Orgy-related

From Honoré de Balzac’s story “Sarrasine.” La Zambinella speaks:

“Orgies do harm to my voice.”

The Human Comedy: Selected Stories , trans. from the French by Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan Stump (New York: New York Review Books, 2014). This story translated by Stump.

She means, of course, wild parties — nothing more.

“Sarrasine” became the stuff of Roland Barthes’s tour de force S/Z (1970). I’m glad to have read, at last, the story.

Also from Balzac
“Easily five foot eight or nine”