| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: on the spot. He stood beside La Cibot when Mlle. Brisetout passed
under the gateway and asked for the door to be opened. Knowing that a
will had been made, he had come to see how the land lay, for Maitre
Trognon, notary, had refused to say a syllable--Fraisier's questions
were as fruitless as Mme. Cibot's. Naturally the ballet-girl's visit
/in extremis/ was not lost upon Fraisier; he vowed to himself that he
would turn it to good account.
"My dear Mme. Cibot," he began, "now is the critical moment for you."
"Ah, yes . . . my poor Cibot!" said she. "When I think that he will
not live to enjoy anything I may get--"
"It is a question of finding out whether M. Pons has left you anything
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: her husband.
"It is a thing I know nothing about," said Lucetta coldly.
"But you can testify to my trustworthiness better than
anybody, ma'am," said Jopp. "I was in Jersey several years,
and knew you there by sight."
"Indeed," she replied. "But I knew nothing of you."
"I think, ma'am, that a word or two from you would secure
for me what I covet very much," he persisted.
She steadily refused to have anything to do with the affair,
and cutting him short, because of her anxiety to get indoors
before her husband should miss her, left him on the
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: where brute force has now become a necessity against popular violence;
where discussion, spreading into everything, stifles the action of
legislative bodies; where money rules all questions; where
individualism--the dreadful product of the division of property /ad
infinitum/--will suppress the family and devour all, even the nation,
which egoism will some day deliver over to invasion. Men will say,
"Why not the Czar?" just as they said, "Why not the Duc d'Orleans?" We
don't cling to many things even now; but fifty years hence we shall
cling to nothing.
Thus, according to Catherine de' Medici and according to all those who
believe in a well-ordered society, in /social man/, the subject cannot
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