Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.  

“LA PEAU DE CHAGRIN” by Honore de Balzac (written 1830-31. First published 1831. Revised many times before being included in La Comedie Humaine in 1845) Usually translated as “THE WILD ASS’S SKIN”

 

            So far on this blog, whenever I have taken it into my head to deal with Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), I have dealt mainly with his more mature novels, generally regarded as his best work. Thus you can find accounts of Eugenie Grandet (1833), Le Pere Goriot (1835), La Rabouilleuse (1842), La Cousine Bette (1846), and Le Cousin Pons (first published 1847), as well as Selected Short Stories, mainly written in Balzac’s mature period. Now I turn to something from the period when he was still finding his feet as a novelist. Only in 1829, after some years of writing pot-boilers under pseudonyms, did Balzac produce his first novel under his own name. This was the historical novel Les Chouans, which was well-received but did not sell.  La Peau de Chagrin (usually translated as The Wild Ass’s Skin but sometimes called The Magic Skin) was the novel that made his name and was instantly a bestseller. It is a work of youthful Romanticism as much as it is a work of the social realism for which Balzac is better known. I admit that it is one of Balzac’s novels which I have never attempted to read in French. I have relied on the two translations that sit on my shelves – the Everyman edition translated by Ellen Marriage and the (more recent) Penguin edition translated by Herbert J. Hunt. Hunt’s version has a detailed introduction asking us to see this novel as a genuine philosophical discourse, wherein Balzac sounds out, in a complex way, his ideas on the nature of human will. For Hunt, this is all related to “illuminism”, the collection of pseudo-scientific ideas, most of which would now be regarded as crank theories, which Balzac took seriously as emerging science – notions of animal magnetism, phrenology, Swedenborgianism etc. And indeed, when Balzac finally included La Peau de Chagrin in his Comedie Humaine, he classified it as one of his “philosophical” works.

 

            While there are indeed passages of philosophical musing in La Peau de Chagrin, I prefer to see it more as a fable or parable about self-destruction brought on by wishing for too much.

            Consider the first of the three long passages into which the novel is divided. It is called “The Talisman” in both the translations I’ve read, and it goes like this: A young man, Raphael de Valentin, having lost his last piece if gold in a sordid gambling den, disappointed in love, unable to bring himself to commit suicide by jumping in the Seine, wanders into a curio shop in a Parisian back-alley. It is a store-house of lost hopes. Among the knick-knacks are works recalling the great art of many periods, now dust-covered, forgotten, and solid reminders of the vanity of human wishes. Here the young Raphael de Valentin discovers the wild ass’s skin, a square of chagreen (chagrin in French, which, signifcantly, also means sorrow and loss) covered in a mystic Oriental inscription promising to grant all the buyer’s wishes, but with the warning that it will shrink each time it grants a wish and will thus shorten the owner’s life. The old proprietor of the curio shop warns Raphael that to own the square of skin and make wishes on it will, in effect, be a prolonged form of suicide, and that will (vouloir) and power (pouvoir) – in other words, wishes and fulfilled wishes - always destroy us, while only knowledge (savoir) can save us. But Raphael burns to possess the magic skin. “I want to live to excess!” he exclaims, throwing out an ironical curse at the old man “May you be loved by a ballet dancer”, before he rushes into the street with the magical skin.

            At once he falls in with a louche group of cronies, and is swept along to an orgy at the shady M. Taillefer’s. Wine flows. There is fashionable talk demolishing the reputations of rising literary stars. The year is 1830 and the July Revolution has just overthrown the old monarchy and replaced it with the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Here Balzac moves into ironical and realist mode, satirising the crassness of the middle-class opportunists who have been unleashed in this change of regime. Society is corrupt and the orgy is its symbol.  Raphael insults the stately, beauteous, worldly courtesan (i.e. call-girl) Aquilina by telling her that her beauty and ability to attract men will fade away as she reaches middle age. Also at Taillefer’s establishment is the 16-year-old prostitute and “dancer” Euphrasie, all the more corrupt for appearing so young and innocent while being so knowing and cold. As the orgy reaches its lethargic stage deep in the night, Raphael pours out his life-story to the journalist, critic and poet Emile Blondet as the two of them lie with their heads resting on the bodies of two expensive whores.

 

            I will not synopsise in detail  the novel’s long second part (“The Woman Without a Heart”), which is Raphael’s back-story. Suffice it to say that Raphael felt scorned and overlooked by the world. When he wrote what he thought would be a world-shattering treatise A Theory of the Will, it was jeered at as an immature effusion. The sophisticate Rastignac (a recurring character in Balzac’s novels) told him that he had to “arrive” to be anything in the world, and introduced him to high society. In this milieu, Raphael was for a while a social success and fell in love with the (soi-disant) “Countess” Foedora, who was beautiful but spurned his advances and she successfiully flirted with any elegible men. Raphael finally judged Foedora to be “without a heart” and a woman who led a vacuous life. He really failed in high society, and he plunged into a life of dissipation, sinking deeper into debt… We as readers know, however, that he missed an opportunity for genuine love by not noticing the humble and unpretentious Pauline, who admires and loves him.

            And so now, in the novel’s last section “The Agony”, Raphael, having told his life history to Emile Blondet, is possessed of his magic ass’s skin and he can realise all his wishes. But as predicted by the old man, the fulfilment of his wishes leads to disaster and death. He wishes he had wealth… whereupon a relative dies and leaves him wealth. Now a millionaire, he is fawned on by parasites asking for favours. When he grants them, the skin shrinks. His old schoolmaster Porriquet calls on him, begging his influence in gaining a post under the new regime. Raphael absent-mindedly wishes him well… and the skin shrinks further. When people beg things of him, his standard answer becomes “You are killing me!” The old man he cursed really does fall in love with a ballet-dancer (the corrupt Euphrasie!) and is financially ruined by her. Raphael realizes that the only way he can stay alive is to control (and stifle) all his desires, so he tries hard to wish for nothing. His life becomes grey, joyless and limp. But he meets Pauline once again and at last desires her. His death is hastened. After many destructive episodes, he tries to call on science to free him of his death-sentence, consulting respectively a naturalist, a professor of mechanics, a chemist and a physician. But it is no good. Science is of no help. The wild ass’s skin is now a tiny speck and Raphael’s body is wasting away. In one of his most melodramatic episodes (yes, Balzac did do melodrama), the idealistic Pauline offers to commit suicide so that Raphael’s desire for her will die. Raphael prevents her from doing this and they at last consummate their love. But it is too late, and Raphael’s emaciated body falls down dead. 

            The most obvious thing to note about this novel is that Balzac situates a fantastical story in a very realistic setting. La Peau de Chagrin navigates through very credible Parisian and provincial scenes, described in hard, physical detail: the poor boarding-house where, as a student, Raphael tries to write his thesis and first meets Pauline; the dusty and seedy curio shop; the pretentious mansion of the arriviste haute-bourgeoisie; the scene of the orgy (i.e. an expensive brothel); the club and sanatorium at Aix-aux-Bains, in the south of France, where Raphael is surrounded by fashionable hyperchondriacs as he seeks to evade immanent death. La Peau de Chagrin is also a work of topical social and political satire, as the very class-conscious Balzac vents his fury at the opportunists and place-seekers who enrich themselves and exploit others under the new bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe.

            Yet it is, forsooth, a parable involving magic, somewhere in line of descent with all Faustian fables of men who barter their lives (or souls) for wealth or youth or short-lived happiness. One original element is the way Raphael’s decline is traced through a physical object – the wild ass’s skin. Its progressive shrinking charts the closing-in of Raphael’s options. It is at least possible that Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (published sixty years after La Peau de Chagrin in 1890), with its protagonist’s moral decline charted in a painting, was influenced by Balzac’s work. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a very different work from La Peau de Chagrin, and nobody is suggesting plagiarism. But Wilde was genuinely a great admirer of Balzac, read him devotedly, and was possibly in part inspired by reading La Peau de Chagrin.

In 1891, one year after The Picture of Dorian Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “The Bottle Imp” was published, having a similar theme (“You can have your wishes but they will kill you”…). Unlike either Wilde or Stevenson, however, Balzac saw his story as a genuine inquiry into the human will.

            Let’s admit that La Peau de Chagrin is in part a young(-ish) man’s novel. Balzac was just over 30 when it was first published, and his protagonist is 26. There is in Raphael de Valentin’s despair much of a young man’s “sense of injur’d merit” at the unfairness of women and society in general. There is also Balzac’s youthful tendency to “show off” when he inserts passages of ostensibly erudite exposition, as in the discourse on art when Raphael first enters the curio shop and the discourses on science and medicine when the rapidly-ailing Raphael seeks relief. A final brief epilogue (actually added years after the novel’s first appearance) rather too neatly spells out Balzac’s intended symbology when we are told that Pauline represents the eternal, unattainable woman, whereas Foedora represents the corruption of society. In the (eventual) impassioned love of Raphael and Pauline there is Romanticism and melodrama with the final Liebestod scene. Yet the realistic milieu “grounds” the novel, and makes this Romanticism with teeth.

            In one sense, La Peau de Chagrin says that even boundless wishes can be no greater than the flawed person who makes them. Balzac moralises: “Power leaves our natures untouched and confers greatness only on the great. There was nothing Raphael might not have done [when he had the power to fulfil his wishes]; he had done nothing.” So this is a novel about the defectiveness of the will. When the will is gratified, it becomes impotent and dead (as in a crucial scene where Raphael stands, without desire, over the sleeping body of the heartless Foedora). Ironically, Raphael is more tightly confined to “the small circle of pain” in the skull when his wishes are answered than when his desires went unanswered. Perhaps this view is questionable when so many of Balzac’s subsequent novels show the triumph of strong wills over weak wills, but the point may be that he always saw true character being formed by struggle and adversity, not by instant gratification. A lesson for many of the world’s adolescents I guess.