| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas: preserve in remembrance of his affectionate uncle.'
"The heirs sought everywhere, admired the breviary, laid
hands on the furniture, and were greatly astonished that
Spada, the rich man, was really the most miserable of uncles
-- no treasures -- unless they were those of science,
contained in the library and laboratories. That was all.
Caesar and his father searched, examined, scrutinized, but
found nothing, or at least very little; not exceeding a few
thousand crowns in plate, and about the same in ready money;
but the nephew had time to say to his wife before he
expired: `Look well among my uncle's papers; there is a
The Count of Monte Cristo |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: is therefore a being who is truly original. Depicted scores of times
by the painter's brush, the pencil of the caricaturist, the charcoal
of the etcher, she still escapes analysis, because she cannot be
caught and rendered in all her moods, like Nature, like this fantastic
Paris itself. She holds to vice by one thread only, and she breaks
away from it at a thousand other points of the social circumference.
Besides, she lets only one trait of her character be known, and that
the only one which renders her blamable; her noble virtues are hidden;
she prefers to glory in her naive libertinism. Most incompletely
rendered in dramas and tales where she is put upon the scene with all
her poesy, she is nowhere really true but in her garret; elsewhere she
Ferragus |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: never refuses. Paquita responded to that passion which is felt by all
really great men for the infinite--that mysterious passion so
dramatically expressed in Faust, so poetically translated in Manfred,
and which urged Don Juan to search the heart of women, in his hope to
find there that limitless thought in pursuit of which so many hunters
after spectres have started, which wise men think to discover in
science, and which mystics find in God alone. The hope of possessing
at last the ideal being with whom the struggle could be constant and
tireless ravished De Marsay, who, for the first time for long, opened
his heart. His nerves expanded, his coldness was dissipated in the
atmosphere of that ardent soul, his hard and fast theories melted
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
