| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Droll Stories, V. 1 by Honore de Balzac: hunchback, to get the sword and rush off to the country.
"But shall we find them in flagrante delicto?" asked Taschereau.
"You will see," said the hunchback, jeering his friend. In fact, the
cuckold had not long to wait to behold the joy of the two lovers.
The sweet wench and her well-beloved were busy trying to catch, in a
certain lake that you probably know, that little bird that sometimes
makes his nest there, and they were laughing and trying, and still
laughing.
"Ah, my darling!" said she, clasping him, as though she wished to make
an outline of him on her chest, "I love thee so much I should like to
eat thee! Nay, more than that, to have you in my skin, so that you
 Droll Stories, V. 1 |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: right side of the bed. The three candles on the bureau made red blurs,
and the windows were dimmed by the fog outside. The nuns carried
Madame Aubain from the room.
For two nights, Felicite never left the corpse. She would repeat the
same prayers, sprinkle holy water over the sheets, get up, come back
to the bed and contemplate the body. At the end of the first vigil,
she noticed that the face had taken on a yellow tinge, the lips grew
blue, the nose grew pinched, the eyes were sunken. She kissed them
several times and would not have been greatly astonished had Virginia
opened them; to souls like this the supernatural is always quite
simple. She washed her, wrapped her in a shroud, put her into the
 A Simple Soul |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Vision Splendid by William MacLeod Raine: town is full of men who have done wrong and haven't paid for it."
"That's one of your fool socialist theories." James spoke sharply
and irritably. "No man's guilty till the law says so. They haven't
been in the penitentiary. He has. That's what damns me if it gets
out."
Jeff laid a hand affectionately on his cousin's shoulder. "Don't
you believe it for a moment. There's no moral distinction between
the man who has paid and the man who hasn't paid for his sins
toward society. There is good and there is bad in all of us,
closely intertwined, knit together into the very warp and woof of
our lives. We're all good and we're all bad."
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