| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: cents, and is careful to avoid the topic of cider, but has been known
occasionally to fall a victim to the craze for rectifying the
conjectural sums-total of the various fortunes of the department. He
is a member of the Departmental Council, has his clothes from Paris,
and wears the Cross of the Legion of Honor. In short, he is a country
gentleman who has fully grasped the significance of the Restoration,
and is coining money at the Chamber, but his Royalism is less pure
than that of the rival house; he takes the /Gazette/ and the /Debats/,
the other family only read the /Quotidienne/.
His lordship the Bishop, a sometime Vicar-General, fluctuates between
the two powers, who pay him the respect due to religion, but at times
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: of staring with unseemly intentness at his small round-backed
figure, dressed with shabby disorder and surmounted by a
wonderful head, lean, vulpine, eagle-beaked as that of some art-
loving despot of the Renaissance: a head combining the venerable
hair and large prominent eyes of the humanist with the greedy
profile of the adventurer. Wyant, in musing on the Italian
portrait-medals of the fifteenth century, had often fancied that
only in that period of fierce individualism could types so
paradoxical have been produced; yet the subtle craftsmen who
committed them to the bronze had never drawn a face more
strangely stamped with contradictory passions than that of Doctor
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Iliad by Homer: for even valiant Lycurgus, son of Dryas, did not live long when
he took to fighting with the gods. He it was that drove the
nursing women who were in charge of frenzied Bacchus through the
land of Nysa, and they flung their thyrsi on the ground as
murderous Lycurgus beat them with his oxgoad. Bacchus himself
plunged terror-stricken into the sea, and Thetis took him to her
bosom to comfort him, for he was scared by the fury with which
the man reviled him. Thereon the gods who live at ease were angry
with Lycurgus and the son of Saturn struck him blind, nor did he
live much longer after he had become hateful to the immortals.
Therefore I will not fight with the blessed gods; but if you are
 The Iliad |