| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: the Comte de Grandville, and Jules Desmarets were playing at
/bouillotte/. Du Tillet won three thousand francs. The day began to
dawn, the wax lights paled, the players joined the dancers for a last
quadrille. In such houses the final scenes of a ball never pass off
without some impropriety. The dignified personages have departed; the
intoxication of dancing, the heat of the atmosphere, the spirits
concealed in the most innocent drinks, have mellowed the angularities
of the old women, who good-naturedly join in the last quadrille and
lend themselves to the excitement of the moment; the men are heated,
their hair, lately curled, straggles down their faces, and gives them
a grotesque expression which excites laughter; the young women grow
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: The band consisted of a fiddle, a clarionet, and a flageolet from the
Blind Asylum. The three were paid seven francs in a lump sum for the
night. For the money, they gave us, not Beethoven certainly, nor yet
Rossini; they played as they had the will and the skill; and every one
in the room (with charming delicacy of feeling) refrained from finding
fault. The music made such a brutal assault on the drum of my ear,
that after a first glance round the room my eyes fell at once upon the
blind trio, and the sight of their uniform inclined me from the first
to indulgence. As the artists stood in a window recess, it was
difficult to distinguish their faces except at close quarters, and I
kept away at first; but when I came nearer (I hardly know why) I
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: so; he would rather suppose that he was quite capable of praying for what
was best: to call down evils seems more like a curse than a prayer.
SOCRATES: But perhaps, my good friend, some one who is wiser than either
you or I will say that we have no right to blame ignorance thus rashly,
unless we can add what ignorance we mean and of what, and also to whom and
how it is respectively a good or an evil?
ALCIBIADES: How do you mean? Can ignorance possibly be better than
knowledge for any person in any conceivable case?
SOCRATES: So I believe:--you do not think so?
ALCIBIADES: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: And yet surely I may not suppose that you would ever wish to act
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