| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: the elegant word substituted by Marius for the ignoble word customer),
--when the client appears at the door, Marius gives him a glance which
appraises him: to Marius you are a HEAD, more or less susceptible of
occupying his mind. To him there's no mankind; there are only heads."
"We let you hear Marius on all the notes of his scale," said Bixiou,
"and you know how to follow our lead."
As soon as Gazonal showed himself, the glance was given, and was
evidently favourable, for Marius exclaimed: "Regulus! yours this head!
Prepare it first with the little scissors."
"Excuse me," said Gazonal to the pupil, at a sign from Bixiou. "I
prefer to have my head dressed by Monsieur Marius himself."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Case of the Golden Bullet by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: the first. He explained his order by saying that his wife was ill,
and that she was grieving over the loss of her wedding ring which
had somehow disappeared. The new ring could be found somewhere as
if by chance and the sick woman's anxiety would be over. Two days
later, as arranged, the same gentleman appeared again and I handed
him the two rings.
"He left the shop, greatly satisfied with my work and apparently
much relieved in his mind. But he left me uneasy in spirit because
I had deceived him. It had not been possible for me to reproduce
exactly the composition of the original ring, and as I believed that
the work was to be done in order to comfort an invalid, and I was
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: whose nape was red, and with his hands stitched
the air, ludicrous, sublimely imbecile and compre-
hensible.
And now he couldn't have her? No! That was
too much. After thinking too that . . . What
had he done? What was my advice? Take her by
force? No? Mustn't he? Who was there then
to kill him? For the first time I saw one of his fea-
tures move; a fighting teeth-baring curl of the lip.
. . . "Not Hermann, perhaps." He lost himself
in thought as though he had fallen out of the
Falk |
