| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: taunts, prompted by envy of Augustine, who was marrying an artist and
a man of rank; adding, with a sort of dismay, that if the Guillaumes
were ambitious, there was an end to the business. An old fan-maker
having remarked that such a prodigal would soon bring his wife to
beggary, father Guillaume prided himself /in petto/ for his prudence
in the matter of marriage settlements. In the evening, after a
splendid ball, followed by one of those substantial suppers of which
the memory is dying out in the present generation, Monsieur and Madame
Guillaume remained in a fine house belonging to them in the Rue du
Colombier, where the wedding had been held; Monsieur and Madame Lebas
returned in their fly to the old home in the Rue Saint-Denis, to steer
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: of the man who from the bronze of the image of the 'Pleasure that
liveth for a moment' has to make the image of the 'Sorrow that
abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could not have been
otherwise. At every single moment of one's life one is what one is
going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol,
because man is a symbol.
It is, if I can fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the
artistic life. For the artistic life is simply self-development.
Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences,
just as love in the artist is simply the sense of beauty that
reveals to the world its body and its soul. In MARIUS THE
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: region which is bounded by the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Chaussee
d'Antin, the upper end of the Rue de Navarin and the line of the
boulevards.
In ten minutes' time they had come to an end of all the deep
reflections, all the moralizings, small and great, all the bad puns
made on a subject already exhausted by Rabelais three hundred and
fifty years ago. It was not a little to their credit that the
pyrotechnic display was cut short with a final squib from Malaga.
"It all goes to the shoemakers," she said. "I left a milliner because
she failed twice with my hats. The vixen has been here twenty-seven
times to ask for twenty francs. She did not know that we never have
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