| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: father or mother of children, and consequently obliged to live with
the strictest economy in a flat on the ground floor or first floor of
a large house. Who knows if they may not even be hunting a fortune?
Henceforth the eldest son's wife, a duchess in name only, has no
carriage, no people, no opera-box, no time to herself. She has not her
own rooms in the family mansion, nor her fortune, nor her pretty toys;
she is buried in trade; she buys socks for her dear little children,
nurses them herself, and keeps an eye on her girls, whom she no longer
sends to school at a convent. Thus your noblest dames have been turned
into worthy brood-hens."
"Alas! it is true," said Joseph Bridau. "In our day we cannot show
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: pitiful and squalid a display of poverty with a vessel as with a
man. When I saw colliers unloading, watched the workers in the
hold filling up silly little sacks and the succession of
blackened, half-naked men that ran to and fro with these along a
plank over a thirty-foot drop into filth and mud, I was first
seized with admiration of their courage and toughness and then,
"But after all, WHY--?" and the stupid ugliness of all this waste
of muscle and endurance came home to me. Among other things it
obviously wasted and deteriorated the coal.... And I had
imagined great things of the sea!
Well, anyhow, for a time that vocation was stilled.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: and servants, belonging to the Ancients, walked in the middle
brandishing thongs.
One of them drove him forward with a great blow; Matho began to move.
They thrust their arms over the chains shouting out that the road had
been left too wide for him; and he passed along, felt, pricked, and
slashed by all those fingers; when he reached the end of one street
another appeared; several times he flung himself to one side to bite
them; they speedily dispersed, the chains held him back, and the crowd
burst out laughing.
A child rent his ear; a young girl, hiding the point of a spindle in
her sleeve, split his cheek; they tore handfuls of hair from him and
Salammbo |
