| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: is highly venerated in Brittany, and Marcas was a Breton.
Study the name once more: Z Marcas! The man's whole life lies in this
fantastic juxtaposition of seven letters; seven! the most significant
of all the cabalistic numbers. And he died at five-and-thirty, so his
life extended over seven lustres.
Marcas! Does it not hint of some precious object that is broken with a
fall, with or without a crash?
I had finished studying the law in Paris in 1836. I lived at that time
in the Rue Corneille in a house where none but students came to lodge,
one of those large houses where there is a winding staircase quite at
the back lighted below from the street, higher up by borrowed lights,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mansion by Henry van Dyke: appreciated at his full value in every region, even in that of
his own dreams.
Presently he rang for the butler, telling him to close the house
and
not to sit up, and walked with lagging steps into the long
library,
where the shaded lamps were burning. His eye fell upon the low
shelves
full of costly books, but he had no desire to open them. Even
the
carefully chosen pictures that hung above them seemed to have
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: be made to reappear unless by an equally delicate rendering of
thought; there are portraits which require the infusion of a soul, and
mean nothing unless the subtlest expression of the speaking
countenance is given; furthermore, there are things which we know not
how to say or do without the aid of secret harmonies which a day, an
hour, a fortunate conjunction of celestial signs, or an inward moral
tendency may produce.
Such mysterious revelations are imperatively needed in order to tell
this simple history, in which we seek to interest those souls that are
naturally grave and reflective and find their sustenance in tender
emotions. If the writer, like the surgeon beside his dying friend, is
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