| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: bookseller has a dozen or a score of works on sale for a twelvemonth
before he pays for them. Even if only two or three of these hit the
public taste, the profitable speculations pay for the bad, and the
publisher pays his way by grafting, as it were, one book upon another.
But if all of them turn out badly; or if, for his misfortune, the
publisher-bookseller happens to bring out some really good literature
which stays on hand until the right public discovers and appreciates
it; or if it costs too much to discount the paper that he receives,
then, resignedly, he files his schedule, and becomes a bankrupt with
an untroubled mind. He was prepared all along for something of the
kind. So, all the chances being in favor of the publishers, they
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: lights, seemed to me to have altered its character; it had certainly
grown ghastly; violet tones were spreading over it; you might have
thought it the cadaverous head of a dying man. Motionless as the
personages painted on a diorama, his stupefied eyes were fixed on the
sparkling facets of a cut-glass stopper, but certainly without
observing them; he seemed to be engulfed in some weird contemplation
of the future or the past. When I had long examined that puzzling face
I began to reflect about it. "Is he ill?" I said to myself. "Has he
drunk too much wine? Is he ruined by a drop in the Funds? Is he
thinking how to cheat his creditors?"
"Look!" I said to my neighbor, pointing out to her the face of the
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