ABSTRACT
Whereas, in Sarrasine, Girodet's Le Sommeil d'Endymion is the end point of the chain of representations that structure the narrative, in La Vendetta it is the starting point of'l'étrange aventure' set in the studio of the artist Servin. Balzac's use of Girodet's painting is overdetermined; it is the beginning of a chain of copies and is also the implicit referent of a tableau vivant whereby Ginevra di Piombo, herself attentively observed, gazes down at the sleeping Luigi Porta through a narrow crevice in a closet partition. In her detailed interrogation of Balzac's fascination with Le Sommeil d'Endymion, Baron reads its 'hieroglyphic' — 'cette union symbolique entre l'amoureuse Séléné et le jeune garçon, sous les yeux complices d'un amour' 1 — as a primal scene, to be looked at illicitly and, by definition, without the awareness of the 'parental' protagonists. As such, the picture satisfies a scopic drive as much as any aesthetic ideal. In La Vendetta, the young man asleep in the closet acts as a magnet for the collective curiosity of Servin's female art pupils. By the end of the first week, of fifteen young women, only Ginevra's friend Laure will have resisted the temptation to look at Luigi through the crevice, and will have distanced herself from the shared certainty that Servin is hiding Ginevra's lover in his closet during their classes. Although Luigi is actually a political proscript (it is late July 1815) none of the girls will realize this; what is more, and as if not by chance, the plot of the Napoleonic proscript-in-hiding fizzles out when the girls' mothers take them away from the studio. In short, the open secret that is Luigi's presence in the studio closet makes him the vanishing point of other proscribed sights. 2
