| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: favor. Sarrasine cried aloud with pleasure. He saw before him at that
moment the ideal beauty whose perfections he had hitherto sought here
and there in nature, taking from one model, often of humble rank, the
rounded outline of a shapely leg, from another the contour of the
breast; from another her white shoulders; stealing the neck of that
young girl, the hands of this woman, and the polished knees of yonder
child, but never able to find beneath the cold skies of Paris the rich
and satisfying creations of ancient Greece. La Zambinella displayed in
her single person, intensely alive and delicate beyond words, all
those exquisite proportions of the female form which he had so
ardently longed to behold, and of which a sculptor is the most severe
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: Hippocrates in the Protagoras to the other great Sophist. He is the
sophisticated youth on whom Socrates tries his cross-examining powers, just
as in the Charmides, the Lysis, and the Euthydemus, ingenuous boyhood is
made the subject of a similar experiment. He is treated by Socrates in a
half-playful manner suited to his character; at the same time he appears
not quite to understand the process to which he is being subjected. For he
is exhibited as ignorant of the very elements of dialectics, in which the
Sophists have failed to instruct their disciple. His definition of virtue
as 'the power and desire of attaining things honourable,' like the first
definition of justice in the Republic, is taken from a poet. His answers
have a sophistical ring, and at the same time show the sophistical
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: it, she let her arms drop like a person much fatigued.
"Caroline, go and ask who left this letter."
"Madame, I received it myself from the valet of Monsieur le Baron de
Rastignac."
After that there was silence for some time.
"Does Madame intend to dress?" asked Caroline at last.
"No-- He is certainly a most impertinent man," reflected the marquise.
I request all women to imagine for themselves the reflections of which
this was the first.
Madame de Listomere ended hers by a formal decision to forbid her
porter to admit Monsieur de Rastignac, and to show him, herself,
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