| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: Jean Valjean shuddered with the continual tremor of the unhappy.
For them everything is hostile and suspicious. They distrust the day
because it enables people to see them, and the night because it
aids in surprising them. A little while before he had shivered
because the garden was deserted, and now he shivered because there
was some one there.
He fell back from chimerical terrors to real terrors. He said
to himself that Javert and the spies had, perhaps, not taken
their departure; that they had, no doubt, left people on the watch
in the street; that if this man should discover him in the garden,
he would cry out for help against thieves and deliver him up.
Les Miserables |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: notice of it, and search her house, and THEN--"
He said no more, but all present understood what he meant.
The sincere friends of Madame de Dey were so alarmed about her, that
on the morning of the third day, the procureur-syndic of the commune
made his wife write her a letter, urging her to receive her visitors
as usual that evening. Bolder still, the old merchant went himself in
the morning to Madame de Dey's house, and, strong in the service he
wanted to render her, he insisted on seeing her, and was amazed to
find her in the garden gathering flowers for her vases.
"She must be protecting a lover," thought the old man, filled with
sudden pity for the charming woman.
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