I often find myself unable to know, when I teach Balzac's Sarrasine, what part I take from Balzac, and what from Roland Barthes. In my mind, Barthes's S/Z is so inextricably bound to and wound around and through Balzac's much shorter text that the two simply cannot be unpeeled. It is a little like the model and copy conundrum that Barthes rehearses – as does Balzac – through an imbricated series of fabrications displayed as the painted, sculpted, written, read and always culturally constructed human body. And the plot thickens with a third ‘B’ not mentioned yet, but which – but who – hovers over and behind and throughout these first remarks: that B is Brooks.

I first studied Balzac and Barthes with Peter Brooks in graduate school courses at Yale in the late 1970s, and then wrote my dissertation – on Balzac – under his direction. Though I may not have understood this then, it's clear to me now that ‘my’ Balzac, the Balzac I teach to my students, is deeply rooted in Brooks's Barthes's Balzac. I may reformulate, revise, revision, even react against these teachings – but still, I think with them. Having spent a good part of the spring semester of 2023 teaching a selection of Balzac's shorter works, most from the oeuvres philosophiques, under cover of a course called Crimes of Passion, I have revisited these stories and novellas through the preoccupations and debates of contemporary students, largely undergraduates, and also through the filter of Peter Brooks's recent book Seduced by Story, which I was reading simultaneously.