Chapter 6 follows the demise of the castrati to a brief and surprising efflorescence in the Paris of 1806, when Napoleon brought Crescentini to court. Crescentini’s influence lived on in a vocality, expressed at the pen of Stendhal, of mezzos and other singers, especially through transmission of his aria “Ombra adorata, aspetta.” The chapter traces the aria through numerous incarnations and variants that circulated over decades in literature and music, often with embellishments upon Crescentini’s embellishments. Its meanings were re-formed in Balzac’s Sarrasine, which the chapter finally reads not so much for Lacanian meanings (as popular in the gender-bending interpretations of the 1990s) as for a critique of the moneyed new world reimagined through the nostalgia of an uncanny past.