| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: stupidities. Very good. Play the rake in the provinces; better still,
commit follies; follies may win you celebrity. But--don't marry. Who
marries now-a-days? Only merchants, for the sake of their capital, or
to be two to drag the cart; only peasants who want to produce children
to work for them; only brokers and notaries who want a wife's 'dot' to
pay for their practice; only miserable kings who are forced to
continue their miserable dynasties. But we are exempt from the pack,
and you want to shoulder it! And why DO you want to marry? You ought
to give your best friend your reasons. In the first place, if you
marry an heiress as rich as yourself, eighty thousand francs a year
for two is not the same thing as forty thousand francs a year for one,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Proposed Roads To Freedom by Bertrand Russell: proved untrue, so far as labor in civilized countries
is concerned. If we wish now to find examples of
capitalist cruelty analogous to those with which
Marx's book is filled, we shall have to go for most
of our material to the Tropics, or at any rate to
regions where there are men of inferior races to
exploit. Again: the skilled worker of the present day
is an aristocrat in the world of labor. It is a question
with him whether he shall ally himself with the
unskilled worker against the capitalist, or with the
capitalist against the unskilled worker. Very often
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: The abbe, in despair, sat down without a word, so crushed was he by
the vague presence of approaching disaster. But after breakfast, when
his friends gathered round him before a comfortable fire, Birotteau
naively related the history of his troubles. His hearers, who were
beginning to weary of the monotony of a country-house, were keenly
interested in a plot so thoroughly in keeping with the life of the
provinces. They all took sides with the abbe against the old maid.
"Don't you see, my dear friend," said Madame de Listomere, "that the
Abbe Troubert wants your apartment?"
Here the historian ought to sketch this lady; but it occurs to him
that even those who are ignorant of Sterne's system of "cognomology,"
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: son.
Nowadays old Canquoelle's costume would look strange, but between 1811
and 1820 it astonished no one. The old man wore shoes with cut-steel
buckles, silk stockings with stripes round the leg, alternately blue
and white, corded silk knee-breeches with oval buckles cut to match
those on his shoes. A white embroidered waistcoat, an old coat of
olive-brown with metal buttons, and a shirt with a flat-pleated frill
completed his costume. In the middle of the shirt-frill twinkled a
small gold locket, in which might be seen, under glass, a little
temple worked in hair, one of those pathetic trifles which give men
confidence, just as a scarecrow frightens sparrows. Most men, like
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