"Sarrasine" by Honore de Balzac (1830, A Short Story Component of La Comedie Humaine)

My Posts on Balzac

I guess  people liked stories about scandals among the rich as much in 1830 as they do now, especially ones with a touch of sexual scandal.

"Sarrasine", translated by Clara Bell, is set in Paris and is the tellings of conversations the narrator heard at a party in the grand mansion of the de Lanty family.  No one seemed to know the origins of their fortune, or at least those who did kept discrete.  Their parties were near the height of high fashion.  The narrator hears a number of stories.  The dominant one turns out to be about the relationship a sculptures to his model.  In the literary and social conventions of the era, artists models, especially those who posed nude, were seen as part of the demi-monde scene.  These lines capture the excitement the narrator felt on being at the party.

I will let the close of this story out, contrary to my normal practice.  The sculpturer's model, with whom he is madly in love and whose beauty is the talk of Paris, is revealed to be a man.

Clara Bell (1835 to 1927, UK) was part of a culturally accomplished family.  She was fluent in French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, German and Norwegian.  I find her prose very readable.

Mel u