| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: wrote to Fet:
"Lyoff Tolstoy continues to play the crank. It was evidently
written in his stars. When will he turn his last somersault and
stand on his feet at last?"
Turgénieff was just the same about my father's
"Confession," which he read not long before his death. Having
promised to read it, "to try to understand it," and "not to lose my
temper," he "started to write a long letter in answer to the
'Confession,' but never finished it . . . for fear of becoming
disputatious."
In a letter to D. V. Grigórevitch he called the book,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: just as she was recovering her courage, a rope-ladder was found, early
one morning in July, attached to her window. The postilion of the
mail-post declared that as he drove past the house in the middle of
the night a small man was in the act of coming down the ladder, and
though he tried to pull up, his horses, being startled, carried him
down the hill so fast that he was out of Nemours before he stopped
them. Some of the persons who frequented Dionis's salon attributed
these manoeuvres to the Marquis du Rouvre, then much hampered in
means, for Massin held his notes to a large amount. It was said that a
prompt marriage of his daughter to Savinien would save Chateau du
Rouvre from his creditors; and Madame de Portenduere, the gossips
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: horizon. He had sacrificed his shirt to make a flag with, which he
hung at the top of a palm tree, whose foliage he had torn off. Taught
by necessity, he found the means of keeping it spread out, by
fastening it with little sticks; for the wind might not be blowing at
the moment when the passing traveler was looking through the desert.
It was during the long hours, when he had abandoned hope, that he
amused himself with the panther. He had come to learn the different
inflections of her voice, the expressions of her eyes; he had studied
the capricious patterns of all the rosettes which marked the gold of
her robe. Mignonne was not even angry when he took hold of the tuft at
the end of her tail to count her rings, those graceful ornaments which
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