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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: figures in the pictures which adorned the choir, or improvised, he
always left at this seat rough sketches, whose obscene character drove
the young fathers to despair; and the evil-tongued alleged that the
Jesuits smiled at them. At last, if we are to believe college
traditions, he was expelled because, while awaiting his turn to go to
the confessional one Good Friday, he carved a figure of the Christ
from a stick of wood. The impiety evidenced by that figure was too
flagrant not to draw down chastisement on the artist. He had actually
had the hardihood to place that decidedly cynical image on the top of
the tabernacle!
"Sarrasine came to Paris to seek a refuge against the threats of a
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