| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: in politics. His shrewdness and the extent of his information in all
matters of government and administration are fully appreciated, and
all parties consider him indispensable. I may tell you that he was
recently offered an embassy, but I would not let him accept it. I am
tied to Paris by the education of Armand and Athenais--who are now
respectively thirteen and nearly eleven--and I don't intend leaving
till little Rene has completed his, which is just beginning.
We could not have remained faithful to the elder branch of the dynasty
and returned to our country life without allowing the education and
prospects of the three children to suffer. A mother, my sweet, is
hardly called on to be a Decius, especially at a time when the type is
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: and whirl of human thought one calls by way of embodiment the French
Revolution, has altered absolutely the approach to such a question.
Machiavelli, like Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd
decades before him, saw only one method by which a thinking man,
himself not powerful, might do the work of state building, and that
was by seizing the imagination of a Prince. Directly these men
turned their thoughts towards realisation, their attitudes became--
what shall I call it?--secretarial. Machiavelli, it is true, had
some little doubts about the particular Prince he wanted, whether it
was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo, but a Prince it had to be.
Before I saw clearly the differences of our own time I searched my
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: sudden transformation of this illustrious author, it is necessary to
realize the simplicity that constant work and solitude leave in the
heart; all that love--reduced to a mere need, and now repugnant,
beside an ignoble woman--excites of regret and longings for diviner
sentiments in the higher regions of the soul. D'Arthez was, indeed,
the child, the boy that Madame de Cadignan had recognized. An
illumination something like his own had taken place in the beautiful
Diane. At last she had met that superior man whom all women desire and
seek, if only to make a plaything of him,--that power which they
consent to obey, if only for the pleasure of subduing it; at last she
had found the grandeurs of the intellect united with the simplicity of
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