Sarrasine

“‘Monsieur de Lanty has not owned this house very long, has he?’ 

‘Oh, yes! It is nearly ten years since the Marechal de Carigliano sold it to him.’

‘Ah!’

‘These people must have an enormous fortune.’

‘They surely must.’

‘What a magnificent party! It is almost insolent in its splendor.’

‘Do you imagine they are as rich as Monsieur de Nucingen or Monsieur de Gondreville?’

‘Why, don’t you know?’”

Balzac’s use of uninterrupted dialogue is characteristic of the Realist style, contributing to the work’s verisimilitude by mirroring the real-world flow of conversations. The speakers remain unnamed, serving as stand-ins for their social group and thus showing that such discussions are commonplace; gossip concerning social status flourishes, establishing the setting as one preoccupied with reputation and appearances. The rapid-fire back and forth is both peppered by exclamation marks and uninterrupted by dialogue markers to reflect the excited tone of the conversation.

“Have you ever met one of those women whose startling beauty defies the assaults of time, and who seem at thirty-six more desirable than they could have been fifteen years earlier? Their faces are impassioned souls; they fairly sparkle; each feature gleams with intelligence; each possesses a brilliancy of its own, especially in the light.”

In this quote, Balzac directly addresses the reader with the second-person pronoun “you” in a rhetorical question that invites them to consider their own experience with beautiful women and to pay particular attention to the detailed, idealized description of the comtesse. This consideration of feminine beauty lays the groundwork for later exploration of The Artificiality of Gender Roles.

“This mysterious family had all the attractiveness of a poem by Lord Byron, whose difficult passages were translated differently by each person in fashionable society; a poem that grew more obscure and more sublime from strophe to strophe. […] [T]he enigmatical history of the Lanty family offered a perpetual subject of curiosity, not unlike that aroused by the novels of Anne Radcliffe.”

Lord Byron (1788-1824) was an English Romantic poet and one of the most famous literary figures in the world during his lifetime. His work was extremely popular in France during the early 19th century and had a massive impact on contemporary and subsequent writers.