The Wild Ass's Skin (Oxford World's Classics)

by Honoré de Balzac

  Galatea: although linked by association with Homer’s Helen of Troy, the reference to Galatea here better fits the nymph in the myth of Acis and Galatea, retold in bk. 13 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Galatea was also the name Rousseau gave in his play Pygmalion to the statue that came to life, and with whom the sculptor Pygmalion fell in love.

  twenty years: Louis XVIII’s wife had died in 1810 while her husband was in exile, and the wife of his successor Charles X had died even earlier, in 1805. Raphael may also be thinking of Napoleon’s first wife Josephine, whom he divorced in 1809; he presumably does not consider Louis-Philippe’s wife Marie-Amélie to be a true queen.

  harden her heart: according to legend, Achilles was plunged by his mother Thetis into the Styx, the river of the underworld, to make him immortal. He became invulnerable, except in the heel by which she held on to him.

  Carlo Dolci: Italian painter (1616–86).

  Rastignac: one of Balzac’s most famous characters, who appears for the first time in this novel. His early years will be portrayed in Père Goriot (1835). Unlike other characters of The Wild Ass’s Skin who are given names from the later novels in subsequent editions, Rastignac bears his name from the start.

  St Chrysostom: his name means ‘golden mouth’. In French, to ‘speak gold’ is to speak wisely, to capture the essence of a situation, but Rastignac literalizes the metaphor.

  Foedora: the name (a French variant on the Russian for Theodora, ‘God’s gift’) appears in a Balzac poem of 1823, about a beautiful Russian countess, a still-virginal widow, who falls in love in Paris with a mysterious man named Georges. When she discovers he is the public executioner, she dies of horror. The masculine version of the name, ‘Foedor’, is found in the melodrama Foedor and Wladimir, or the Siberian Family, by Jean-François Ducis (1802), and in one of the stories, ‘Vaninka’, included in Alexandre Dumas père’s Celebrated Crimes (1842–3). The unusual spelling of the name has led some critics to link it to the Latin verb foedare (‘to make unclean’, ‘to foul’) or the Latin noun foedus (‘treaty’ or ‘compact’), but this is a stretch.

  the Bois: the Bois de Boulogne, where people of fashion went for walks or rides in their carriages.

  Serizy … Carigliano: all the ladies mentioned here are fictional characters in Balzac’s other works; their names were added in 1838.

  1827: a possible explanation of this date is that it marked the publication of Stendhal’s novel Armance, or Scenes from a Paris Salon in 1827, which treats of a love relationship never consummated because of the hero’s unnamed affliction, often interpreted as impotence.

  grandes entrées: permission to enter the king’s chambers at any time, reserved for a privileged few.

  Lauzun: the duc de Lauzun was a famous seducer who courted, and may have secretly married, the cousin of Louis XIV. First-floor lodgings were the most elegant and expensive in Paris buildings; prices fell as one ascended the stairs.

  Croatia: the word ‘cravat’ is derived from ‘Croatia’, the nation whose soldiers were the first to wear one.

  Bienne … la Lescombat: the Swiss lake of Bienne (Biel in German) is described in Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker. The Murillo Madonna associated with Napoleon’s Marshal Soult is the Immaculate Conception (1665) he took to France after the conquest of Spain. Held for a century by the Louvre, it is now in the Prado in Madrid. La Lescombat was an eighteenth-century lady who convinced her lover to murder her husband.

  Clarissa Harlowe: Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, novel by Samuel Richardson (1748). The sympathetic view of the seducer Lovelace expressed here accords with Raphael’s ‘Byronic’ outlook.

  prince of Lorraine: unidentified allusion.

  Arsinoé, Araminte: female characters in plays by Molière and Marivaux, who for different reasons play hard to get.

  Institute: the Institut de France, on the Quai de Conti, home of the French Academy.

  Bossuet: Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), bishop of Meaux. His sermons and funeral orations often sought to humble the pride of his aristocratic audience, though he was a supporter of absolute monarchy and did not question the social order in which he lived.

  Erard’s best instruments: pianos by Erard were owned by Haydn, Beethoven, and Liszt. Raphael’s instrument would be a valuable gift.

  tilbury: a light, sporty carriage seating one or two people.

  Don Miguel’s mule: in 1828 an accident was caused by the mules pulling the king of Portugal’s coach.

  congress: probably an allusion to international political gatherings such as the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), where crafty diplomats such as Talleyrand and Metternich displayed all their skill in deciding the future of Europe. The man Raphael meets is a ‘name’ because he has books written by others published under his name (Balzac himself did some work for literary brokers of this kind). Rastignac jokes that the man avoids shops that provide facilities for people to do their own writing, since this is what he never does. Interestingly, this literary broker is not named here; he will be called Finot below, after a character in Balzac’s later novels, notably Lost Illusions.

  Necklace Affair: a complicated fraud of the 1780s that compromised the reputation of Queen Marie-Antoinette, who in fact was innocent of any wrongdoing.

  Diderot … five hundred francs: Denis Diderot (1713–84), a philosopher who became well known for his materialist views, did indeed write some sermons for money early in his career.

  Jean-Paul: Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), German Romantic writer of novels and stories under the pen name Jean Paul.

  “English system”: it is unclear why the notion of a young man living lavishly on credit to make himself a candidate for a wealthy marriage is called ‘English’. Possibly it is because England was thought to be particularly clever in using the mechanisms of credit as a means to expanding its power.

  three-percent bonds: a reference to one of the bond funds issued by the French government at various fixed interest rates; their value fluctuated according to the market. Foedora will later speak of selling her holdings of five-percent bonds.

  Funambules: see note to p. 24 above.

  “A little … not at all”: French equivalent of the ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ said when plucking the petals off daisies.

  coupé: a carriage designed for two passengers only, the part with the rear-facing front seats having been ‘cut off’.

  Polycles: ancient Greek sculptor known for his representation of a hermaphrodite. The book referred to is by Henri de Latouche (1785–1851), a journalist friend of Balzac’s at this time, though they later quarrelled. Fragoletta, ou Paris et Naples en 1799 (1829) is the story of a hermaphrodite who, appearing alternately as female and male, becomes involved with a man and his sister.

  Lady Delacour: a character in Maria Edgeworth’s novel Belinda (1801; French translation 1802). Her cancer turns out to be a false diagnosis.

  Corsican monk: Corsicans were proverbial for their vendettas, and presumably the desire for vengeance of a monk, deprived of sexual fulfilment or other outlets for his passions, would be even more powerful.

  penknife in lieu of a dagger: a comic touch reminiscent of a passage in Prévost’s novel Manon Lescaut (1731), in which the noble but cuckolded hero is caught with only a penknife instead of a sword to defend his honour.

  Pria che spunti: ‘Before dawn breaks in the sky’, an aria from Il matrimonio segreto (The Secret Marriage), an opera by Domenico Cimarosa (1749–1801). This composer was mentioned by Raphael earlier (p. 111) along with Rossini and the lesser-known Nicolò Zingarelli (1752–1837), whose Romeo and Juliet was much appreciated by Balzac.

  brown liquid: possibly opium, as a sleeping-aid.

  Gymnasium: a theatre on the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, which presented, among others, the dramas of Scribe and Dumas fils.

  troubles: ‘chagrins’ (see note to p. 25 above).

  anchorite: hermit.

  Othello: the poet Alfred de Vigny’
s translation of the play caused a sensation when first performed in 1829, notably because of its break with classical decorum in using the ‘low’ word mouchoir for the handkerchief that spurs the jealous Othello to kill his wife Desdemona. Vigny’s success in the staging of the play at the Comédie Française helped pave the way for the French Romantic theatre.

  malmsey butt: according to a tradition cited notably in Shakespeare’s Richard III, when the imprisoned Duke of Clarence (1449–78) was allowed to pick the method of his execution, he chose to be drowned in a vat of malmsey wine.

  Rue Taitbout: in the quarter of the Chaussée d’Antin, mentioned earlier as the centre of new, mostly bourgeois money. Lesage’s was a real furniture and art store of the time.

  Ruffec’s pâtés: Ruffec is a town in the Charente.

  Saint Helena: the island in the South Atlantic to which Napoleon was exiled in 1815 and where he died in 1821.

  boston: an eighteenth-century card game, popular in continental Europe.

  Mahmud: Sultan Mahmud II (see note to p. 40 above). Byron died in 1824, after arriving in Greece to fight for its liberation from the Turks but before he could engage in battle.

  Mirabeau: the comte de Mirabeau (1749–91) played an important role at the beginning of the French Revolution. In addition to works on politics, he wrote a number of erotic novels.

  Raphael d’Urbino: the painter’s death in 1520 was said to have been hastened by the vigour of his sexual relations with his mistress and model, Margherita Luti.

  Alexander … Hercules: according to one ancient and disputed legend, Alexander the Great died from drinking a gigantic cup of wine in honour of Hercules.

  monastery of Monte San Bernardo: in the Saint Bernard pass in the Swiss Alps, where the monks provided shelter for travellers with the help of the famous St Bernard rescue dogs.

  Sardanapalus: the last king of ancient Assyria, who was said to have committed suicide after killing all his concubines and slaves. The story was dramatized by Byron (1821) and used for a cantata by Berlioz (1830), but its most famous Romantic representation is Delacroix’s painting The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), which shows, however, not the king’s death but the murder of one of his concubines under his indifferent eye.

  Eusebius Salverte: author of a book on the names of men, peoples, and gods (1824). Raphael quotes from its opening lines.

  doppelgänger: the figure of a mysterious and often menacing double, made popular by the fantasy tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, which had been recently translated into French.

  chipolata pudding: ‘chipolata’ often designates a kind of sausage originating in Italy, and mixed with onions. It is perhaps more likely to cause indigestion than the Dutch dessert of the same name, which is made with fingers of sponge cake, fruit, and cream.

  Sainte-Pélagie: see note to p. 32 above.

  Greuze: Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), painter known for his sentimental scenes of family drama. The work mentioned here is The Paralytic of 1763.

  harpies at Châtelet: bailiffs, named for a notorious prison demolished in 1808, making room for the present Place du Châtelet.

  Petra: city located in present-day Jordan, capital of the ancient Roman province of Arabia Petraea (‘stony’), as opposed to Arabia Deserta, the desert interior of the Arabian peninsula.

  hospital: in this period, the word designates a poorhouse and a prison for prostitutes as well as a place for treating the sick.

  ‘The Red Inn’: see note to p. 34 above. The reference was added by Balzac to the last edition of his works.

  ‘Hold him up, Châtillon’: adaptation of a line from Voltaire’s tragedy Zaïre (1732) that had passed into common use.

  after July: following the July Revolution, the new regime would abolish the hereditary peerage at the end of 1831.

  Charter: the constitutional charter promulgated by Louis XVIII in 1814 and revised by Louis-Philippe in 1830. Despite the restoration of the monarchy, it retained the principle of equality before the law proclaimed by the French Revolution.

  THE DEATH AGONY

  December: we are still in 1830. Less than two months have passed since Raphael has acquired the skin at the end of October. His new lodgings in the Rue de Varenne are on the Left Bank, in the quarter of the old aristocracy.

  Rollin: Charles Rollin (1661–1741), a classical scholar and schoolmaster who wrote an influential work on education.

  carus alumnus: ‘dear pupil.’

  rhetoric: an older name for the first class in the French lycée.

  Journal de la Librairie: the official Bibliographie de France, which announced all new publications.

  vergetating: in French, the word contains an echo of verge, which can mean a measure of length (‘yard’), a rod used for whipping, or a penis.

  Origen, by castrating his imagination: an influential early third-century Christian writer who was said (perhaps by enemies seeking to discredit his way of reading the Bible) to have castrated himself in literal obedience to the injunction of Matt. 19: 12.

  Manfred … Childe Harold: both of Byron’s heroes are in fact melancholy and disenchanted, but the hero of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–16) is at least active in seeking distraction, while that of Manfred (1816–17) is paralysed and suicidal.

  Exegi monumentum: ‘I have built my monument’, Horace, Odes 3.30.

  Ronsard: the work of Pierre Ronsard (1524–85), today considered one of the greatest French poets, had not been well appreciated by critics of ‘classical’ taste. Interest in Ronsard had recently been revived by the Romantics, notably in a book Sainte-Beuve published on Renaissance poetry in 1828.

  Massillon … Buffon … Racine: like the preacher Massillon (1663–1742) and the naturalist Buffon (1707–88), who wrote that ‘style is the man’, the dramatist Racine (1639–99) was held up by the classicists as a model of style. The traditionalist Porriquet is an opponent of Romanticism.

  Charles: see note to p. 44 above.

  Resistance … Movement: ‘Resistance’ and ‘Movement’ were names given to conservative and liberal factions within the new government of Louis-Philippe. The former, led by Casimir Périer, were indeed victorious in 1831. These terms were also used by Balzac in his philosophical speculations about the dynamic of human thought and action generally.

  Favart: the name of the theatre housing the Italian Opera.

  Semiramis: Rossini’s opera of 1823 about the legendary Assyrian queen was reprised with great success in Paris at the end of 1830. Among its stars was Maria Malibran, mentioned earlier in the novel. Like other fashionable people of the time, Raphael arrives after the performance has begun.

  Mazarin-style beard: Cardinal Mazarin was chief minister of France in the years between the death of Louis XIII in 1642 and his own death in 1661. Disliked by the people, he was the subject of many satirical drawings and songs.

  Sanzio d’Urbino: Giovanni Santi (1435–94), Italian painter and father of Raphael.

  Romantics: the man’s use of the word ‘ghoul’ signals his interest in the trappings of Gothic fiction, which were already becoming clichés.

  Madame de Nucingen and her daughter: detail added in 1845 to fit the fictional biography Balzac later developed for Rastignac in other works. After a long affair with the mother, the wife of a wealthy banker (the beginning of their relationship is described in Père Goriot), Rastignac marries the daughter.

  quarter of Saint-Jacques: the student quarter that includes the Hôtel de Saint-Quentin.

  terrible sorrow: ‘chagrin’ (see note to p. 25 above).