Sarrasine (and A Passion in the Desert) by Honoré de Balzac

Read this short story because I want to read Barthes' analysis in S/Z.

My first Balzac stories, I cannot really say too much about Balzac's writing just yet, these two stories are not sufficient for such an evaluation.

Both used the technique of telling a story within a story. Maupassant does this a lot, too.

In Sarrasine, Balzac's descriptions of the old man foretells his identity as a castrato:

"His excessive thinness, the delicacy of his limbs proved that his proportions had always remained slender... Quite a rust-coloured jabot of English lace, the magnificence of which would have been envied by a queen... Besides, the feminine vanity of this fantastic figure was already forcefully proclaimed by the golden rings hanging from his ears... Silently, and as immobile as a statue, it exhaled the musky odour of the old clothes that the heirs of a duchess exhume from her drawers during an inventory..."

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