Magic Skin
Magic Skin
Raphael de Valentin is a young artist with no money, no prospects, and mounting debts when he stumbles upon a piece of enchanted shagreen in a dusty antique shop. The shopkeeper offers it freely: the skin will grant any wish, but with each desire fulfilled, it shrinks - and takes a portion of Raphael's life with it. What follows is a descent into hedonistic excess that begins as liberation and curdles into horror. Raphael wishes for wealth, for power, for the endless pleasure he was denied as a starving poet. He gets everything. And he watches himself die with every contraction of the magical skin. Balzac's 1831 novel is a fever dream of materialism run amok - a Faustian bargain dressed in the silk and champagne of Restoration France. It is also a sharp criticism of a society that measures human worth in francs and social standing, and asks what remains of a man when he has traded his soul for everything he ever wanted.
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