| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eve and David by Honore de Balzac: You yourself, madame, would then be the proprietor of the plant in the
printing-office. You would sell the business, no doubt; it is quite
worth twenty thousand francs. I will undertake to find you a buyer at
that price.
"Now if you draw up a deed of partnership with the MM. Cointet, and
receive fifteen thousand francs of capital; and if you invest it in
the funds at the present moment, it will bring you in an income of two
thousand francs. You can live on two thousand francs in the provinces.
Bear in mind, too, madame, that, given certain contingencies, there
will be yet further payments. I say 'contingencies,' because we must
lay our accounts with failure.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs: feast on simnel bread and malmsey, that you must
needs burden me still further with the affliction of thy
vile tongue?
"Hast thou the clothes ready bundled and the key,
also, to this gate to perdition? And the room: didst set
to rights the furnishings I had delivered here, and
sweep the century-old accumulation of filth and cob-
webs from the floor and rafters? Why, the very air
reeked of the dead Romans who builded London twelve
hundred years ago. Methinks, too, from the stink, they
must have been Roman swineherd who habited this sty
The Outlaw of Torn |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: long improvised dirges will ring for ever in my ears. Among
other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular
perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of
Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy
brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vagueness at which
I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not
why;--from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before
me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion
which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By
the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he
arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea,
The Fall of the House of Usher |
