| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: than a working man, and cared nothing for appearances, I did not put
them on their guard; I could join a group and look on while they drove
bargains or wrangled among themselves on their way home from work.
Even then observation had come to be an instinct with me; a faculty of
penetrating to the soul without neglecting the body; or rather, a
power of grasping external details so thoroughly that they never
detained me for a moment, and at once I passed beyond and through
them. I could enter into the life of the human creatures whom I
watched, just as the dervish in the /Arabian Nights/ could pass into
any soul or body after pronouncing a certain formula.
If I met a working man and his wife in the streets between eleven
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: him get into the tilbury, to see him gather up the reins, to catch a
parting look, hear the crack of his whip and the sound of his wheels
on the stones, watch the handsome horse, the master's hat, the tiger's
gold lace, and at last to stand gazing long after the dark corner of
the street had eclipsed this vision.
Five years after Mademoiselle Caroline de Bellefeuille had taken up
her abode in the pretty house in the Rue Taitbout, we again look in on
one of those home-scenes which tighten the bonds of affection between
two persons who truly love. In the middle of the blue drawing-room, in
front of the window opening to the balcony, a little boy of four was
making a tremendous noise as he whipped the rocking-horse, whose two
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