| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: that change in his appearance was due solely to mental shocks;
physically, he was well. He clasped the old man's hand affectionately,
and forced him not to rise, saying:--
"Dear, kind Maitre Mathias, you, too, have had your troubles."
"Mine were natural troubles, Monsieur le comte; but yours--"
"We will talk of that presently, while we sup."
"If I had not a son in the magistracy, and a daughter married," said
the good old man, "you would have found in old Mathias, believe me,
Monsieur le comte, something better than mere hospitality. Why have
you come to Bordeaux at the very moment when posters are on all the
walls of the seizure of your farms at Grassol and Guadet, the vineyard
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: be. If a peasant lays by his money, he can always buy a bit of land
and become his own master."
"I've seen the olden time and I've seen the new, my dear wise
gentleman," said Fourchon; "the sign over the door has changed, that's
true, but the wine is the same,--to-day is the younger brother of
yesterday, that's all. Put that in your newspaper! Are we poor folks
free? We still belong to the same parish, and its lord is always
there,--I call him Toil. The hoe, our sole property, has never left
our hands. Let it be the old lords or the present taxes which take the
best of our earnings, the fact remains that we sweat our lives out in
toil."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: his mysterious gift of languages, and his almost superhuman
faculty for knowing how to address letters to eminent people,
and in what terms to conclude them, he had a smattering of
archaeology and general culture on which Mrs. Hicks had learned
to depend--her own memory being, alas, so inadequate to the
range of her interests.
Her daughter might perhaps have helped her; but it was not Miss
Hicks's way to mother her parents. She was exceedingly kind to
them, but left them, as it were, to bring themselves up as best
they could, while she pursued her own course of self-
development. A sombre zeal for knowledge filled the mind of
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