| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: had brought him such commercial celebrity that all vendors of the
"article Paris"[*] paid court to him, and humbly begged that he would
deign to take their commissions.
[*] "Article Paris" means anything--especially articles of wearing
apparel--which originates or is made in Paris. The name is
supposed to give to the thing a special value in the provinces.
Thus, when he returned to Paris in the intervals of his triumphant
progress through France, he lived a life of perpetual festivity in the
shape of weddings and suppers. When he was in the provinces, the
correspondents in the smaller towns made much of him; in Paris, the
great houses feted and caressed him. Welcomed, flattered, and fed
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: "This, of course, applies only to passion; in any other sense it would
be socially wrong. Nothing more clearly proves the necessity for
indissoluble marriage than the instability of passion. The two sexes
must be chained up, like wild beasts as they are, by inevitable law,
deaf and mute. Eliminate revenge, and infidelity in love is nothing.
Those who believe that for them there is but one woman in the world
must be in favor of vengeance, and then there is but one form of it--
that of Othello.
"Mine was different."
The words produced in each of us the imperceptible movement which
newspaper writers represent in Parliamentary reports by the words:
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