| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: should inherit the money."
Madame des Vanneaulx, however, wanted to keep her uncle, after the
manner of the managers of the Italian Opera, who entreat their popular
tenor to wrap up his throat, and give him their cloak if he happens to
have forgotten his own. She had sent old Pingret a fine English
mastiff, which Jeanne Malassis, the servant-woman brought back the
next day saying:--
"Your uncle doesn't want another mouth to feed."
The result proved how well-founded were the niece's fears. Pingret was
murdered on a dark night, in the middle of his clover-field, where he
may have been adding a few coins to a buried pot of gold. The servant-
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: on the bedspread for her handkerchief. Failing to find it, she sat
up wearily, raising herself on one elbow and pushing her hair back
from her forehead--not as you have seen a leading lady pass a lily
hand across her alabaster brow, but as a heart-sick woman does it.
Her tears and sniffles had formed a little oasis of moisture on the
pillow's white bosom so that the ugly stripe of the ticking showed
through. She gazed down at the damp circle with smarting, swollen
eyes, and another lump came up into her throat.
Then she sat up resolutely, and looked about her. The leading
lady had a large and saving sense of humor. But there is nothing
that blunts the sense of humor more quickly than a few months of
Buttered Side Down |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: wings of the bird flapped in unison. When clouds gathered on the
horizon and the thunder rumbled, Loulou would scream, perhaps because
he remembered the storms in his native forests. The dripping of the
rain would excite him to frenzy; he flapped around, struck the ceiling
with his wings, upset everything, and would finally fly into the
garden to play. Then he would come back into the room, light on one of
the andirons, and hop around in order to get dry.
One morning during the terrible winter of 1837, when she had put him
in front of the fire-place on account of the cold, she found him dead
in his cage, hanging to the wire bars with his head down. He had
probably died of congestion. But she believed that he had been
A Simple Soul |
