The Magic Skin
1831
A young man stands at the edge of the Pont des Arts, ready to end his life. Raphael de Valentin has squandered his inheritance, his ambitions, his very will to live. Then a mysterious dealer offers him a scrap of wild ass's skin: it will grant him anything his heart desires, but with each wish the skin shrinks, stealing years from his life. One wish, one shrinking, one step closer to death. What follows is Balzac's darkest meditation on desire itself. He wishes for wealth, for love, for power each wish stripping away his remaining years until he confronts the terrible arithmetic of his own longing. Part Gothic fever dream, part ruthless portrait of Parisian society in the 1830s, The Magic Skin asks what we all secretly fear: that getting everything we want might be the cruelest trick of all. For readers who love Faustian bargains, moral philosophy, and novels that haunt you long after the last page.
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“Il ya toute une vie dans une heure d'amour.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“There is something noble as well as terrible about suicide. The downfall of many men is not dangerous, for they fall like children, too near the ground to do themselves harm. But when a great man breaks, he has soared up to the heavens, espied some inaccessible paradise, and then fallen from a great height. The forces that make him seek peace from the barrel of a gun cannot be placated. How many young talents confined to an attic room wither and perish for lack of a friend, a consoling wife, alone in the midst of a million fellow humans, while throngs of people weary of gold are bored with their possessions.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“Yes, I can understand that a man might go to gambling table - when he sees that all that lies between himself and death is his last crown””
— Honoré de Balzac
“He looked like some plant bleached by darkness.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“Journalism, look you, is the religion of modern society.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“საზოგადოებრივი აზრი? - ეს ხომ ყოველ მეძავ ქალზე უფრო გარყვნილი არსებაა.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“Hélas! Nous ne manquons jamais d'argent pour nos caprices, nous ne discutons que le prix des choses utiles ou nécessaires; nous jetons l'or avec insouciance à des danseuses, et nous marchandons un ouvrier dont la famille affamée attend la paiement d'un mémoire. Combien de gens ont un habit de cent francs, un diamant à la pomme de leur canne, et dinent à vingt-cinque sous? Il semble que nous n'achetions jamais assez chèrementles plaisirs de la vanité””
— Honoré de Balzac
“Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life of pleasure.””
— Honoré de Balzac
