Sarrasine is a dizzying tale on illusion, art, and the ambiguity of desire, built as a frame narrative. At an evening party at the home of the immensely rich and mysterious Lanty family, the narrator sets out to tell a woman the origin of their fortune and the secret of a strange, emaciated old man who haunts their salons. He goes back to the eighteenth century: the French sculptor Sarrasine, an ardent and impetuous genius, sojourns in Rome, where he falls passionately in love with La Zambinella, an opera singer of ideal beauty whom he hears triumph on stage. He makes her his muse, pursues her with his ardor, and plans to abduct her, seeing in her the perfect woman and the incarnation of his artistic ideal. But Sarrasine is ignorant of a reality peculiar to the Papal States of the time, where women did not appear on stage: La Zambinella is not a woman but a castrato, a man castrated to preserve his voice. When the sculptor discovers the truth, his idealized love collapses into horror and fury; he wishes to kill the one who has destroyed his dream, but is himself dispatched by the men of the cardinal who protects the singer. The enigmatic old man of the Lanty house is none other than La Zambinella, survivor of this story, whose fortune has made the family's wealth. Balzac interrogates the deceptive nature of beauty, the uncertain frontier of the sexes, and the artist's relation to an ideal that does not exist. The tale, famous for having inspired Roland Barthes's analysis (S/Z), conjugates the fantastic, irony, and aesthetic reflection. Sarrasine is a meditation on the founding illusion of art and desire, and on the castration at the heart of creation.