| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: disconnected the words from any image of deceit. They might have
struck him as the record of a deep dissimulation; but she had
always given him a sense of noble reasons. The vanished aunt was
present, as he looked about him, in the small complacencies of the
room, the beaded velvet and the fluted moreen; and though, as we
know, he had the worship of the Dead, he found himself not
definitely regretting this lady. If she wasn't in his long list,
however, she was in her niece's short one, and Stransom presently
observed to the latter that now at least, in the place they haunted
together, she would have another object of devotion.
"Yes, I shall have another. She was very kind to me. It's that
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: two garments for each season, which lasted their lifetime and beyond
it. These garments were bequeathed to their children. Consequently the
clause in the marriage-contract relating to arms and clothes, which in
these days is almost a dead letter because of the small value of
wardrobes that need constant renewing, was then of much importance.
Great costs brought with them solidity. The toilet of a woman
constituted a large capital; it was reckoned among the family
possessions, and was kept in those enormous chests which threaten to
break through the floors of our modern houses. The jewels of a woman
of 1840 would have been the /undress/ ornaments of a great lady in
1540.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Chouans by Honore de Balzac: the stranger with a certain ease of manner, and a pliant, affable air
which seemed intolerable to the citizen du Gua.
"Yes," he replied, shortly.
"I suppose you have been graduated into some grade of the artillery?"
"No, citizen, into the navy."
"Ah! then you are going to Brest?" said Corentin, interrogatively.
But the young sailor turned lightly on the heels of his shoes without
deigning to reply, and presently disappointed all the expectations
which Mademoiselle de Verneuil had based on the charm of his
appearance. He applied himself to ordering his breakfast with the
eagerness of a boy, questioned the cook and the landlady about their
The Chouans |
