The Wild Ass's Skin

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Sir, I have not slept,’ said Raphael to his adversary.

  These icy words and the terrifying look that accompanied them made the real challenger shudder. He was aware of the wrong he had done, and was secretly ashamed of his conduct. There was something odd about the attitude, voice, and gestures of Raphael. The Marquis paused, as did all the rest. The tension and anxiety was at its height.

  ‘There is still time’, he went on, ‘to give me lesser satisfaction. But do this, sir, or you will die. You are counting on your skill, and do not recoil from the idea of a combat in which you believe you have all the advantage. Well, sir, I am generous, I warn you that I am superior to you. I possess a terrible power. To bring your skill to nought, to cloud your sight, make your hands tremble and your heart miss a beat, even to kill you, I have only to wish for it. I do not want to be obliged to exercise my power, it costs me too dear to make use of it. You will not be the only one to die. If therefore you refuse to present your apologies to me, your bullet, accustomed to killing though you are, will fly into that waterfall, and mine, without my aiming for it, will lodge in your heart.’

  At that moment Raphael was interrupted by a hubbub of voices. As he uttered these words the Marquis had continually kept the unbearable brilliance of his gaze fixed upon his adversary. He had straightened up, and his expression was impassive, like that of a deranged criminal.

  ‘Shut him up!’ the young man said to his second. ‘His voice turns my stomach!’

  ‘Be quiet, monsieur, your speeches are useless,’ cried the surgeon and his seconds to Raphael.

  ‘Sirs, I am doing my duty. Has this young man any last requests to make?’

  ‘Enough!’

  The Marquis stood there motionless, without for one moment taking his eyes off his adversary who, subdued by a seemingly magic power, was like a bird confronted by a snake. Forced to bear this murderous gaze, he looked away time and again and then back at Raphael.

  ‘Give me water, I am thirsty,’ he said to his second.

  ‘Are you afraid?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘This man’s stare burns and mesmerizes me.’

  ‘Do you wish to apologize?’

  ‘It is too late.’

  The two adversaries were placed fifteen paces apart. Each had at hand two pistols, and according to the ritual for this ceremony they had to fire two shots at will, after the signal had been given by their seconds.

  ‘What are you doing, Charles?’ cried the young man who was serving as a second to Raphael’s adversary. ‘You are putting the bullet in before the powder.’

  ‘I am dead,’ he muttered, ‘you have positioned me facing the sun.’

  ‘The sun is behind you,’ Valentin said to him in a serious, solemn voice, slowly loading his pistol without paying any attention to either the given signal or the care with which his adversary was taking aim.

  This supernatural self-confidence had something terrible about it which seized even the two postillions who had been brought there out of cruel curiosity. Toying with his power, or wishing to put it to the test, Raphael was speaking to Jonathas and was looking at him at the moment when his enemy fired. Charles’s bullet ripped through a branch of the willow and ricocheted onto the water. Firing at random, Raphael hit his adversary in the heart and, paying no attention to the young man’s fall, immediately checked the ass’s skin to see what this human life had cost him. The talisman was now no bigger than a small oak-leaf.

  ‘Well, what are you staring at, postillions? Let us be on our way,’ said the Marquis.

  * * *

  Reaching France that very evening, he straight away took the road for the Auvergne and arrived at the spa of the Mont-Dore. During this journey he was struck by one of those unexpected ideas which flash through the mind like a ray of sunshine through dense cloud, lighting up a dark valley. The light of sadness, of a merciless wisdom, illumines past events, reveals our mistakes, and leaves us without forgiveness for ourselves. He thought suddenly that the possession of power, however great, did not give a person the knowledge of how to use it. To a child a sceptre is a toy, for Richelieu an axe, and for Napoleon a means to bend the world to his will. Power leaves us as we are and only makes the great greater. Raphael had had the ability to do whatever he liked; he had done nothing.*

  At the spa in Mont-Dore, he rediscovered that society which was distancing itself from him with the urgency of animals that shun one of their number lying dead, having smelled it a long way off … This hatred was reciprocal. His last escapade had given him a deep aversion to human society. So his first concern was to look for a place to escape, away from the environment of the spa. Instinctively he felt the need to draw nearer to nature, to simple emotions, and the vegetative life in which we allow ourselves to indulge so readily in the middle of the countryside.

  The day after his arrival he climbed, not without difficulty, the Pic du Sancy, and explored the upland valleys, the airy heights, the secret lakes, the rustic cottages of Mont-Dore, whose harsh, rugged charms are just now tempting our painters to put brush to canvas. Occasionally, admirable landscapes full of grace and freshness can be found there, contrasting vigorously with these looming, desolate mountains. At roughly half a league from the village Raphael found himself in a place where nature, light-hearted and joyful as a child, seemed to have taken pleasure in hiding its treasures. As soon as he saw this simple and picturesque retreat, he resolved to live there. Life there must be tranquil and organic, like that of fruit on a tree.

  Imagine an upside-down cone, a granite cone broadly hollowed out, a kind of bowl with its edges broken by bizarre cracks and fissures; here were flat tables of bare rock without any vegetation, smooth, of a bluish colour, over which the rays of the sun slid as across a mirror; over there rock-faces riven by waterfalls, wrinkled by fissures, from which hung blocks of lava which the rain was slowly preparing to bring down with a crash, and which often were crowned by stunted bushes twisted out of shape by the winds. Here and there were cool, shaded indentations from where rose a grove of chestnuts as high as cedars, and yellowish grottoes, with gaping black mouths, hedged round with brambles and flowers and ornamented with tongues of greenery. At the bottom of this bowl, which might have been the former crater of a volcano, was a lake whose pure waters sparkled like a diamond. Around this deep basin, bordered by willows, wild gladioli, rowans, and a thousand aromatic plants in flower at that time, was a green meadow, as green as an English bowling-green.

  Its fine, tender grass was watered by the rivulets that filtered through the clefts in the rocks and was fertilized by the debris of vegetation that the storms incessantly washed down from the high peaks to the bottom. With jagged edges like those of the base of a rock, the lake covered about three acres; the meadow extended to one or two, depending on how far the water and the rocks encroached. In some places there was scarcely enough space for the cattle to get through. At a certain height the vegetation ceased. The granite rocks at the top assumed the oddest shapes and took on those misty colours which give high mountains a passing resemblance to clouds. Unlike the gentle aspect of the valley, these bare, worn rocks presented the wild and sterile images of desolation, landslides which are to be feared, such fanciful shapes that one of these rocks goes by the name of Capucin, it looks so much like a hooded monk. Sometimes these sharp needles, bold columns, aerial caves were lit up one by one, according to the position of the sun or the vagaries of the atmosphere, and took on a golden tone, were tinted with purple, or turned a bright pink or dull grey. These summits offered a continuously changing spectacle like the iridescent sheen on a pigeon’s breast.

  Often, at dawn or at sunset, a thin ray of light pierced through, between two blades of lava that you would have thought divided by the blow of an axe, right to the bottom of this pretty parterre, where it came to play on the waters of the lake, like a golden streak piercing through the slit in a blind and crossing a Spanish room carefully closed for the siesta. When the sun was soaring high abov
e this ancient crater filled with water by some antediluvian upheaval, the rocky flanks became warm, the extinct volcano heated up, and its rapid rise in temperature made the seeds sprout, fertilized the plants, coloured the flowers, and ripened the fruit in this small, forgotten corner of the earth.

  When Raphael reached it he noticed some cows grazing in the meadow; after walking a few steps in the direction of the lake he saw, in a place where the level ground was widest, a modest dwelling built out of granite and faced with wood. The roof of this cottage matched its surroundings, being decorated with mosses, ivy, and flowers, a sign of its great age. A wisp of smoke, not a threat to the birds, escaped from the tumbledown chimney. At the door stood a large bench between two gigantic bushes of honeysuckle covered in red, scented flowers. The walls were scarcely visible beneath the entwined stems and the masses of roses and yellow jasmine that grew wherever and however they liked. The cottage-dwellers, unconcerned with this jewel of the countryside, had not taken care of it in the least but allowed nature to take its elfin course, unspoiled by man. Napkins spread over gooseberry bushes were drying in the sun. There was a cat crouched on a scutch and underneath this a copper cauldron, recently cleaned, lying in the midst of some potato peelings. On the other side of the house Raphael could see a hedge of dry thornbushes, no doubt intended to stop the hens destroying the fruit and the vegetable garden.

  The world appeared to end there. This habitation resembled those birds’ nests ingeniously perched in the hollow of a rock, a combination of art and carelessness. Nature in this place was simple and good, of a genuinely rustic kind, but poetic, because it blossomed a thousand leagues away from our contrived poetic inventions, contained no philosophy, but sprang out of itself alone, a triumph of pure chance. When Raphael arrived, the sun’s rays were slanting from right to left, lighting up the colours of the vegetation, bringing out and enhancing the contrasting brightness and shadow, the ochres and greys in the rocks, the different greens of the leaves, the blue, red, and white clumps of flowers, the climbing plants and their bells, the gleaming velvet of the mosses, the purplish clumps of heather, but most of all the sheet of clear water faithfully mirroring the granite peaks, the trees, the house, and the sky. In this delightful picture everything shone, from the sparkling mica in the rock to the tufts of beige grasses half-hidden in the shadows. Everything was pleasing to the eye: the brindled cow with her shiny coat, the fragile water-lilies that stretched like fringes over the water in an inlet buzzing with blue and emerald insects, and the roots of trees with a kind of sandy hair crowning a face-like shape in the stones. The warm odours from the waters, the flowers, and the grottoes that perfumed this solitary retreat gave Raphael an almost voluptuous sensation.

  The majestic silence reigning in this grove, forgotten perhaps by the tax-collector, was suddenly interrupted by the barking of two dogs. The cows turned their heads to the entrance of the valley, showing Raphael their wet muzzles, and, after gazing at him for a while with a bovine expression, set to chewing the cud once more. Perched high in the rocks, as though by magic, a nanny-goat and her kid leaped onto a flat granite boulder near Raphael, seeming to be asking him what he was doing there. The yapping of the dogs brought a sturdy child outside, and he stood there open-mouthed; he was soon joined by an old man with white hair and of medium height. These two creatures harmonized with the surroundings, with the air, the flowers, the cottage. Nature was plentiful here and health abundant; old age and childhood were equally beautiful; there was, in fact, in all these forms of life a primordial easiness of being, a contented routine which gave the lie to our philosophical moralizings, and would cure the heart of its turgid passions.

  The old man belonged among the models favoured by the virile paintbrush of Schnetz:* a brown face covered with wrinkles that looked rough to the touch, a straight nose, prominent cheekbones veined with red like an old vine-leaf, a bony frame and all the signs of muscular strength, even where that strength had all but gone; on his hands, callused although they no longer did manual labour, were a few white hairs; his bearing was of a truly independent man and suggested that in Italy he might have become a brigand out of love for his precious liberty. The boy, a true child of the mountains, had black eyes which could look at the sun without blinking, a swarthy complexion, and untidy brown hair. He was nimble and self-confident, natural as a bird in his movements. He was dressed in rags and his white, fresh skin showed through the holes in his clothes. They stood there, side by side, not speaking, with identical feelings, showing by their facial expressions a perfect concord in the leisured life they shared.

  The old man had taken up the child’s games and the child the old man’s humour, in a sort of pact between two kinds of frailty, between a strength nearing its end and a strength getting ready to blossom. Soon a woman of about thirty appeared at the door, spinning wool as she walked: a woman of the Auvergne, with red cheeks, a happy open expression, white teeth, with the face and figure of a woman of the Auvergne, dress of the Auvergne, rounded breasts of the Auvergne, and its accent. A complete personification of the country in every way, hardworking, uneducated, thrifty, and friendly.

  She greeted Raphael, and they fell into conversation. The dogs quietened down, the old man sat on a bench in the sun, and the child followed his mother around, not speaking but watching and listening to the stranger.

  ‘Are you not afraid living here, my good woman?’

  ‘Why would we be afraid, sir? When we bar the door, who could come in? Oh no, we’re not afraid! And besides,’ she went on, inviting the Marquis into the largest room in the house, ‘what is there for robbers to steal from us?’

  She indicated the smoke-blackened walls on which the only decorations were blue, red, and green pictures representing the Death of Credit,* the Passion of Jesus Christ, and the Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard; dispersed around the room, an old walnut four-poster bed, a twisted-leg table, stools, a bread-bin, flitches of bacon hanging from the beams, salt in a large pot, a frying-pan; and on the mantelpiece yellowed and coloured plaster ornaments. As he left the house Raphael saw among the rocks a man carrying a hoe, who was leaning over and looking curiously their way.

  ‘That’s the master,’ said the Auvergnate with the smile so typical of peasant women. ‘He’s working up there.’

  ‘And this old man is your father?’

  ‘Saving your grace, sir, he’s my husband’s grandfather. He’s a hundred and two years old, would you believe. Do you know, a few days ago he took our little son down to Clermont on foot! He used to be a strong man. Now all he does is sleep, drink, and eat. He’s always playing with my little boy. Sometimes the little lad takes him up the mountain and he still manages to get up there.’

  Immediately Valentin resolved to live his life in the company of this old man and this boy, to breathe their air, eat their bread, drink their water, sleep their sleep, and have their blood in his veins. The fantastic notion of a man doomed to die! To become one of the limpets on this rock, to save his skin for a few days longer by sending death to sleep, was for him the ruling principle of life, his ideal aim, the true, the only life. There came into his heart an overwhelming egoism that swallowed up the universe. For him there was no other universe but that which existed in himself. For a sick man the world begins at the head of the bed and ends at its foot. This landscape became Raphael’s bed.

  Which of us has not once in his life spied on the movements and progress of an ant, slipped a straw into the single orifice where a slug is breathing, studied the darting of a dragonfly, admired the thousand veins, coloured like a rose window in a Gothic cathedral, which stand out on the russet background of a young oak-leaf? Which of us has not looked long, and with great delight, at the effect of rain and sun on a roof of brown tiles, or contemplated a dewdrop, a flower petal, and the various shapes of its calyx? Which of us has not plunged into these indolent and yet busy reveries about the material world, that are aimless but nevertheless conducive to the formation of some idea? Who ha
s not, in short, led the life of a child, the life of indolence, the life of a savage, without the harshness of that life? Raphael lived in this manner for several days without care, without desires, feeling in the best of health, with an extraordinary sense of well-being, which calmed his worries, quietened his sufferings. He climbed the rocks, and went to sit on a peak from where his eyes took in a huge panoramic landscape. There he stayed for days on end like a plant in the sun, like a hare in its form. Or again, becoming more familiar with the phenomena of vegetation and with the vicissitudes of the heavens, he observed the changing pattern in all the works of nature, on the land, on the waters, or in the air.

  He tried to associate himself with the intimate movement of these natural phenomena, to identify completely with their passive obedience and subject himself to the despotic, conservative law which rules over instinctive existence. He no longer wished to bear the responsibility of himself. Like those criminals in the old days who, fleeing from the law, were saved if they reached the shadow of the altar, he tried to slip into the sanctuary of life. He succeeded in becoming an integral part of this large and powerful fruitfulness. He learned to live with bad weather, dwelt in the hollows of the rocks, grew to understand the habits and characteristics of all the plants, studied the water-courses, the way they flowed, and became acquainted with the animals. In short, he became so much at one with this animated land that he had in a sense grasped its soul and penetrated its secrets. He believed that the infinite forms of all plant and animal kingdoms had developed from one single substance, that they were the combinations of one single movement: the mighty breath of an immense Being who acted, thought, walked, grew, and with whom he wanted to grow, walk, think, and act. He had in his mind fused his life with that of the rock; he had embedded himself in it.