| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Vendetta by Honore de Balzac: it dried the springs of pride. Then, before they knew it, came want,--
want in all its horror, indifferent to its rags, treading underfoot
all human sentiments.
Seven or eight months after the birth of the little Bartolomeo, it
would have been hard to see in the mother who suckled her sickly babe
the original of the beautiful portrait, the sole remaining ornament of
the squalid home. Without fire through a hard winter, the graceful
outlines of Ginevra's figure were slowly destroyed; her cheeks grew
white as porcelain, and her eyes dulled as though the springs of life
were drying up within her. Watching her shrunken, discolored child,
she felt no suffering but for that young misery; and Luigi had no
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther: misery. For only begin to act as though you would be godly and adhere
to the Gospel, and see whether no one will become your enemy, and,
moreover, do you harm, wrong, and violence, and likewise give you cause
for sin and vice. If you have not experienced it, then let the
Scriptures tell you, which everywhere give this praise and testimony to
the world.
Besides this, you will also have the devil about you, whom you will not
entirely tread under foot, because our Lord Christ Himself could not
entirely avoid him. Now, what is the devil? Nothing else than what the
Scriptures call him, a liar and murderer. A liar, to lead the heart
astray from the Word of God, and to blind it, that you cannot feel your
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: you will only dine at Flicoteaux's when you happen to have less than
thirty sous in your pocket and no dinner engagement. At the
Luxembourg, at five o'clock, you did not know which way to turn; now,
you are on the eve of entering a privileged class, you will be one of
the hundred persons who tell France what to think. In three days'
time, if all goes well, you can, if you choose, make a man's life a
curse to him by putting thirty jokes at his expense in print at the
rate of three a day; you can, if you choose, draw a revenue of
pleasure from the actresses at your theatres; you can wreck a good
play and send all Paris running after a bad one. If Dauriat declines
to pay you for your Marguerites, you can make him come to you, and
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