| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Case of the Golden Bullet by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: "What do you know?" she breathed in alarm.
The peddler laughed. "Oho, then he's jealous! All the better for
me - the Councillor was jealous too, wasn't he?" Nanette looked at
him in horror.
"The truth, therefore, you must tell me the truth, and get the
others away, so I can speak to you alone. You must do this - or
else I'll tell George about the handsome carpenter in Church street,
or about Franz Schmid, or - "
"For God's sake, stop - stop - I'll do anything you say."
The girl sank back on her chair pale and trembling, while the
peddler resumed his pose of a tired old man leaning against the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: the horrible savagery of those tribes.
So it was in later centuries. One cannot read fairly the history of
the Middle Ages without seeing that the robber knight of Germany or
of France, who figures so much in modern novels, must have been the
exception, and not the rule: that an aristocracy which lived by the
saddle would have as little chance of perpetuating itself, as a
priesthood composed of hypocrites and profligates; that the
mediaeval Nobility has been as much slandered as the mediaeval
Church; and the exceptions taken--as more salient and exciting--for
the average: that side by side with ruffians like Gaston de Foix
hundreds of honest gentlemen were trying to do their duty to the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: into which the hapless fellow threw everything; a gulf whither the
mind dare not venture, since his, flexible and firm as it was, was
lost there. There all was mysterious, for everything went on in that
moral world, closed to most men, whose laws were revealed to him--
perhaps to his sorrow.
When an accident threw me in the way of his uncle, the good man showed
me into the room which Lambert had at that time lived in. I wanted to
find some vestiges of his writings, if he should have left any. There
among his papers, untouched by the old man from that fine instinct of
grief that characterized the aged, I found a number of letters, too
illegible ever to have been sent to Mademoiselle de Villenoix. My
Louis Lambert |
