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

by Honoré de Balzac

  Rue Saint-Lazare: in the quarter of the Chaussée-d’Antin.

  two weeks: according to France’s Civil Code, banns announcing an impending marriage must be published at least ten days before the wedding, so that anyone knowing about a legal impediment to the marriage has time to protest.

  Abbess of Andouillets: Tristram Shandy (vol. 7, ch. 25) tells the story of the abbess of Andouillets and a novice stuck in a cart abandoned by its driver. The mules pulling the cart would only move in response to obscenities. In order to avoid sinning, it was decided that one nun would utter the first half of the curse-word and the other the second.

  Westall: Richard Westall (1765–1836), English artist and book illustrator.

  Tsar Nicholas: the autocratic Nicholas I (reigned 1825–55) had recently crushed an uprising in Poland against Russian rule. Polish attempts to regain its independence evoked much sympathy in France. Many Polish émigrés settled in Paris, the most famous of whom was the composer Chopin, who arrived in September 1831, just after Balzac’s novel was published. Balzac will later portray an émigré Polish artist in the fictional sculptor Steinbock of Cousin Bette.

  Mene mene tekel upharsin: according to the Bible (Dan. 5: 24–8), these words, written by a divine hand on the palace wall, were interpreted by the prophet Daniel as signalling the condemnation of the Babylonian king Belshazzar and the imminent destruction of his kingdom.

  Salpêtrière: hospital housing many insane patients. The Halle aux Vins was the wholesale wine market.

  Lavrille: possibly based on the entomologist Pierre-Andrée Latreille (1762–1833). The scientific information on which Balzac plays in the following pages is largely borrowed from dictionaries of natural history and technology published in the 1820s.

  we are not short of ducks: in French, a canard is also a slang term for a newspaper. The mocking tone of this section echoes that of the journalists’ dinner-party conversation earlier in the novel.

  Pallas: Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811), a German zoologist who wrote accounts of his travels in Russia and Central Asia. The Bible does not speak of prostitution with asses.

  Nogais: the Nogais are an ethnic group of the Black Sea and Caucasus region.

  Niebuhr: Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815), German explorer who wrote about his travels in Arabia.

  chagri: see note to p. 25 above.

  Dom Calmet: the Benedictine monk Dom Calmet (1672–1757) was the compiler of massively detailed but somewhat uncritical dictionaries and histories. His religious order had been banned from France under the Revolution but would be restored in 1837.

  Planchette: another fictional scientist, whose name (‘little plank’) is a comic one for the operator of a massive hydraulic press.

  story of the goats in Don Quixote: in pt. I, ch. 20. Cervantes’ work is also mentioned in the ‘Dead Ass’ chapter of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. This latter work is the source of the sexual innuendo about bridling one’s desire that Balzac develops in this passage, playing on the sexual connotations of ‘stretching’ the skin.

  Lalande: Jérôme Lalande, a French astronomer (1732–1807). The source of the anecdote is unknown.

  blow up Paris: the whole discussion of pressure and motion here (see the play on ‘movement’ and ‘resistance’, note to p. 155 above) echoes contemporary apprehensions of potential violence in the society of the time.

  Pascal: Blaise Pascal (1623–62), scientist and religious thinker, had formulated the physical principle crucial to the development of the hydraulic press, although he did not build one himself. One of the famous lines of his posthumous fragmentary Pensées is ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread’. His Lettres provinciales (Letters from the Provinces, 1656–7), mentioned by Raphael below, a work of religious controversy with the Jesuits about divine grace, are considered to be a masterpiece of style but their concerns may seem to be far removed from those of Pascal the scientist.

  Spieghalter: a fictional figure.

  Rue de la Santé: or ‘Health Street’, named for the Maison de la Santé, now the Hôpital Sainte-Anne.

  Japhet: a fictional character possibly modelled on Louis-Jacques Thénard (1777–1857), a famous chemist.

  salicin: an anti-inflammatory agent that had recently (1829) been isolated from willow bark by a French pharmacist named Leroux.

  doctrinaires: see note to p. 33 above. The axiom seems to allude to their satisfaction with the political status quo.

  his wife: for reasons that are never explained, the wedding of Raphael and Pauline never takes place. Balzac uses the word ‘wife’ here as a way of saying that even though the couple’s sexual relationship has just been consummated without legal sanction, the characters have not acted immorally, and in particular that Pauline is not to be considered a ‘fallen woman’. Balzac is generally tolerant of the affairs of unhappily married women, or of courtesans scorned by good society, but the behaviour of a good girl like Pauline needs the justification of an implicit marriage.

  Horace Bianchon: in 1838 Balzac changed the name of this character, originally called Prosper, to that of the doctor made famous by his subsequent novels, in many of which he plays a minor but important role as a moral anchor.

  Brisset … Cabanis … Bichat: the three fictional doctors of this section have all been linked to real-life models: François Broussais (1772–1838), François Magendie (1786–1855), and Joseph Récamier (1774–1852). Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) was a physician and materialist philosopher, Bichat a fictional doctor mentioned earlier.

  Van Helmont: Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579–1644) was a chemist and physiologist who studied digestion. He believed in alchemical transformations and the possibility of spontaneous generation.

  Pyrrhonian: follower of the sceptical philosopher Pyrrho. See note to p. 58.

  Panurge: see note to p. 58.

  Dupuytren … Hohenlohe: Guillaume Dupuytren (1777–1835) was a surgeon; ‘Dupuytren’s contracture’ is named for him. The Musée Dupuytren of anatomy in Paris was established by his bequest. Hohenlohe was a German priest (1794–1849) who gained a reputation as a miracle-worker.

  Carymary, Carymara: see note to p. 58.

  Cantal: in reality the Mont Dore is in the Puy-de-Dôme.

  ‘And that’s why your daughter is dumb’: a famous line from Molière’s Médecin malgré lui (The Doctor despite Himself, or The Mock Doctor), by which the servant Sganarelle, in the guise of a doctor, concludes a comically absurd diagnosis.

  equestrian order: the lower of the two aristocratic orders in ancient Rome, also known as the knights, defined by their wealth more than by birth.

  phlogistic elements: supposed causes of combustion. The hypothetical postulation of a substance called ‘phlogiston’ by early eighteenth-century scientists was abandoned after further research on oxygen led to the caloric theory of combustion.

  Lac du Bourget: the description of this site, made famous by Lamartine’s poem of romantic love and loss ‘Le Lac’ (1820), was significantly expanded by Balzac in 1833, after a visit to the area in 1832 with the duchesse de Castries, whose favours he sought in vain.

  French Maurienne: mountainous region which at this time lay on the border between France and Savoy.

  Sardinia: until 1860 the Duchy of Savoy belonged to the Kingdom of Sardinia, whose capital was Turin. Raphael’s duel thus takes place outside French jurisdiction.

  Cérisier: possibly based on the fencing-master Grisier; Lepage’s school is real.

  he had done nothing: these reflections were added in the second edition of 1831. The description that follows of the Mont Dore, which Balzac had not seen, is based on things he had read; the peasants’ cottage is based on one Balzac had seen in Touraine.

  Schnetz: Jean-Victor Schnetz (1787–1870), a French painter among whose works is a depiction of the battle of 28 July 1830 in front of the Paris Hôtel de Ville.

  Death of Credit: an allegorical image of Credit being killed by a painter, a musician,
and a soldier who have failed to pay their debts. It was especially popular among shopkeepers.

  illuminism: the word normally refers to the current of spiritualist thinking, Neoplatonic or occult in character, associated with Swedenborg; here it refers to a state of mind closer to Rousseau’s fundamental ‘sentiment of existence’, in which consciousness hews so closely to the material rhythms of nature that any alienating self-consciousness is kept at bay.

  novena: the recitation of the rosary or other prayers over nine days as a way of asking God for a special favour.

  Trappists’ ‘Brother thou must die’: a monastic order known for its rigorous rule. The injunction quoted by Balzac symbolizes its absolute renunciation of worldly things. The dramatic formulation appealed to Romantic writers such as Alfred de Vigny, who cited it in his poem ‘Le Trappiste’, which appeared in his collection of Poèmes antiques et modernes (1826). Chateaubriand would later write a biography of the abbé de Rancé, the seventeenth-century reformer of the Cistercian abbey of La Trappe.

  June: we are in 1831, at the very moment Balzac was completing his novel, which would be published in August.

  in a very bad humour: ‘tout chagrin’ (see note to p. 25 above).

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

  our immaterial soul: up to the edition of 1838 the phrase read ‘our allegedly immaterial soul’.

  Mademoiselle de la Vallière: celebrated mistress of Louis XIV.

  EPILOGUE

  The title of this section was changed in 1835 from ‘Conclusion’.

  Dame des Belles Cousines: the noble lady who educates the young page and title character of Le Petit Jehan de Saintré, a medieval tale (1451) by Antoine de la Sale. The Château d’Ussé is here said to be her home, but it is also known as the model for the castle in Perrault’s tale ‘Sleeping Beauty’.

  Society: Balzac added ‘she is … everywhere’ in the edition of 1835, and ‘She is … Society’ by hand on the edition of 1845.

  Paris 1830–1: the first edition was not dated, and it ended, in the manner of a fable, with a one-paragraph ‘Moral’. This text referred in whimsical vein to Rabelais’ ideal Abbey of Thélème (Gargantua, ch. 55), whose motto was ‘Do what thou wilt’. According to Balzac (though without textual basis), the inhabitants of the Abbey were thrifty with their skins and restrained in their chagrins (cf. the note to p. 175 above for Balzac’s use of a similar phrase from Sterne’s Sentimental Journey). The ‘Moral’ ends by declaring that the novel is a tribute to Master Alcofribas by one of his own characters.

  APPENDIX

  Hoffmann: E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), influential German author of fantastic tales, including ‘The Nutcracker’.

  purée septembrale: wine.

  Brillat-Savarin: see note to p. 39 above.

  Maturin … Bertram: Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824), a Dublin curate in the Church of Ireland, was of Huguenot descent. His Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) was an important influence on the young Balzac, who later wrote a short novel titled Melmoth Reconciled (1835). Eva refers to Maturin’s tale Women; or, Pour et Contre (1818). Bertram, or the Castle of St Aldobrand (1816) is a drama.

  Boileau: Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), known for his verse Satires.

  Schiller … Franz Moor: Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), German poet and dramatist. Franz Moor is the dark hero of his play The Robbers (1782), considered a masterpiece of the ‘Storm and Stress’ movement of the late eighteenth century.

  Ducis: Jean-François Ducis (1733–1816), French dramatist, known for his adaptations of Shakespeare to French classical taste.

  Favarts: the name of two lyric dramatists, father and son, of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the theatre where Raphael goes to hear Italian opera is called the salle Favart (see note to p. 155 above).

  the Beauce: rural area of central France.

  siege is over: a proverbial phrase meaning ‘don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up’. It originated with the eighteenth-century abbé Vertot, who supposedly refused to change his account of the medieval siege of Rhodes when someone brought him new first-hand documents.

  Mercier: Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814), the author of a sociological Tableau de Paris (1781–8) that was read across Europe, including Russia. His other writings include a utopian novel, The Year 2440.

  Paraguay-Roux … concoction: the first is a remedy for toothache; the other no doubt a medicine for venereal disease.

  Pompadour: the marquise de Pompadour (1721–64), an influential mistress of Louis XV, and a supporter of the Enlightenment.

  Sanchez … De Matrimonio: the actual title of this sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit’s manual about what is proper in conjugal relations is Discussions of the Holy Sacrament of Marriage.

  Laird of Dumbiedykes: ‘Character in The Prison of Edinburgh, by Walter Scott’ (author’s note). The English title of the novel is The Heart of Midlothian (1818).

  Lara: ‘Poem by Lord Byron’ (author’s note). See note to p. 16.

  Florence … Sahara: both the painter and writer refer to Balzac himself. The first reference is to his story ‘The Exiled Ones’ (‘Les Proscrits’, May 1831), about Dante; the second to ‘A Passion in the Desert’ (‘Une Passion dans le désert’, December 1830). Dan is in Palestine; Balzac seems to think Sahara is the name of a town.

  materialism and spiritualism: by ‘spiritualism’, Balzac means any philosophy that postulates the existence of a distinct spiritual reality (including occultism).

  ‘Ricky the Tuft’: ‘Riquet à la houppe’, one of the fairy tales by Charles Perrault, the author of ‘Donkey Skin’ (see note to p. 80 above).

  mens divinior: ‘a soul divine’. Horace, Satires 1.4.43.

  Childe Harold pilgrimages: after the title of a long narrative poem by Byron (1812–18).

  privileges of the clergy: the right to be judged by other clergy in ecclesiastical rather than by state judges in secular courts. It was abolished by the French Revolution. In the United Kingdom what was called the ‘benefit of clergy’ was abolished in 1823.

  Walterscotted: Balzac’s coinage for the recent wave of French historical novels inspired by Walter Scott.

  Polyeucte: an edifying tragedy by Pierre Corneille (first performed 1643) about a Roman pagan’s conversion to Christianity.

  La Muette: The Mute Girl of Portici, 1828 opera by Auger and Scribe, whose liberal message led to its revival after the July Revolution.

  half-pay: pensioned off, like a retired or redundant soldier.

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  1 Honoré de Balzac, ‘Avant-propos’, in La Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–81), i. 19. Further references in this introduction to works of Balzac will be to this edition, except for references to the translation of The Wild Ass’s Skin, which will be given parenthetically in the text.

  2 Balzac, Œuvres complètes: le ‘moment’ de La Comédie humaine, ed. Claude Duchet and Isabelle Tournier (Saint-Denis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 1993).

  3 Balzac, ‘Avant-propos’, in La Comédie humaine, i. 11, 10.