Sarrasine E-Book

Honore de Balzac

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 120

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

"A tale of gothic glamour, depicting European culture at its most corrupt, like Edgar Allan Poe with lashings of lust and facepaint" -Kate Pullinger At a fashionable party in Paris, an appalled young lady hears the story of the mysterious figure that haunts the elegant de Lanty household... Parisian artist Sarrasine travels to Italy to pursue his vocation of sculpture. At the opera, he falls in love with the beautiful prima donna, Zambinella. Entirely captivated by her beauty and her charms, he sets to sculpting a tribute to her perfect femininity while also attempting to court her. However, all is not as it seems, and on making a shocking discovery, Sarrasine's love suddenly turns to murderous rage. A vivid evocation of nineteenth-century Europe, Balzac's tragic tale of mistaken identity was the text used by Roland Barthes in his influential work of structuralist theory, S/Z. It is accompanied here by another of Balzac's short stories, the orientalist fable A Passion in the Desert.

Leseprobe

Sarrasine

Honoré de Balzac

Foreword byKate Pullinger

Translated byDavid Carter

Hesperus Classics

Published by Hesperides Press Limited

167-169 Great Portland Street

London W1W 5PF

www.hesperus.press

First published in Revue de Paris in 1830

First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2007

This edition published in 2025

Foreword © Kate Pullinger, 2007

Introduction and English language translation

© David Carter, 2007

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-84391-151-7

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-84391-331-3

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Foreword

Kate Pullinger

Introduction

David Carter

Sarrasine

A Passion in the Desert

Notes

Biographical Note

Foreword

Kate Pullinger

Honoré de Balzac was possessed by hypergraphia for most of his days – at least that’s my theory. Dead by the age of sixty-one, he nonetheless produced close to one hundred novels, as well as many short stories and plays, as well as essays and journalism. It is said that he usually spent sixteen hours a day writing, consuming upwards of 300 cups of coffee during that time (that’s one cup of coffee every three minutes). I picture a pale writer hunched over an enormous ream of paper, a coffee-drip, hospital-style, suspended overhead: perfect conditions for one in the grip of a nineteenth-century writing fever.

Balzac’s reputation as a writer rests on the detailed realism he brought to literature, his fictive gaze focused on the lives of the petite bourgeoisie, inspiring Proust and de Maupassant among many others. Both the stories in this volume were published around the same time, 1830, in a group of short novels and stories Balzac named Scènes de la vie privée (‘Scenes from Private Life’); later this series developed into what by the end of that decade he began calling the Comédie humaine, a vastly ambitious project in which Balzac hoped to transcribe the whole of contemporary society. Hence, the need for coffee.

But the two stories here, Sarrasine and A Passion in the Desert, are very different from the work for which Balzac is revered: Sarrasine is a kind of gorgeous urban myth, while A Passion in the Desert is an orientalist fable. Both stories are lush and over-ripe, heavily scented and hugely sensual, and in both tales true love is ultimately – murderously – thwarted.

‘ “This show is frightening!” she exclaimed.’ So begins A Passion in the Desert, and we embark on a story within a story, a device familiar to readers of Balzac and common to both these stories – the first person narrator recounting a story they themselves have been told to a lovely and, it must be said, slightly credulous, young woman whose main role is to look at the narrator ‘in amazement’.

Napoleon had led his great expedition into Egypt at the turn of the century, and all of Europe was enthralled by news of his discoveries; the old Provençal soldier who tells his tale to the narrator in A Passion in the Desert (who in turn tells the tale to his astonished friend) was captured by Arabs in Upper Egypt.

The soldier escapes and takes flight into the desert where he is soon lost. Sheltering in a cave for the night (Balzac’s desert is a dream desert, a place of endless sand, oases, palm trees, and, at night, a star-filled oriental sky), the soldier wakes up and discovers he is not alone; there is a panther, a ‘petite maitresse’ possessed of a kind of weary exotic oriental hauteur, sleeping beside him. Will she kill him before he kills her? One imagines Flaubert reading this story en route to the brothels of the Nile, where he elaborated upon and then made his own this particular view of eastern femininity.

The novella Sarrasine is a tale of gothic glamour, depicting European culture at its most corrupt, like Edgar Allan Poe with lashings of lust and face paint. The de Lanty family, wealthy, good-looking and otherwise blessed, has a terrible secret: what is the true identity of the decrepit old man, who ‘has the smell of the cemetery about him’, is hideous to behold, and frequents their sophisticated house parties like a ghost? The narrator is privy to this secret, and his guest at the party, a young marquise ‘whose figure was full and vivacious in its beauty’ is desperate to hear it. But the story of the sculptor Ernest-Jean Sarrasine and the phantasmagorical La Zambinella is too much: the Cardinal is a murderer, society a haven for aristocrats with too much money and too much time on their hands whose silly tricks result in death and despair. The narrator’s tale is based on hearsay and rumour and myth, a tale of love gone bad, morals gone astray, set in a world where nothing is as it first seems.

The theorist Roland Barthes’ book S/Z is entirely devoted to a detailed semiotic examination of Sarrasine. I first came across the story not through Barthes (however much I’d love to claim the contrary) but at the beginning of the 1990s when the English theatre company Gloria created a music theatre piece adapted from the text by the writer and director Neil Bartlett and the composer Nicolas Bloomfield, a production redolent with faded stage make-up, torn costumes and decaying sets. The story of the sculptor who falls desperately in love with the opera singer he thinks is a woman, and fears is a man, but who turns out to be neither was conveyed most vividly, and Sarrasine’s desperate imprecation when he discovers La Zambinella’s duplicity – ‘To love and be loved are from now on words devoid of any meaning for me… No more love! I am dead to all pleasure, to all human emotions’ – ring in my ears still. The debased glamour of the novella was filtered through gorgeous operatic arias that depict the castrato who, like his ill-fated suitor, dares to believe for a few moments that he will be loved, after all, anyway.

The last European castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, died in 1922, and there remain only a few low-quality recordings of his voice – high, strange, and, there is no other word for it, unearthly. But the castrato lives on to this day in literature and film and in Sarrasine he lives on quite literally, the one-hundred-year-old oddity, the family shame who also created the family fortune. The narrator thinks the moral of the story is one of progress; the castrati are dying off, and ‘they don’t make wretched creatures like that any more’. But the marquise knows better; the city is a cruel and terrible place, ‘crime and infamy have the right of refuge there’. Love does not conquer all and some secrets are secret for good reason.

Introduction

David Carter

One of the first writers to perceive that Balzac’s stories Sarrasine and A Passion in the Desert shared the common theme of unconventional love, with more than a hint of perversion, was the Baroness Aurore Duprès, who herself shocked Parisian society by challenging its notions of sexual identity through appearing dressed as a man and changing her name to George Sand. In a letter of 7th March 1831, she pointed out that Balzac’s fame at that time depended on stories about the love of a soldier for a tigress (sic) and of an artist for a castrato.

Hitherto Balzac had published several novels under pseudonyms, a satirical piece called The Physiology of Marriage, the historical novel The Last of the Chouans, or Brittany in 1880, a series of short pieces called Scenes from Private Life, and some other short works and fragments.

Apart from the aspects of the stories stressed by Sand, the works also have other points of similarity. Both use the device of a story within a story, and in both cases the narrator tells his story to impress a beautiful woman; in Sarrasine the narrator is more obviously determined to seduce his female companion. Both ladies are in a vulnerable state of mind: the one in Sarrasine is disturbed at the sight of a cadaverous old man at a society function and seeks from the narrator the story behind his strange association with the wealthy de Lanty family; in A Passion in the Desert the lady is anxious and incredulous after watching the performance of an animal tamer, and seeks an explanation of how such intimacy between a man and a wild animal is possible. Interestingly, the lady in Sarrasine is also described as being ‘under the spell of that timid curiosity that drives women to acquire dangerous emotions, to see chained-up tigers…’

For Sarrasine there are several interesting literary parallels with which it may be fruitfully compared. The very magazine in which both stories had been originally published, the Revue de Paris, had also published in recent years translations of some of the fantastic stories by the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), whose stories also show considerable interest in mysterious figures, often ugly old men, neurotic young men, Italian opera, and beautiful young women who are not what they seem. His famous story ‘The Sandman’ (1816) is about a young man who falls obsessively in love with a young ‘woman’ who, as everybody else already knows, is an automaton (the basis of the ballet Coppélia, 1870, by Léo Délibes). In Hoffmann’s story ‘Don Juan’ (1819) the protagonist falls in love with the prima donna in a production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. At the height of his obsession she appears in a ghostlike form in his box at the opera.

There are several later works with which Sarrasine also bears comparison. Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891) is also concerned with the unnatural pursuit of ideal beauty at the cost of one’s humanity. And Thomas Mann’s Gustav Aschenbach in Death in Venice (1912) is an artist who is drawn towards his own death by the godlike charms of a youth. But all is not what it seems: the authorities of the most serene cities cover up the presence of cholera and Mann reveals in telling detail that the youth may well be sick: he has some decaying teeth. More recently there is a close parallel in the play M Butterfly (1988) by David Henry Hwang, which is based on the true story of Bernard Boursicot’s love for a ‘female’ Chinese opera singer, who was really a young man. The film version, directed by David Cronenberg, appeared in 1993. Balzac also provided some clear classical allusions in Sarrasine: to the legend of the sculptor Pygmalion, who fell in love with a beautiful statue, to the beautiful youth Adonis, and to the Lesbian poetess Sappho, as well as to the historical Antinous, favourite of the Emperor Hadrian. There is therefore a clear invitation to interpret the story in archetypal terms.

Perhaps the most notorious study of Sarrasine is that provided by Roland Barthes in his oddly titled work S/Z (1973). In this book he dissects the entire story, fragment by fragment. It is far too extensive to summarise in the present context. While many may feel that it distorts the meanings of the story, it does provide many interesting insights. For Barthes Sarrasine is a ‘writerly’ (‘scriptible’) text, meaning that it lends itself to complete dismemberment by a critic, who can feel free to impose on the text patterns of meaning, which often cannot be proved by citing other textual evidence, and do not need to be compatible with each other. This kind of text has, for Barthes, no final ‘signifieds’ but is an endless mesh of interrelated ‘signifiers’. He divided the story into 581 small units (lexias) and applied to them 5 codes. These codes are not ranked in any way and several codes are often applied to the same lexia. They are referred to by the following adjectives: hermeneutic (relating to enigma and mystery); semic (associations evoked); symbolic (polarities and antitheses); proairetic (action and behaviour); and cultural (knowledge shared between text and reader). It must be said that Barthes produced a web of meanings and significances that would be unlikely to occur to the average intelligent reader during a careful reading of the text. It might be compared to interpreting all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle individually without attempting to relate them to the total picture of which they are a part.

One should point out finally that the two stories are also different in various ways. Not the least is the fact that Sarrasine depicts the profound shock of disillusionment at discovering that what was held to be reality is in fact artifice. The soldier in A Passion in the Desert, however, in his total isolation relishes the sensuality of the panther to the point that he knowingly identifies her with his mistress. While he gradually lets down his guard to become intimate with his ‘mistress’, he never forgets that she is a wild creature. There is no shattering of a dream, and he feels no regret at the end.

The translations are based on those editions known to contain Balzac’s last amendments. While there are many uncertainties and variations, it has not been deemed wise to clutter this edition with them. A few interesting ambiguities have been commented on in the notes. The manuscript of Sarrasine has not been preserved, and each of the four early editions were subjected to alterations. It was first published in two parts in the Revue de Paris on the 21st and the 28th of November, 1830. It was republished in Novels and Philosophical Tales in 1831, where it had two chapters with headings. The present translation is based on the fourth edition in volume X of the Comédie humaine, published by Furne in 1844. A Passion in the Desert appeared as a ‘Christmas Tale’ in the Revue de Paris on the 24th of December, 1830. It was republished in volume XVI of the Philosophical Studies in 1837, and again in 1845 in volume IV of Three Lovers, with titled sections. The present translation is based on the text in volume VIII of the Comédie humaine published by Furne in 1846.

Some modifications have been made to Balzac’s punctuation, bringing it more in line with current English usage. He uses semicolons, for example, more freely and fulfilling different functions than is common in English. His uses of ellipsis and italics have been retained.