| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: "Closed!" she echoed. The thing was incredible. "But... but do
you mean that we cannot pass?"
Not unless you have a permit, madame." The sergeant leaned
nonchalantly on his pike. "The orders are that no one is to leave
or enter without proper papers."
"Whose orders?"
"Orders of the Commune of Paris."
"But I must go into the country this evening." Madame's voice was
almost petulant. "I am expected."
"In that case let madame procure a permit."
"Where is it to be procured?"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: "All that has nothing to do with my question," retorted Bianchon.
"I want to know the reason for what you have just been doing, and
why you founded this mass."
"Faith! my dear boy," said Desplein, "I am on the verge of the
tomb; I may safely tell you about the beginning of my life."
At this moment Bianchon and the great man were in the Rue des
Quatre-Vents, one of the worst streets in Paris. Desplein pointed
to the sixth floor of one of the houses looking like obelisks, of
which the narrow door opens into a passage with a winding
staircase at the end, with windows appropriately termed "borrowed
lights"--or, in French, jours de souffrance. It was a greenish
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: it gave to the world the scientific work and what (while time was)
were of far greater value, the delightful qualities of Fleeming
Jenkin. The Kentish-Welsh family, facile, extravagant, generous to
a fault and far from brilliant, had given the father, an extreme
example of its humble virtues. On the other side, the wild, cruel,
proud, and somewhat blackguard stock of the Scotch Campbell-
Jacksons, had put forth, in the person of the mother all its force
and courage.
The marriage fell in evil days. In 1823, the bubble of the Golden
Aunt's inheritance had burst. She died holding the hand of the
nephew she had so wantonly deceived; at the last she drew him down
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