The Wild Ass's Skin

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Go away, go away, leave me alone,’ Raphael replied after some time, in a dull voice. ‘Go! If you stay here I shall die. Do you want to see me die?’

  ‘Die!’ she echoed. ‘Can you die without me? Die? But you are young! Die? But I love you! Die?’ she added in a hoarse, choking voice, taking hold of his hands in a frantic gesture.

  ‘They are cold,’ she said. ‘Is it an illusion?’

  Raphael pulled from underneath his pillow the shred of shagreen, fragile and tiny as the leaf of a periwinkle, and showed it to her.

  ‘Pauline, beautiful image of my happy life, let us say goodbye,’ he said.

  ‘Goodbye?’ she repeated, much taken aback.

  ‘Yes. This is a talisman which accompanies my desires and represents my life. This is all that is left. If you look at me once more I shall die …’

  The girl thought Valentin had gone mad, took the talisman, and went to fetch the lamp. By the light of the flickering glow that was directed equally on to Raphael and the talisman, she examined with infinite care both the face of her lover and the last particle of the ass’s skin. Seeing Pauline so beautiful with terror and with love, he could no longer control his thoughts: the memory of the tender scenes and delirious joys of his passion sprang forth triumphantly in his soul that had been so long asleep, and revived like the embers of a fire that has not been properly extinguished.

  ‘Pauline, come here! Pauline!’

  A terrible cry burst from the young girl’s throat, her eyes dilated; her eyebrows were violently distorted by untold pain, and widened in horror as she read in Raphael’s expression a frenzied desire such as had once been her pride and glory. But as this desire grew she could feel the skin contract, tickling the palm of her hand. Without stopping to think, she ran into the next room and shut the door.

  ‘Pauline, Pauline!’ cried the dying man, stumbling after her. ‘I love you, I adore you, I want you! Open the door or I shall lay my curse upon you! I want to die in your arms!’

  With uncanny strength, with the remaining spark of life in him, he battered down the door and saw his mistress half-naked, writhing on a couch. Pauline had vainly attempted to pierce her heart, and in order to die quickly she was trying to strangle herself with her shawl.

  ‘If I die, he will live!’ she said, trying in vain to pull the knot tighter.

  Her hair was dishevelled, her shoulders bare, her clothes undone, and in this struggle with death, her eyes streaming and her face flushed, her body twisted in an attitude of utter despair, she offered to Raphael, drunk with desire, an incomparable beauty that only served to increase his delirium; he swooped upon her with the swiftness of a bird of prey, tore the shawl from her, and tried to take her in his arms.

  The dying man sought words to express the desire that was devouring all his strength; but nothing came from his chest except the strangled sounds of his death-rattle, each breath more hollow than the last and seeming to come from his very entrails. Finally, no longer even able to make any sound, he sank his teeth into Pauline’s breast. Jonathas appeared, terrified by the screams he heard, and tried to tear the young girl away from the corpse over which she was crouching in a corner.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said. ‘He is mine, I have killed him, did I not say I would?’

  EPILOGUE*

  ‘And what became of Pauline?’

  ‘Ah … Pauline, well now … Have you ever sat at home by your fireside on a cosy winter’s night, indulging your memories of love or youth, watching the flames creep along an oak log? Here the fire draws red squares on a draughtboard, there it gleams like velvet; little blue flames run and leap and play at the back of the hearth. Some unknown painter comes along and uses the blaze for his own purpose; by a peculiar trick he traces in the middle of these flaming purples and reds a supernatural face of unbelievable delicacy, a fleeting vision that could never be brought about by chance. It is a woman with hair streaming in the wind, whose profile promises passionate delights. Fire within the fire! She smiles, she fades away, you will never see her again. Farewell, flower of the flame, farewell, image unfulfilled, unimaginable, come too soon or too late to materialize as a beautiful diamond.’

  ‘But what about Pauline?’

  ‘You haven’t understood me yet? I’ll start again. Make way, make way, she’s coming, here she is, the queen of illusions, the woman who passes swiftly as a kiss, the woman as vivid as lightning and sprung like lightning burning from the heavens, the uncreated being, all spirit, all love. She has clothed herself in I know not what body of flame, or perhaps for her the flame has sprung momentarily to life! Her form is of a purity which tells you she has come from heaven. Does she not shine forth like an angel? Can you not hear the airy fluttering of her wings? Lighter than a bird, she settles near you and her terrifying gaze holds you in thrall. Her sweet but potent breath draws your lips to hers by a magic force. She flits away and sweeps you along, your feet no longer touch the ground. You yearn to touch her snow-white body just once with your excited, frenzied hand, ruffle her golden hair, kiss her sparkling eyes. Your mind is clouded, an enchanting music bewitches you. Every nerve in you quivers, you are all desire, all suffering. Oh nameless happiness! You have touched the lips of this woman. But suddenly an atrocious pain awakes you. Aha! You have banged your head on the edge of your bed, you have been kissing the brown mahogany, the cold gilding, some bronze ornament or a brass cherub.’

  ‘But, monsieur, what about Pauline?’

  ‘You still haven’t understood? Listen. One fine morning a young man, who had started off from Tours and boarded the boat named The City of Angers, held the hand of a pretty girl in his. United in this fashion, they spent a long time admiring in the broad waters of the Loire the semblance of a white face emerging from the mist like a creation of the water and the sun or like a vagary of the clouds and the air. Now water-sprite, now wood-nymph, this fluid creature was flitting through the air like a word that runs through your brain and haunts your memory but cannot be called to mind. She was passing between the islands, tossing her head among the tall poplar trees. Then, towering above them, she shook out the thousand folds of her dress and the aureole of the sun around her face shone forth. She soared over the hills and hamlets and seemed to be forbidding the steamboat to pass in front of the Château d’Ussé. You would have thought her the ghost of the Dame des Belles Cousines,* wishing to protect her country against the invasion of modernity.’

  ‘All right, I understand now about Pauline. What about Foedora?’

  ‘Oh, you will see Foedora all over the place. Yesterday she was at the Bouffons, tonight she’s going to the Opéra, she is to be found everywhere. She is, if you like, Society.’*

  Paris 1830–1*

  APPENDIX

  BALZAC’S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, AUGUST 1831

  No doubt there are many writers whose personality is vividly reproduced in their compositions and where the work and the man are one and the same. However, there are others whose minds and manners contrast powerfully with the form and the substance of their work. So there is no positive rule by which we might understand the various degrees of affinity that exist between the characteristic thoughts of an artist and the imaginary life of his compositions.

  These similarities or differences derive from forces in the writer’s psychology as bizarre, as secret, in their play as nature is fantastic in its vagaries of generation. The production of living organisms and the production of ideas are two mysteries which we do not understand, and the total similarities and dissimilarities with their authors that these two sorts of creation display will scarcely serve to establish their paternity.

  Petrarch, Lord Byron, Hoffmann,* and Voltaire were men in keeping with their genius. Whereas Rabelais, a sober man, belied the bloated vulgarity of his style and the characters in his books … He drank water while extolling the purée septembrale,* thus resembling Brillat-Savarin,* who ate very little while celebrating the delights of the table.

  It is the
same with the most original modern writer on whom Great Britain can pride herself. Maturin, the priest to whom we owe Eva, Melmoth, Bertram,* was careful of his appearance, gallant, a ladies’ man; this man with the terrifying ideas turned into a young fop or dandy in the evenings. The same goes for Boileau,* whose gentle, polite conversation sorted ill with the satirical spirit of his mischievous verse. Most elegant poets have been men who were quite careless about personal elegance; just like sculptors, who constantly busy themselves idealizing the most beautiful human forms, reproducing their sensuous curves, bringing together the scattered traits of beauty, they almost all go around badly dressed, disdaining ornament, retaining the models of loveliness in their souls, without showing any external evidence of it.

  It’s very easy to multiply the examples of these characteristic consistencies and inconsistencies in men and their thoughts. But this twofold fact recurs so frequently that it would be childish to insist on it.

  Would literature be at all possible if the noble heart of Schiller were to be suspected of some complicity with Franz Moor,* the most execrable conception, the most profoundly wicked character that a dramatist has yet put on stage? …

  Have not the most sombre dramatists usually been people who are very gentle and with the morals of the patriarchs? Witness the venerable Ducis.* Even today, looking at that one of our Favarts* who translates the ungraspable nuances of our petty-bourgeois ways with the greatest finesse, grace and wit, you would say he was a good peasant from the Beauce* who has made money by speculating on cattle.

  Despite the lack of certainty in the laws that regulate literary physiognomy, readers can never remain impartial between the book and the writer. They can’t help but mentally draw a face, build a man, suppose him to be young or old, big or small, kind or unkind. Once the portrait of the artist is painted, that’s it! Their siege is over.*

  And you may be a hunchback in Orleans, blond in Bordeaux, slender in Brest, big and fat in Cambrai. Such and such a salon may detest you, while in another they praise you to the skies. Thus, while in Paris they were pouring scorn on Mercier,* in Saint Petersburg he was the Russians’ oracle. In short, you become a multiple being, a kind of imaginary creature clothed by the reader after his imagination and almost always stripped of a few virtues and reclothed in his own vices. So you sometimes have the inestimable benefit of hearing someone say:

  ‘I never thought he was like that!’

  If the author of this book could be at all gratified by the erroneous judgements thus passed upon him by the public, he would be careful not to discuss this strange problem of authorial physiology. He would very quickly have resigned himself to passing for a literary gentleman, respectable, virtuous, wise, well thought of in the right circles. But unfortunately he is reputed to be old, more or less debauched, cynical, and all the ugliness of the seven deadly sins has been stamped upon his face by those who don’t even recognize his virtues; for not everything in vice is vicious. He is therefore completely justified in scratching away at a public opinion that has been falsely circulating about him.

  But all things considered, he would perhaps more willingly accept a deservedly bad reputation than a falsely good one. For in our present times, what is a literary reputation? A red or blue poster stuck up at the end of every street. Then again, what sublime poem would be fortunate enough to achieve the same popularity as the Paraguay-Roux or some other such concoction?*

  This misfortune has come from a book to which he has not appended his name because of the danger in signing it, but which he now acknowledges to be his.

  The work is The Physiology of Marriage, attributed by some to an old doctor, by others to a dissolute courtesan of la Pompadour,* or to some misanthropist who has lost all his illusions and never in all his life met a single woman he could respect.

  The author has frequently found these mistakes amusing and has even taken them as signs of approbation. But now he believes that, even though a writer has to subject himself mutely to the dangers of purely literary reputations, he does not have to accept, with similar resignation, an insult that brings his character into disrepute. A false accusation is an attack on our friends even more than on ourselves. And when the author of this book realized that he would not be defending himself alone in trying to destroy opinions that could harm him, he got over the quite natural disinclination one feels to talk about oneself. He vowed to deal once and for all with the numerous people who do not know him in order to satisfy the small number who do: happy, in so doing, to justify certain friendships which do him honour and some approval he is proud of.

  Will he now be taxed with conceit if he claims for himself the unhappy privileges of Sanchez, the good Jesuit who, seated on a marble throne, wrote his famous book De Matrimonio* in which an entire fantasy of sexual pleasure is judged before the ecclesiastical tribunal and transferred from there into judgements in the confessional, all with an admirable grasp of the laws which govern conjugal union? Is philosophy then more culpable than priesthood?

  Is it ill-mannered to admit to a whole life of labour? Would he incur blame for displaying a birth certificate which tells us that he is thirty years old? Is he not within his rights to ask people who don’t know him not to call into question his morality or his deep respect for women, and not to make of his chaste mind the very prototype of cynicism?

  If those who, despite the careful warnings in the preface, have gratuitously maligned the author of the Physiology, wish, when they read this new work, to be consequential, they ought to believe its author to be as delicately in love as he was formerly depraved. But praise would not flatter him any more than blame offended him. Though he may be more than touched by the encouragement his compositions receive, he refuses to deliver his person up to the whims of popular acclaim. However, it is very difficult to persuade the public that an author can imagine criminal behaviour without himself being a criminal … So the author, having once been accused of cynicism, would not now be surprised to be considered a gambler and a bon viveur, even though his numerous works are proof of a solitary life, and a sobriety without which the fertility of the spirit cannot exist at all.

  He could take pleasure, certainly, in composing some autobiographical note here which would excite a powerful sympathy towards him. But he feels too well received to write irrelevancies in the manner of so many writers of prefaces; too conscientious in his works to be humble; and not being a valetudinarian, he would in any case be a decidedly sad hero for a preface.

  If you exclude his personality and his morals from the writing, the author will acknowledge that you have full authority over his books: you can charge them with effrontery, hurl insults upon a writer so ill-mannered as to paint improper portraits, make problematical observations, blame society falsely and accuse it of vices and ills it does not have. Success is the sovereign rule in these difficult matters. So the Physiology of Marriage would perhaps be totally absolved. Later it may be better understood and no doubt one day the author will have the pleasure of being considered an esteemed, sober, and serious individual.

  But many women readers will not be happy to learn that the author of the Physiology is young, as well-behaved as an old sous-chef, sober as a sick man on a diet, drinking only water and working hard, for they will not understand how a young man with pure morals could plumb the mysteries of married life in such depth. The indictment would thus be reproduced in new forms. But to bring this frivolous trial to an end and find him innocent, it will suffice for him to lead those who are not very familiar with the workings of human intelligence to the source of his ideas.

  Although restricted to the confines of a preface, this psychological essay will perhaps help to explain the strange disparities which exist between the talents of a writer and his physiognomy. No doubt the question will interest women poets more than it does the author himself.

  The literary art, which has as its purpose the reproduction of nature in ideas, is the most complex of all the arts.

  To portray
a feeling, to make the colours, the light, the half-tones, the shades come alive again, to accurately convey a defined scene, a seascape or landscape, a man or a monument, that is what painting is all about.

  Sculpture is still more limited in its resources. It has scarcely anything but a stone and a colour to express the richest of natures, feelings in human form. So the sculptor hides beneath the marble a huge labour of idealization which very few people give him credit for.

  But ideas, far larger, comprehend everything. The writer must be familiar with all effects, all natures. He is obliged to have within him a sort of concentric mirror in which, according to his imagination, the universe comes to be reflected. Without that, the poet and even the observer do not exist. For it is not just a question of looking, but of remembering and imprinting one’s impressions with a certain choice of words and dressing them in all the grace of images or lending them all the liveliness of primordial sensations …

  Now, without engaging in the elaborate Aristotelianism every writer devises for his own work, every pedant in his own theories, this author believes he is in agreement with all intellects, high and low, when he asserts that the literary art has two quite distinct components: observation and expression.

  Many distinguished men possess the gift of observation, but don’t have the ability to express their ideas in a lively way. Other writers have been endowed with a marvellous style, without being guided by the wise and curious genius that sees and takes note of everything. From these two intellectual dispositions come in some way the literary senses of sight and touch. To one man the doing; to another the conceiving. The latter plays with a lyre without producing any of these sublime harmonies which make you weep or think. The former composes poems for himself alone, lacking an instrument.