Sarrasine

Sarrasine (1830) is a novella by Honoré de Balzac, part of his Comédie Humaine. The stage is set around midnight during a ball, the narrator is sitting at a window. There is an unknown old man around the house, whom the family was oddly devoted to, and who frightened and intrigued the partygoers. When the man sits next to the narrator's guest, Beatrix Rochefide, she touches him, and the narrator rushes her out of the room. The narrator knows who the man is and says he will tell her his story the next evening. Then he portrays Ernest-Jean Sarrasine, a passionate, artistic boy, who after having trouble in school became a prodigy of the sculptor Bouchardon. Sarrasine, a talented young man, after one of his sculptures wins a competition, heads to Rome, where he sees a theatre performance featuring Zambinella. He falls in love with her, going to all of her performances and creating a clay mold of her. The old man is not Sarrasine. Who is he?