revolutionise all
our conceptions of French character.
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