| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: the man who is ridiculous for love. In fine, a fop can be no fop
unless he is right in being one. It is women who bestow that rank. The
fop is love's colonel; he has his victories, his regiment of women at
his command. My dear fellow, in Paris everything is known, and a man
cannot be a fop there /gratis/. You, who have only one woman, and who,
perhaps, are right to have but one, try to act the fop! . . . You will
not even become ridiculous, you will be dead. You will become a
foregone conclusion, one of those men condemned inevitably to do one
and the same thing. You will come to signify /folly/ as inseparably as
M. de La Fayette signifies /America/; M. de Talleyrand, /diplomacy/;
Desaugiers, /song/; M. de Segur, /romance/. If they once forsake their
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: But I constantly heard of Pamina, and then of Tamino,*
(* Characters In Mozart's Zauberflote.)
And I fain would express my opinion; so when she had ended,
I ask'd questions respecting the text, and who were the persons.
All were silent and smiled; but presently answer'd the father
'Did you e'er happen, my friend, to hear of Eve or of Adam?'
Then no longer restrain'd they themselves, the girls burst out laughing,
All the boys laugh'd loudly, the old man's sides appear'd splitting.
In my confusion I let my hat fall down, and the titt'ring
Lasted all the time the singing and playing continued.
Then I hasten'd home, ashamed and full of vexation,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: as she called it, he felt at last in real possession of her. The
place had the flush of life - it was expressive; its dark red walls
were articulate with memories and relics. These were simple things
- photographs and water-colours, scraps of writing framed and
ghosts of flowers embalmed; but a moment sufficed to show him they
had a common meaning. It was here she had lived and worked, and
she had already told him she would make no change of scene. He
read the reference in the objects about her - the general one to
places and times; but after a minute he distinguished among them a
small portrait of a gentleman. At a distance and without their
glasses his eyes were only so caught by it as to feel a vague
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