The Magic Skin (The Wild Ass's Skin)

Longevity and the inevitable deterioration of man's vital energies in the face of an indifferent and selfish world is the theme of this work. This was one of Balzac's first successful works and contains within it the precursors of many of the characters and plot patterns that he used in later works. In some ways the novel also contains the symbolic essence of his later works, a subject that will be dealt at greater length after a summary of the plot.

Plot:

The novel has three parts: The Talisman, The Woman without a Heart, and Agony. The novel opens with the main character, Raphael de Valentin, losing his last gold coin at the roulette table. Before he commits suicide by throwing himself into the Seine, he enters an antique shop full of bizarre remnants from different ages and civilizations. The strange owner of the shop directs him to a mysterious piece of animal skin that King Solomon supposedly cast a spell over eons ago. The skin is capable of granting any wish the holder makes. The only catch is that with every wish the skin shrinks and when the skin has shrunk to nothing the holder will die.

The first first thing Raphael wishes for is a wild party to snap himself out of his depression. Immediately, as he leaves the shop he bumps into several friends of his heading to a banquet thrown by a banker who's starting a new opposition newspaper. His luck picking up, Raphael is offered the job of editor for the newspaper. The picture of dissipation and chaos that Balzac paints at the end of this party is quite incredible.

Towards the end of the party, part two begins and Raphael relates his sad life history up to this point to his friend. It is basically the same story of a youth arriving in Paris to make a name for himself and his struggle against adversity that will become Balzac's hallmark in his later novels. For the last three years Raphael has lived in a garret in utter poverty writing a treatise on philosophy, all the while being secretly loved by the landlord's daughter Pauline.

Raphael's friend Rastignac, one of Balzac's most ubiquitous recurring characters, advises Valentin to use women as a tool for ascending the social ladder. He also advises the use of gambling, debt, and a journalistic-mercenary practice of writing for profit. Raphael tries to make headway with a rich and beautiful woman named Foedora, but she is a "woman without a heart" using men to feed her ego but offering nothing in return. At the end of the orgy Raphael makes a second wish, an annual income of 200,000 francs. In the morning, as he ends his life story news comes that he has just inherited a fortune. His wish has been granted.

The skin already having shrunk significantly with his first two wishes, the fear of death has been sparked in Raphael. He retreats to a mansion where his servant supplies him with all the necessities of life so he can avoid all emotion and excercise of will-power. This, he hopes, will prevent the skin from shrinking any further. Coming into contact with the landlord's daughter Pauline again, he wishes that she love him. His wish is granted and, much to his joy, the skin does not shrink. Raphael believes the process of shrinkage has halted but the skin hasn't shrunk merely because Pauline loved him already. Living together in love for several years, Raphael ignores the skin, only to find it one day reduced to a truly frightful size. Raphael enlists the help of engineers and scientists to stretch the skin and make it bigger. He consults a physician to diagnose and cure the disease that is wasting away his life force. He retires to a sanitarium in the country in search of a cure, but there he is forced into a duel with another patient whom he kills. The skin shrinks even further. He retreats to a small pastoral cottage deep in the country hoping to lead a quiet life in harmony with nature, but his neighbors will not leave him alone. Like Flaubert's St. Anthony Raphael's ambition is to attain "the insensibility of plants and inert things." (Hunt, 44) Finally, he goes back to Paris and uses up his last little bit of life in the arms of Pauline.

Metaphysical System

The "Magic Skin" is a symbolic microcosm of Balzac's later works. Expenditure of life force is the principle theme. The size of the donkey skin is the gauge measuring this life force.

Balzac outlines a basic metaphysics in this work that he will expand on in future works. The expenditure of life force is rooted in what Balzac termed 'the destructive function of thought' [l'usure par la pense]:

Intelligence and the habit of analysis are in a sense a deviation from nature, a derivative of civilization; they lead to a disastrous exacerbation of the instincts and desires, to a lust for experience, pleasure, passion, wealth and power which wears out the human organism. (Hunt, 42)

The principle that drives the action in many of Balzac's novels is put in the mouth of the antique dealer: (Note: The translation used: "To Will" = "vouloir" and "To have your Will" = "pouvoir" )

I will tell you in a few words the great secret of human life. By two instinctive processes man exhausts the springs of life within him. Two verbs cover all the forms which these two causes of death may take--To Will and To have your Will. Between these two limits of human activity the wise have discovered an intermediate formula, to which I owe my good fortune and long life. To Will consumes us, and To have our Will destroys us, but To Know steeps our feeble organisms in perpetual calm. In me Thought has destroyed Will, so that Power is relegated to the ordinary functions of my economy. In a word, it is not in the heart which can be broken, or in the senses that become deadened, but it is in the brain that cannot waste away and survives everything else, that I have set my life. Moderation has kept mind and body unruffled. Yet, I have seen the whole world. I have learned all languages, lived after every manner. I have lent a Chinaman money, taking his father's corpse as a pledge, slept in an Arab's tent on the security of his bare word, signed contracts in every capital of Europe, and left my gold without hesitation in savage wigwams. I have attained everything, because I have known how to despise all things. (mgcsk10.txt in Project Gutenberg)

Raphael and the courtesans at the banquet represent the type of person addicted to rapidly expending and squandering their life force, in a sort of "live fast, die young" James Dean life of excess. The chaos and drunkenness of the banquet itself is this life of excess writ large, symbolic of "the disintegration of society through individualism" and the "instability and corruption of society" in early nineteenth century France. (Hunt, 44-45)

Up until the time he met Rastignac, Raphael's reclusive life of study, contemplation, and writing, was representative of the antique dealer's mode of life, a slow, steady expenditure of life force. Retreating from the world the antique dealer has managed to build a peaceful life of great longevity for himself:

So thought is cheated of its destructive properties and becomes for him what we might call pensee-contemplative. He vicariously enjoys all the varieties of experience, thanks to the wide range of his knowledge and the multitude of curios he has gathered around him. (Hunt, 43-44)

Practicing the same conservation of life force as the antique dealer is Foedora, the rich woman whom Raphael hoped to use to scale to social heights. Foedora's "aim is to excite passion while feeling none." (Hunt, 44) Ironically, Raphael uses one of his wishes to disrupt the antique dealer's placid mode of life and turn him into a fast living party animal.

Katherine Mansfield in one of her letters expressed her disgust with Balzac's seeming obsession with money. In fact, no writer of his time or since has so painstakingly and unashamedly provided the price of every significant item purchased during the course of the novel. As Hunt has observed money becomes an all pervading measure and gauge for many things for the first time in this novel, much like the skin is a gauge for a person's store of vital energy:

"It is the first novel in which the money motive is well to the fore: money which is not only the prize in a relentless conflict between opposing interests and ideas, but also a trivial, daily necessity, the lack of which may cause sharp embarassment or even torture to self-esteem." (Hunt, 45)

(Long, La Peau de chagrin, mgcsk10.txt)

Melmoth Reconciled (Before 1822)

This tale has a Faustian plot. A cashier for the banker Nucingen named Castanier embezzles money to support his mistress and in order to extricate himself from the situation exchanges lives with an evil English officer, John Melmoth, who has supernatural powers and wants to die in sanctity. Realizing he has made a mistake by making such an exchange the cashier in turn exchanges lives with a banker named Claparon.

The character John Melmoth "reeks" of Englishness, a "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" like figure prowling the streets of London in the fog. Like Oscar Wilde, but 50 years earlier, he ends up dieing in a little room in the neighborhood of Saint-Sulpice. Strange coincidence: when Oscar Wilde left England for France after his imprisonment he changed his name to "Melmoth". Oscar Wilde was one of Balzac's most famous and devoted fans. (Marceau, 392)

"Melmoth Reconciled" had another famous fan: Karl Marx. Admiring its wonderful use of irony, he encouraged his partner Engels to read it. Marx found in the story "a prediction of doom for the bourgeousie in its mad rush to amass wealth without basic regard for human values." (Tilby,151)

(Short, Melmoth Reconciled, mlmth10.txt)

The Elixir of Long Life (16th Century)

"Don Juan's dying father has asked his son to revive him after death by bathing his corpse in the magic potion. Keeping watch over his father's body, the son moistens one eye. It opens, and is, as one might expect, horribly eloquent, 'thinking, accusing, condemning, threatening, judging, speaking, shouting, and biting.' Taking a trowel, Don Juan squashes the eye and keeps the rest of the precious elixir for himself." (Robb,161)

(Very Short, L'Elixir de longue vie,lxrlf10.txt)