Sarrasine | Page 9

decidedly ugly, always badly dressed, and naturally so independent, so
irregular in his private life, that the illustrious nymph, dreading some
catastrophe, soon remitted the sculptor to love of the arts. Sophie
Arnould made some witty remark on the subject. She was surprised, I

think, that her colleague was able to triumph over statues.
"Sarrasine started for Italy in 1758. On the journey his ardent
imagination took fire beneath a sky of copper and at the sight of the
marvelous monuments with which the fatherland of the arts is strewn.
He admired the statues, the frescoes, the pictures; and, fired with a
spirit of emulation, he went on to Rome, burning to inscribe his name
between the names of Michelangelo and Bouchardon. At first, therefore,
he divided his time between his studio work and examination of the
works of art which abound in Rome. He had already passed a fortnight
in the ecstatic state into which all youthful imaginations fall at the sight
of the queen of ruins, when he happened one evening to enter the
Argentina theatre, in front of which there was an enormous crowd. He
inquired the reasons for the presence of so great a throng, and every
one answered by two names:
"'Zambinella! Jomelli!'
"He entered and took a seat in the pit, crowded between two
unconscionably stout _abbati_; but luckily he was quite near the stage.
The curtain rose. For the first time in his life he heard the music whose
charms Monsieur Jean-Jacques Rousseau had extolled so eloquently at
one of Baron d'Holbach's evening parties. The young sculptor's senses
were lubricated, so to speak, by Jomelli's harmonious strains. The
languorous peculiarities of those skilfully blended Italian voices
plunged him in an ecstasy of delight. He sat there, mute and motionless,
not even conscious of the crowding of the two priests. His soul poured
out through his ears and his eyes. He seemed to be listening with every
one of his pores. Suddenly a whirlwind of applause greeted the
appearance of the prima donna. She came forward coquettishly to the
footlights and curtsied to the audience with infinite grace. The brilliant
light, the enthusiasm of a vast multitude, the illusion of the stage, the
glamour of a costume which was most attractive for the time, all
conspired in that woman's favor. Sarrasine cried aloud with pleasure.
He saw before him at that moment the ideal beauty whose perfections
he had hitherto sought here and there in nature, taking from one model,
often of humble rank, the rounded outline of a shapely leg, from

another the contour of the breast; from another her white shoulders;
stealing the neck of that young girl, the hands of this woman, and the
polished knees of yonder child, but never able to find beneath the cold
skies of Paris the rich and satisfying creations of ancient Greece. La
Zambinella displayed in her single person, intensely alive and delicate
beyond words, all those exquisite proportions of the female form which
he had so ardently longed to behold, and of which a sculptor is the most
severe and at the same time the most passionate judge. She had an
expressive mouth, eyes instinct with love, flesh of dazzling whiteness.
And add to these details, which would have filled a painter's soul with
rapture, all the marvelous charms of the Venuses worshiped and copied
by the chisel of the Greeks. The artist did not tire of admiring the
inimitable grace with which the arms were attached to the body, the
wonderful roundness of the throat, the graceful curves described by the
eyebrows and the nose, and the perfect oval of the face, the purity of its
clean-cut lines, and the effect of the thick, drooping lashes which
bordered the large and voluptuous eyelids. She was more than a woman;
she was a masterpiece! In that unhoped-for creation there was love
enough to enrapture all mankind, and beauties calculated to satisfy the
most exacting critic.
"Sarrasine devoured with his eyes what seemed to him Pygmalion's
statue descended from its pedestal. When La Zambinella sang, he was
beside himself. He was cold; then suddenly he felt a fire burning in the
secret depths of his being, in what, for lack of a better word, we call the
heart. 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. Sarrasine
longed to rush upon the stage and seize that woman. His strength,
increased a hundredfold by a moral depression impossible to
describe,--for such phenomena take place in a sphere inaccessible to
human observation,--insisted upon manifesting itself with deplorable
violence. Looking at him, you would have said that he was a