| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas: to assertions hitherto somewhat doubtful, but which now
assumed the garb of reality.
Such was the state of society in Paris at the period we
bring before our readers, when Monte Cristo went one evening
to pay M. Danglars a visit. M. Danglars was out, but the
count was asked to go and see the baroness, and he accepted
the invitation. It was never without a nervous shudder,
since the dinner at Auteuil, and the events which followed
it, that Madame Danglars heard Monte Cristo's name
announced. If he did not come, the painful sensation became
most intense; if, on the contrary, he appeared, his noble
The Count of Monte Cristo |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: which a perverse wind blew off from a shelf of Moderns into the
keeper's eyes. Others affirmed he had a humour to pick the worms
out of the schoolmen, and swallow them fresh and fasting, whereof
some fell upon his spleen, and some climbed up into his head, to
the great perturbation of both. And lastly, others maintained
that, by walking much in the dark about the library, he had quite
lost the situation of it out of his head; and therefore, in
replacing his books, he was apt to mistake and clap Descartes next
to Aristotle, poor Plato had got between Hobbes and the Seven Wise
Masters, and Virgil was hemmed in with Dryden on one side and
Wither on the other.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: "Won't your honour tell these chaps. . .?"
But the officer looked at him in silence in such a way that he
gave it up at once and hurried off to call the pantry-boy to help
him collect the arms. Meantime the officer walked slowly through
all the rooms in the house, examining them attentively but
touching nothing. The peasants in the hall fell back and took
off their caps when he passed through. He said nothing whatever
to them. When he came back to the study all the arms to be found
in the house were lying on the table. There was a pair of big
flint-lock holster pistols from Napoleonic times, two cavalry
swords, one of the French the other of the Polish Army pattern,
Some Reminiscences |
