| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: the blood of a great family, which took its rise in the desert and is
now about to die out in the person of a solitary exile.
Farewell.
VII
LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO RENEE DE MAUCOMBE
WHAT! To be married so soon. But this is unheard of. At the end of a
month you become engaged to a man who is a stranger to you, and about
whom you know nothing. The man may be deaf--there are so many kinds of
deafness!--he may be sickly, tiresome, insufferable!
Don't you see, Renee, what they want with you? You are needful for
carrying on the glorious stock of the l'Estorades, that is all. You
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne: window, and was going to do the same by the waste paper; - but
stopping to read a line first, and that drawing me on to a second
and third, - I thought it better worth; so I shut the window, and
drawing a chair up to it, I sat down to read it.
It was in the old French of Rabelais's time, and for aught I know
might have been wrote by him: - it was moreover in a Gothic letter,
and that so faded and gone off by damps and length of time, it cost
me infinite trouble to make anything of it. - I threw it down; and
then wrote a letter to Eugenius; - then I took it up again, and
embroiled my patience with it afresh; - and then to cure that, I
wrote a letter to Eliza. - Still it kept hold of me; and the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: some years afterwards, when she had abandoned further hope of
children, that Lily grew jealous of those dead sons of mine and of
my ever present love for them.
Now the tidings of my return and of my strange adventures among the
nations of the Indies were noised abroad far and wide, and people
came from miles round, ay, even from Norwich and Yarmouth, to see
me and I was pressed to tell my tale till I grew weary of it. Also
a service of thanksgiving for my safe deliverance from many dangers
by land and sea was held in the church of St. Mary's here in
Ditchingham, which service was no longer celebrated after the rites
of the Romish faith, for while I had sojourned afar, the saints
Montezuma's Daughter |
