[3] The text was edited into a single volume with le Cabinet des Antiques, published by éditions Souverain in 1839, before being published by édition Furne in 1846 in the Études philosophiques, following Massimilla Doni, a short story also written by Balzac shortly after returning from Italy, highly impressed by what he called the "mother of the arts".

This work shows the formidable artistic intuition Balzac had already developed in le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu, la Bourse, his habit of taking on the guise of a painter and of searching the soul and meandering thoughts of a sculptor in Sarrasine.

[4] The Milanese nobleman count Andrea Marcosini strolls to the Palais-Royal in Paris, where he spots in the crowd the extraordinary face of a woman with fiery eyes.

If he is "attached to the step of a woman whose costume announced a deep, radical, ancient, inveterate misery, who was no fairer than so many others he saw each night at the Opéra", it was his eye that was literally spellbound.

Marianna sacrifices herself for him, working in humble jobs to pay for their household's upkeep, for she strongly believes in her husband's misunderstood genius.