Sarrasine by Balzac

"A good man, we had agreed, must at any rate be honest, passionate, and unworldly."

"'If we hadn’t learnt to read,' she said bitterly, 'we might still have been bearing children in ignorance and that I believe was the happiest life after all.'"

"She was the type of that hidden poesy, the link which connects all the arts and which always eludes those who seek it."

"By virtue of one of the strangest of nature's freaks, the thought half draped in black, which was tossing about in my brain, emerged from it and stood before me personified, living; it had come forth like Minerva from Jupiter's brain, tall and strong; it was at once a hundred years old and twenty-two; it was alive and dead."

"He saw before him at that moment the ideal beauty whose perfections he had hitherto sought here and there in nature,"

"He did not applaud, he said nothing; he felt a mad impulse, a sort of frenzy of the sort that seizes us only at the age when there is a something indefinably terrible and infernal in our desires."

"He had had such exquisite pleasure, or perhaps had suffered so, that his life had flowed away like water from an overturned vessel."

Pleasure and suffering go hand in hand.

"He met La Zambinella, spoke to her, entreated her, exhausted a thousand years of life and happiness with her, placing her in all imaginable situations, trying the future with her, so to speak."

"Sarrasine drew his mistress in all poses: he drew her unveiled, seated, standing, reclining, chaste, and amorous--interpreting, thanks to the delirious activity of his pencil, all the fanciful ideas which beset our imagination when our thoughts are completely engrossed by a mistress."

He created his own imagination visually. Oddly combining the real and unreal.

"The golden age of love, during which we enjoy our own sentiments, and in which we are almost as happy by ourselves,"

Interesting. Solitude and the impression is just as important as being with them.

"To talk of danger to a man in love is to sell him pleasure.

"I am an accursed creature, doomed to understand happiness, to feel it, to desire it, and like many, many others, compelled to see it always fly from me."

"I shall never cease to think of that imaginary woman when I see a real woman."

"'I shall always have in my memory a divine harpy who will bury her talons in all my manly sentiments, and who will stamp all other women with a seal of imperfection. Monster! you, who can give life to nothing, have swept all women off the face of the earth.'"

He's stuck with that idea forever.
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Woah! That was a very surprising ending! I cannot believe this was a story about a "trap". Even though it was all for a joke. It's so interesting how he imagined that Zambinella was a woman, and insipired all of these passions, and yet he didn't figure out that it was actually a man. I mean, what is Balzac trying to say with all of this? Because in the end, wouldn't it eventually be revealed that Zambinella would actually be a man? I think Balzac is trying to say something about the blindness of passion...maybe that Sarrasine saw what he wished so desperately to see. He developed his strongest passions for Zambinella when he was AWAY from her. Therefore, I think Balzac is trying to say that it didn't really matter who Zambinella really was, but what Sarrasine thought she was. This is stressing the importance of our mind, and what a large role it plays in the process of "falling in love". The imagination satisfies so much that the person that first stimulated them ceases to be important. It was just a stimulus, a trigger, but then gets lost as our fantasies reach new realms with a being that ceases to resemble the original. It makes me think how unfair it is to that being. But when one falls in love, doesn't the imagination eventually cool down, and starts to resemble the real? For instance, Virginia Woolf's Night and Day- the interesting balance between what one imagines in the person, and what it is. In the end, Ralph cooled his delusions and finally enjoyed the real. Well, as best as he could. The ending of this story though- I have no idea what to make of it. Sarrasine swears that he will forever uphold the imagine of woman he had made in his mind, and that the real woman for him is forever destroyed. Tragic, but the tone and the way Zambinella bows his head in despair, strikes me as rather comic? Or maybe that's just my odd way of thinking. I don't know, but personally, I thought the ending was rather humorous.

Anyway, Balzac makes a very interesting point- and of course, so eloquently. That ending- I think it depicts so much of who he was in real life.

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This is a very nice commentary on the book, mixed with a little bit of French, saying that of course the French original is much better. Which, I can imagine, is certainly true. Too bad my French is horrendous, or I would try it. (link)

This post (readear) says that the audio-which links it to-is extremely funny.
I listened to some parts of it, starting with the line "Suppose I were not a woman" which strikes me as extremely hilarious now that I know the ending! He proceeded to respond, "Would you venture to say now that you are not a woman?" Oh, little did he know! Zambinella's helpless voice at the end, and Sarrasine's question "Have you any sisters that resemble you?" depicts the marvelous genius of Balzac's wit. Shall we say "lol"? One needs to listen to this after one has read the book: makes it much more enjoyable.

other links:

An analysis of Sarrasine by Ronald Barthes (link) from which this Bibliophil references.

This post (making friends and enemies) goes on to further talk about Barthes' argument in which he says to separate the Author from the creation (in his work Death of the Author), as he talks about Sarrasine and "who" is actually speaking in the story. As it says in the post, "When, in the passage, the character dotes over her perceived womanliness, Barthes challenges his own readers to determine who is speaking, and about what. "Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? … We can never know." Writing, "the destruction of every voice," defies adherence to a single interpretation or perspective."

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Produced by Dagny; and John Bickers