La Peau de chagrin

Toward the end of October 1830, a young man enters a gambling house in the Palais-Royal at that wan hour when the chandeliers grow dim and only those players who can no longer stop remain around the green baize. His hat is taken at the cloakroom as one might take his soul; he tosses his last gold coin onto the table, watches it live for a moment with the throbbing life that chance confers, and loses it. He walks out with the terrible composure of a man who has settled his accounts, makes his way down toward the Seine whose grey waters await him, and defers his death until nightfall out of one last vanity: to die in broad daylight, before passersby, strikes him as bad form. To kill the hours between himself and darkness, he pushes open the door of an antiquarian's shop that rises, gallery upon gallery, through four storeys crammed with the debris of every century.

There, among Egyptian gods and ivory crucifixes, empty suits of armour and porcelain in which entire dynasties seem to slumber, an old man clad in black velvet — so ancient and so desiccated he might have stepped out of a painting — watches and divines him. To this young man who has nothing left, he shows what he has never sold: a piece of wild-ass's skin nailed to the wall, scarcely the size of a fox pelt, its grain casting comet-like gleams, and bearing, stamped into its oriental weave, a pitiless inscription — if thou possess me, thou shalt possess all things, but thy life shall belong to me; with each desire I shall shrink, even as thy days. Raphaël de Valentin — for so the dying man is called — seizes the talisman with a laugh and, in defiance, he who was about to take his own life commands the skin to furnish a royal feast, wine, women, all the frenzy of one last night.

He has barely taken three steps along the embankment when he falls in with old companions who were looking for him that very moment: a newspaper is being launched, a banker is entertaining, minds of his calibre are wanted — and there he is, swept as if by an invisible hand into the midst of a banquet Lucullus would not have disowned, in the mansion of the banker Taillefer. Between wines and table-top philosophies, Raphaël confides to his friend Émile the story of his life: the garret at three sous a day where he spent three years drinking water and burning up his youth over a Theory of the Will that was to make him immortal; sweet Pauline, his landlady's daughter, who set milk and bread on his table every morning without his ever thinking so much as to look at her; then Rastignac, who flung him into society as one flings a man into the sea; and Fœdora, the countess of twenty-seven triumphant years, the heartless woman, damnably beautiful and locked tight as a safe, for whom he squandered his last pennies on gloves and cabs, and who let him waste away with the polite curiosity of a queen watching a candle gutter out.

By morning, when the guests lie strewn among the spent candelabra, a notary appears, searching through the wreckage for a certain Raphaël de Valentin: an uncle in Calcutta has just died, leaving six millions. The room erupts in cheers; the heir turns pale. He has drawn the shagreen skin from his pocket, and the skin has shrunk — exactly, mathematically, by the full breadth of his fortune. No doubt remains: the talisman keeps its word. The richest young man in Paris is henceforth the poorest of mortals, for everything is possible and nothing is permitted; each wish is a cut of the shears in the fabric of his days.

Then begins the strangest of existences: life without desire. In his household, regulated like clockwork, old Jonathas, promoted to domestic guardian spirit, anticipates his master's every need so that no wish may ever form; the days glide by on rails, without surprise, appetite, or future. Raphaël brings the skin to the learned men as one brings one's ailment to the oracles: the zoologist pronounces it onager hide and holds forth; the engineer subjects it to his hydraulic press, which shatters; the chemist attacks it with reagents, which confess themselves defeated. The whole of science returns the talisman to the patient intact, together with theories. As for the physicians, assembled at the bedside of a chest that is caving in, they dispute learnedly — one blames the stomach, another the nerves, a third prescribes the waters — while the skin goes on answering in its own fashion, which is to shrink.

It is then that Pauline reappears, enriched in her turn, lovelier than the dreams he had not known enough to dream: those two who had loved each other without saying so in poverty now find themselves free to love amid gold. For a few weeks Raphaël knows a happiness he no longer dares to measure, for to love is still to desire, and every joy costs him a sliver of life; at night, while she sleeps, he secretly consults the scrap that dwindles. He throws the skin down a well; a gardener brings it back to him. He flees to a spa in the Auvergne, is driven from the salons by his cough, lives among peasants like a plant set out in the sun; death climbs towards him all the same, patient, punctual. And on the last night, when nothing remains of the talisman but a frail leaf thin as a petal, Raphaël, revived by the sight of Pauline, wills one final time — with all that is left of his life, he wills her. She understands, flies into the next room to kill herself and cease to be desirable; he breaks down the door with the strength of a dying man and expires upon her breast, his teeth clenched in her flesh, in the only embrace the skin ever granted him for nothing.