The Wild Ass's Skin

by Honoré de Balzac

  The suspicious dealer examined the gloomy face of his pretended customer with a knowing eye as he listened to this speech. Then, soon reassured by the tone of his dolorous voice, or perhaps reading in those pallid features the sinister destiny which previously had filled the men in the gambling-den with such dread, he let go his hands. But a suspicion remained, and revealed the experience of a man at least a hundred years old, as he casually stretched out his hand to a sideboard as if to lean against it, and said, taking up a stiletto:

  ‘Have you been a supernumerary at the Treasury for the last three years, and not received your due payment?’

  The stranger could not suppress a smile as he indicated this was not the case.

  ‘Has your father told you off too roundly for being born or have you done something dishonourable?’

  ‘If I wished to dishonour myself, I should go on living.’

  ‘Have you been the butt of whistling at the Funambules,* or do you find yourself obliged to compose rhymes for your mistress’s funeral? Or have you perhaps made yourself ill with the lust for gold? Do you want to rid yourself of boredom? Well, what error makes you feel you have to take your own life?’

  ‘Do not go looking for the reasons for my death in the vulgar motives which govern most suicides. To disclose to you my untold suffering, so hard to express in human language, I will just say that I am in the most profound, most base, most acute of all miseries. And’, he added, in a tone of voice whose wild pride belied his preceding words, ‘I do not wish to beg for help or consolation.’

  ‘Well well!’ These two syllables were all the old man uttered by way of reply, in a throaty rattle* of a voice. Then he went on:

  ‘I shall not oblige you to implore me, I shall not embarrass you, nor shall I give you a cent from France, a para from the Levant, a tarant from Sicily, a heller from Germany, a kopek from Russia, a farthing from Scotland, a single sestercium or obol from the ancient world, nor a piastre from the new, nor offer you anything at all in gold, silver, bullion, bond, or banknote, but I want to make you richer, more powerful, and more respected than any constitutional monarch.’

  The young man assumed the old man was in his second childhood, and stood still, not venturing to reply.

  ‘Turn round,’ said the dealer suddenly catching hold of the lamp in order to direct the light from it onto the wall opposite the portrait, adding: ‘and take a look at this WILD ASS’S SKIN.’

  The young man got up abruptly and showed some surprise at seeing a piece of shagreen* hanging on the wall above where he had been sitting; it was no bigger than a fox’s pelt, but at first sight, by some unexplained phenomenon, this skin projected such bright rays into the very core of the darkness which pervaded the shop that you would have thought they came from a small comet. Unable to believe his eyes, the young man approached this so-called talisman which was to protect him from misfortune, and mentally dismissed it. However, stirred by a quite legitimate curiosity, he leaned over to examine the skin from all sides, and soon found there was a scientific reason for this singular brightness. The black grain of the shagreen was so carefully polished and darkened, the uneven threads so clean and neat, that the rough patches of this oriental leather formed a multitude of small centres which vividly reflected the light, like the facets of a garnet. He demonstrated the mathematics of the reason for this phenomenon to the old man, who only smiled mischievously. This superior smile made the young philosopher realize he was the dupe of some charlatanism, and not wishing to carry off yet another mystery to the tomb, he promptly turned the skin over, like a child anxious to discover the secrets of his new toy.

  ‘Ah!’ he cried. ‘This is the mark of the seal the Orientals call Solomon’s Seal.’*

  ‘So you know about that?’ asked the dealer, puffing two or three times from his nostrils in a way that spoke louder than the most forceful of words could have done.

  ‘Is there a man anywhere in the world who believes that nonsense?’ cried the young man, rather annoyed at his silent mockery, so full of bitter derision. ‘Don’t you know’, he went on, ‘that the superstitions of the Orient held sacred the mystical form and the illusory characters of this emblem which symbolizes a fabulous power? I think I should not be taxed with foolishness in this, any more than if I were speaking about the Sphinx or the Griffins, whose existence is in a sense mythologically accepted.’

  ‘Since you are an orientalist,’ the old man went on, ‘perhaps you will read this sentence?’

  He brought the lamp near to the talisman which the young man was holding back to front and pointed out to him the characters inlaid in the cellular material of this wonderful skin, as though they had been part of the animal to which it had originally belonged.

  ‘I admit’, cried the stranger, ‘that I cannot guess at the procedure which was followed in order to engrave these letters so deeply in the skin of an onager.’

  And, turning round abruptly to the tables laden with curiosities, his eyes seemed to be seeking something.

  ‘What do you want?’ asked the old man.

  ‘A tool to cut the shagreen, so that I may see if the letters are stamped upon it or inlaid.’

  The old man gave the stranger his knife, and he took it and tried to cut into the skin where the words were written; but when he had taken off a superficial layer of leather, the letters reappeared so clear and so like the ones which had been printed on the surface that for a moment he thought he had removed nothing from it.

  ‘The work of the Levant has secrets which are really peculiar to it,’ he said, looking at the oriental sentence in some anxiety.

  ‘Yes,’ replied the old man, ‘it is better to blame it on man than on God!’

  The mysterious words were set out in the following manner:

  Which means in our language:

  ‘Ah, so you read Sanskrit* fluently,’ said the old man. ‘Have you travelled in Persia or Bengal perhaps?’

  ‘No, monsieur,’ replied the young man, fingering this symbolic skin curiously; it was so lacking in flexibility it resembled metal leaf.

  The old dealer put the lamp back on the column from which he had taken it, throwing the young man a cold, ironic glance which seemed to be saying: ‘He has already given up all thought of dying.’

  ‘Is it a hoax, an enigma?’ enquired the young stranger.

  The old man shook his head and said gravely: ‘I could not say. I have offered the terrifying power that this talisman bestows to men endowed with more energy than you appear to possess; but although they jeer at the problematical influence it might exercise over their future destinies, none of them wished to take the risk of signing a contract with I know not what forces. I think as they do; I have doubted, I have abstained, and …’

  ‘And you haven’t tried it yourself?’ said the young man interrupting.

  ‘Tried!’ exclaimed the old man. ‘If you were on the column in the Place Vendôme,* would you try throwing yourself off? Can we stop the flow of life? Have we ever been able to break the bonds of death? Before entering this room you had resolved to commit suicide; but suddenly you are engrossed by a puzzle and distracted from the idea of dying. What a child you are! Will not each of your days offer you a more interesting enigma than this one does? Listen to me. I have seen the licentious court of the Regency.* Like you, I was poor at that time, I begged for my bread; nevertheless I have reached the age of 102 and I have become a millionaire: ill-luck has given me a fortune, ignorance has been my teacher. I shall reveal to you in a few words one of the great mysteries of human life. Man exhausts himself in two activities which are accomplished by instinct and dry up the founts of his existence. All the forms that these two causes of death may take are contained in this dialectic: what a man wants and what he can do. Between these two courses of human action, there is another formula that the wise adopt, and to that I owe my happiness and my longevity. What we want burns us up and what we can do destroys us; but knowing leaves our feeble constitution in a perpetual state o
f calm. Thus desire or wanting is dead in me, killed by thought; movement or power has dissolved in the natural play of my organs. In short, I have placed my life not in the heart which breaks, nor in the senses which grow dull, but in the brain which does not wear out and which conquers everything. No excesses have disturbed either my soul or my body. And yet I have seen the whole world. My feet have trodden the highest mountains of Asia and America, I have learned all human languages and lived under all regimes. I have lent money to a Chinaman, taking his father’s body for surety, I’ve slept in the tent of an Arab on the strength of his word, signed contracts in all European capitals, and left my money without fear in the wigwam of savages. I might say that I have obtained everything because I have been able to do without everything. My only ambition was to see. To see, is it not to know? Oh to know, young man, is that not to enjoy, intuitively? Is it not to discover the very substance of fact and take hold of its essential property? What remains of a material possession? An idea. Judge then how beautiful must be the life of a man who, able to imprint all kinds of reality in his mind, carries over the sources of happiness into his soul, extracts from them a thousand ideal pleasures, stripped of their earthly grime. Thought is the key to all treasures, it procures the joys, without the worries, of the miser. So I have soared above the world, and my pleasures have always been the delights of the intellect. My debauchery consisted in contemplating the sea, peoples, forests, mountains! I’ve seen everything, but in tranquillity, without fatigue. I have never desired anything but have waited for everything. I have walked in the universe as in the garden of a house that belonged to me. What men call worries, loves, ambitions, misfortune, sadness, are for me ideas that I change into dreams; instead of feeling them, I express them, I translate them. Instead of letting them devour my life, I dramatize them, I develop them; I enjoy them, as if they were novels that I might read with an inward eye. Never having overtaxed my organs, I enjoy good health and am still robust. My soul inherited all the strength I did not abuse, and so this head is even better furnished than my showrooms. Here,’ he said, tapping his head, ‘here are the true riches. I spend delightful days looking with intelligence at the past; I evoke whole countries, sites, views of the ocean, fine faces from days gone by! I have an imaginary seraglio where I possess all the women I have not had. In my mind I frequently review your wars, your revolutions, and I judge them. Oh, how could I prefer a febrile, slight admiration for flesh of whatever shade, for figures of whatever shape! How could I prefer the calamity of being let down in my desires to the sublime faculty of being able to make the whole universe appear before me; to the enormous pleasure of travelling without being trammelled by the bonds of time or the confines of space; to the pleasure of embracing everything, of seeing everything, of leaning on the edge of the world to interrogate the other spheres, of listening to God! This’, he said, raising his voice as he pointed towards the shagreen, ‘is desire and ability conjoined. Here are your ideas of society, your excessive desires, your intemperance, the joys that kill, your griefs that make you live too intensely; for evil is perhaps nothing but violent pleasure. Who can determine the point where delight becomes an evil or evil a delight? Are not the brightest lights of the ideal world easy on the eye, whereas the softest shadows of the physical world always hurt them? Without knowledge no wisdom, would you not agree? And what is madness unless it is an excess of desire or power to act?’

  ‘Yes yes! I want to live to excess,’ said the stranger, seizing the shagreen.

  ‘Be careful, young man!’ cried the old man with incredible vehemence.

  ‘I had determined my life by study and thought; but they have not even fed me,’ replied the stranger. ‘I want to be neither the dupe of a preaching worthy of Swedenborg,* nor of your oriental amulet, nor of the charitable efforts you are making, my dear Sir, to keep me in a world where my existence henceforth is impossible. Let me see,’ he went on, clutching the talisman in a trembling hand and looking at the old man. ‘I want a dinner that is regally splendid, some bacchanalian feast worthy of the age in which all things have attained perfection—or so they say! May my companions be young, witty, and unprejudiced, joyful to the point of folly! May wines follow one after the other, more and more intense, sparkling, and of such a strength that they make us drunk for three days! May that night be adorned by ardent women! I want delirious, roaring Debauchery to carry us off in his coach and four, beyond the limits of the world, to wash us up on unknown shores: that souls may climb to the heavens or plunge into the mire, and I not know whether they rise or fall. It is no concern of mine! So I command this sinister power to melt all joys into one joy. Yes! I need to embrace the pleasures of the heavens and earth in one last embrace so that I expire. So I want antique priapics* after drinking and chants fit to raise the dead and kisses without end, the sound of them echoing through Paris, waking couples in their marriage beds and arousing a burning desire that makes them all young again, even the septuagenarians!’

  A peal of laughter from the mouth of the little old man echoed in the ears of the wild young man like the rumblings of hell and cut him off with such authority that he was silent.

  ‘Do you suppose’, said the dealer, ‘that my floor will at once open up and tables sumptuously served will arrive and guests from the other world? No no, you young madman. You have signed the pact and that’s that. Now your wishes will be scrupulously satisfied, but at the cost of your life. The circle of your days, illustrated by this skin, will shrink according to the strength and number of your wishes, from the slightest to the most extravagant. The brahmin to whom I owe this talisman once explained to me that there would be effected a mysterious correspondence between the fate and the wishes of the possessor. Your first desire is vulgar, I could fulfil it; but I leave it to the events of your new life to take care of it. After all, you wished to die? Well, your suicide is merely postponed.’

  The stranger, surprised and almost annoyed to see himself made fun of by this peculiar old man whose half-charitable intention seemed to him clearly demonstrated by his last gibe, cried:

  ‘I shall soon see, Monsieur, if my fortune changes in the time I take to cross the quay. But if you are not making fun of an unhappy man, I wish, to avenge myself for such a deadly service, that you may fall in love with a dancer! Then you will understand how happy debauchery makes you and perhaps you will become prodigal of all those possessions that you have so carefully husbanded.’

  He left without hearing the deep sigh uttered by the old man, made his way through the rooms, and went down the flights of stairs, followed by the large, plump-cheeked attendant who made vain efforts to light his way; he ran with the speed of a robber caught red-handed. Blinded by a kind of delirium, he did not even notice the incredible pliability of the magic skin, which had now become as supple as a glove, rolled up under his frantic fingers and easily fitted into his suit pocket, where he had put it, almost without thinking. As he leaped through the shop door onto the pavement he bumped into three young men who were arm in arm.

  * * *

  ‘You clumsy oaf!’

  ‘Idiot!’

  Such were the charming names they exchanged.

  ‘Hey, it’s Raphael!’

  ‘Oh good, we were looking for you.’

  ‘What? Is it you?’

  These two friendly remarks succeeded the imprecations as soon as the light waving in the wind on a streetlamp fell on to the faces of this surprised group of people.

  ‘My dear friend,’ said the young man Raphael had nearly knocked over, ‘you must come with us.’

  ‘What is going on?’

  ‘Come with us, I’ll explain as we walk along.’

  By force or goodwill Raphael was surrounded by his friends who, having drawn him by the arm into their happy band, were propelling him towards the Pont des Arts.

  ‘My dear friend,’ went on their spokesman, ‘we have been hunting you for about a week. In your respectable Hotel Saint-Quentin, whose irremovable sign, by the
way, still has alternately red and black lettering as in J. J. Rousseau’s day, your Léonarde* told us you had left for the country. Yet we certainly don’t look like moneylenders, bailiffs, creditors, brokers, and the like. Never mind! Rastignac had spotted you the day before at the Bouffons,* so we plucked up our courage again and we made it a matter of pride to find out if you had gone to roost in the trees on the Champs-Élysées, sleeping for a few pence in one of those charitable establishments where beggars spend the night stretched out on a threadbare hammock, or if you were more fortunate and had bedded down in somebody’s boudoir. We couldn’t find you anywhere, neither locked up in Sainte Pélagie, nor in the Force.* Ministries, the Opéra, monastic institutions, cafés, libraries, on the prefectoral lists, in newspaper offices, restaurants, theatre foyers, in short, everywhere in Paris of good and bad repute having been thoroughly searched, we were mourning the loss of a man endowed with enough genius to be sought after either at court or in prison. We were saying we should have to canonize you like a July hero!*And we really did miss you.’

  At that moment Raphael was crossing over the Pont des Arts with his friends and looking down at the Seine, in whose roaring waters were mirrored the lights of Paris. Above this river into which he had previously wanted to cast himself headlong, the predictions of the old man had come true, the hour of his death had already been fatally postponed.

  ‘And we really missed you!’ his comrade went on in the same vein. ‘What we have in mind is a scheme in which we include you as a superior intelligence, that is, a man who can rise over and above everything. The royal sleight-of-hand on the Constitution is today, my friend, graver than ever. The despicable monarchy overthrown by popular heroism was a disreputable woman with whom one could make merry and have banquets; but our country now is a sour, virtuous spouse, and we have to put up with her frigid caresses, like it or not. Now political power has been transferred, as you know, from the Tuileries to the journalists, just as economic power has moved from the Faubourg Saint Germain to the Chaussée d’Antin.* But here is something you are perhaps not aware of! Those in charge—the aristocracy of bankers and the lawyers, I mean—who do with our country today what the priests used to do with the monarchy—have felt the need to mystify the good people of France with their modern jargon and ancient ideas, following the example of philosophers from all schools of thought and powerful men of all ages. They are trying to inculcate in us opinions which are nationalistic in the extreme, by proving that it is much more blessed to pay twelve hundred million francs and thirty-three centimes to the patrie represented by Messieurs such and such, than eleven hundred million francs and nine centimes to a king who said “I” instead of “we”. In short, a newspaper armed with a good two or three hundred thousand francs has just been founded with the aim of forming an opposition which will content the malcontents and won’t harm the national government of the citizen-king. Now since we jeer at liberty as much as we do at despotism, at religion as much as atheism; since the patrie is now a stock of capital where ideas are exchanged and sold at so much a line, where every day brings delicious dinners, countless spectacles; a place swarming with licentious prostitutes, where suppers last until dawn; where love is bought by the hour like a cab; since Paris will always be the most adorable of cities, a land of joy and liberty, wit, pretty women, wicked men, good wine, and where the strong arm of power will never be felt too much because we are close to those who wield it … We, the true members of the sect of the god Mephistopheles, have taken it upon ourselves to whitewash public opinion, clothe the actors in new costumes, nail new boards on the government’s hoardings, give the doctrinaires* medicine, revive the old republicans, deck the Bonapartists in their true colours, and give sustenance to the centre, as long as we are permitted to laugh up our sleeves at king and country, not hold the same opinions at night as we do in the morning, and to live a life of pleasure in the manner of Panurge* or in more orientali,* reclining on our soft cushions.