| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: have wives and women. They have them, just as we have Voltaire and
Rousseau; but who ever opens his Voltaire or his Rousseau? Nobody.
But, for all that, the highest style is to be jealous. They sew a
woman up in a sack and fling her into the water on the slightest
suspicion,--that's according to their Code."
"Did you fling any in?" asked the farmer.
"I, a Frenchman! for shame! I loved them."
Whereupon Georges twirled and twisted his moustache with a dreamy air.
They were now entering Saint-Denis, and Pierrotin presently drew up
before the door of a tavern where were sold the famous cheese-cakes of
that place. All the travellers got out. Puzzled by the apparent truth
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: the fire of circumstance. This question had just been asked by a man
whom he had made a prefet, a man of wit and observation, who had for a
long time been a journalist, and who admired de Marsay without
infusing into his admiration that dash of acrid criticism by which, in
Paris, one superior man excuses himself from admiring another.
"Was there ever," said he, "in your former life, any event, any
thought or wish which told you what your vocation was?" asked Emile
Blondet; "for we all, like Newton, have our apple, which falls and
leads us to the spot where our faculties develop----"
"Yes," said de Marsay; "I will tell you about it."
Pretty women, political dandies, artists, old men, de Marsay's
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Golden Sayings of Epictetus by Epictetus: sketch of the system, he answered:--"We will consider that at
leisure. At present I content myself with saying this much: If a
man put his hand to so weighty a matter without God, the wrath of
God abides upon him. That which he covets will but bring upon him
public shame. Not even on finding himself in a well-ordered house
does a man step forward and say to himself, I must be master
here! Else the lord of that house takes notice of it, and, seeing
him insolently giving orders, drags him forth and chastises him.
So it is also in this great City, the World. Here also is there a
Lord of the House, who orders all thing:--
"Thou are the Sun! in thine orbit thou hast power to make the
The Golden Sayings of Epictetus |
