LIBRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Mr. H. H. KM iani
 
 UCSB LIBRARX 
 V- 1^73 \
 
 H. DE BALZAC 
 
 THE COMEDIE HUMAINE
 
 PORTRAIT OF BALZAC
 
 H. DE BALZAC 
 
 THE 
 
 WILD Ass' SKIN 
 
 (LA PEAU DE CHAGRIN) 
 
 AND OTHER STORIES 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 ELLEN MARRIAGE 
 
 WITH A PREFACE BY 
 
 GEORGE SAINTSBURY 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 THE GEBBIE PUBLISHING Co., Ltd. 
 1897
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PREFACE TO 'THE WILD ASS 1 SKIN 1 ix 
 BRIEF SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR . . . .13 
 
 AUTHORS INTRODUCTION 41 
 
 THE WILD ASS' SKIN 
 
 I. THE TALISMAN I 
 
 II. A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART 73 
 
 III. THE AGONY 184 
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 286 
 
 A STUDY OF WOMAN 313
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PORTRAIT OF BALZAC Frontispiece 
 
 By H. Crickmore. 
 
 PAGE 
 A LITTLE OLD MAN TURNED THE LIGHT OF A LAMP UPON 
 
 HIM 2 4 
 
 Drawn by W. Boucher. 
 
 I CANNOT RECOLLECT PAYING FOR WATER; I WENT OUT TO 
 
 FETCH IT EVERY MORNING 89 
 
 Drawn by W. Boucher. 
 
 PAULINE DREW HER HANDS AWAY, LAID THEM ON RAPHAEL'S 
 
 SHOULDERS, AND DREW HIM TOWARDS HER . . . 205 
 
 Drawn by W. Boucher. 
 
 VALENTIN HURRIEDLY SOUGHT THE WILD ASS* SKIN TO SEE 
 
 WHAT ANOTHER MAN'S LIFE HAD COST HIM . . . 263 
 
 Drawn by W. Boucher.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE " Wild Ass' Skin " is the one book of Balzac's which 
 it is difficult for those who know it to approach without a 
 somewhat uncritical enthusiasm. It is not faultless ; no book 
 of his is, and this cannot challenge the epithet even to the ex- 
 tent to which not a few others can challenge it. It is earlier 
 than almost any of the mature novels, except " The Chouans;" 
 and it bears in some respects the marks of its earliness as well 
 as, in others, those of that rather artificial scheme of repre- 
 senting life, which was so strongly characteristic of the author, 
 and which, while it helped him in conceiving the "Comedie 
 Humaine," imposed a certain restraint and hamper on the 
 " Comedie" itself. We could spare a good deal of the jour- 
 nalist and other talk at the orgie; and more persons than Emile 
 have gone to sleep over, or have escaped sleep only by skip- 
 ping, the unconscionable length of Raphael's story. 
 
 But these are the merest and most miserable of details. In 
 the first place, the conception is of the very finest. You may 
 call it a philosophic study, or you may not ; you may class it 
 as an " allegory " on the banks of the Nile or the Seine, or any 
 other river, if you like. Neither title will do it any harm, 
 and neither can explain it or exalt it higher. The law of 
 Nemesis the law that every extraordinary expansion or satis- 
 faction of heart or brain or will is paid for paid for inevit- 
 ably, incommutably, without the possibility of putting off or 
 transferring the payment is one of the truths about which 
 no human being with a soul a little above the brute has the 
 slightest doubt. It may be put religiously as, " Know that 
 for all these things God will bring thee into judgment;" or 
 philosophically, as in the same book, "All things are double, 
 one against the other;" or in any other fashion or language. 
 
 (ix)
 
 x PREFACE. 
 
 But it is an eternal and immutable verity, and the soul of 
 man bears witness to it. 
 
 It is Balzac's way to provide abundant, and not always 
 economically arranged backgrounds and contrasts for his cen- 
 tral pictures ; and the gaming-house (the model of how many 
 gaming-houses since!), the gorgeous disorder of the curi- 
 osity shop, and the " orgie " provide these in the present 
 case lavishly enough. The orgie is undoubtedly the weakest. 
 It is only touched with others by the pleasant and good- 
 humor skit of Gautier in " Les Jeune-France ;" but the note 
 there struck is, as usual with "Theo," the right one. You 
 cannot "organize" an orgie; the thing comes naturally or 
 not at all ; and in the splendors of Taillefer, as in those of 
 Trimalchio, there is a certain coldness. 
 
 But this is soon forgotten in the absorbing interest of the 
 skin and its master. The only adverse comment which has 
 ever occurred to me is, that one might perhaps have expected 
 a longer period of indifference, of more or less reckless en- 
 joyment of the privileges, to elapse before a vivid conscious- 
 ness of the curse and of the penalty. I know no answer, 
 unless it be that Balzac took the orgie itself to be, as it were, 
 the wild oats of Raphael's period in which case he had not 
 much to show for it. But when the actual consciousness 
 wakes, when the Skin has been measured on the napkin, and 
 its shrinking noted, nothing is questionable any longer. The 
 frenzied anxiety of the victim is not overdone ; the way in 
 which his very frenzy leads him to make greater and ever 
 greater drafts on his capital of power without any correspond- 
 ing satisfaction is masterly. And the close is more masterly 
 still. To some tastes the actual conclusion may be a thought too 
 allegorical, but in eighteen-hundred-and-thirty your allegory 
 was your only wear; and Gautier, in the pleasant book above 
 cited, was thoroughly in the fashion when he audaciously put 
 a hidden literary meaning on the merry tale of " Celle-ci et 
 celle-la." Here, too, if anywhere, the opposition of Pauline
 
 PREFACE. xi 
 
 and Fcedora in this way is justified. It softens off the too 
 high-strung tragedy of the catastrophe at the same time that it 
 points the moral, and it rounds as much as it adorns the tale. 
 
 It has been observed, in no carping or hypercritical spirit, 
 that passages of the book are somewhat high-flown in style. 
 The fact is that Balzac had rather a tendency to this style, and 
 only outgrew it, if he ever did outgrow it, by dint of its 
 greater and greater unfitness for his chosen subjects. Here, 
 if anywhere, it was excusable, just as here, if anywhere, the 
 gigantic element in his genius found scope and play. There 
 had been some "inventories " in literature before, and there 
 have been many more since the description of the curiosity 
 shop ; but none, if we except the brief Shakespearian perfec- 
 tion of that in Clarence's dream, and none at all in a heaped 
 and minute style, can approach this. The thing is night- 
 marish you see the magots and the armor, the pictures and 
 the statues, and amongst them all the sinister " piece of shag- 
 reen,"* with the ineffaceable letters stamped on it. 
 
 And so over all the book there is the note of the seer, of 
 the seer who sees and who makes others see. This note is 
 seldom an idyllic or merely pleasant one ; the writer who 
 has it must have, even in such a book as the " Country 
 Doctor," a black thread in his twist, a sombre background 
 to his happy valley. Here the subject not only excuses, but 
 demands a constant sombreness, a tone of thunder in the air, 
 of eclipse and earthquake. And the tone is given. A very 
 miserable person would he be who endeavored to pick out 
 burlesque points in the " Wild Ass' Skin," the most apoc- 
 alyptic of the novels of the nineteenth century, and yet one 
 of the most soberly true in general theme and theory. When 
 one thinks of the tireless efforts which have been made, 
 especially of late years, to " pejorate " pessimism and blacken 
 
 *I hesitated between " The Piece of Shagreen " and " The Wild Ass' 
 Skin " for the title, but Balzac's own remarks decided me. " The Magic 
 Skin " is very weak, and " The Skin of Shagreen " hideous.
 
 xii PREFACE. 
 
 gloom, and of the too general conclusion of yawn or laugh 
 to which they bring us, it is doubly curious to come" back 
 to this sermon by a very unpriestly preacher on the simple 
 text, " Whom the gods curse, to him they grant the desires 
 of his heart." 
 
 "The Wild Ass' Skin" appeared first in August, 1831, 
 published in two volumes, by Gosselin and Canel, with a 
 Preface and a ' ' Moral, ' ' which the author afterwards cut out. 
 Of its four chapters or divisions the first originally bore the 
 title of the whole book, and the last that of " Conclusion," 
 not " Epilogue," which was afterwards affixed to it. One or 
 two fragments, not incorporated in the finished book, exist, 
 having been previously published. Balzac reviewed it him- 
 self, more than once, in the Caricature and elsewhere, both 
 at its first appearance and afterwards, when it reappeared in 
 the same year with other stories and a new preface by Philarete 
 Chasles as " Philosophical Tales and Romances." This was 
 republished more than once till, in 1835, it took rank anew in 
 the "Philosophical Studies," while ten years later, under the 
 same sub-title, it was finally classed in the first complete ar- 
 rangement of the " Com6die Humaine." 
 
 "L'Elixir de longue Vie" (The Elixir of Life), in which 
 Balzac acknowledges (I do not know whether by trick or not) 
 indebtedness to Hoffmann or somebody else, is also "style of 
 1830," and to speak with perfect frankness, would have been 
 done much better by Merim6e or Gautier than by Balzac. 
 But it is done well. 
 
 The first " Etude de Femme " (A Study of Woman) came 
 out in La Mode in March, 1830, next year at the end of the 
 " Peau de Chagrin," in 1835 (with a new title, Profi I de 
 Marquise) in "Scenes de la vie Parisienne." When the 
 " Comedie " was collected its actual title was taken and it 
 was given a position among the shorter stories. 
 
 G. S.
 
 BRIEF SKETCH 
 
 OF 
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC. 
 
 Honore de Balzac was born at Tours on the 2oth of May, 
 1799. The family was a respectable one, though its right to 
 the particle which Balzac always carefully assumed, subscrib- 
 ing himself (with dubious correctness, though the point is an 
 argued one) " de Balzac" was contested. And there appears 
 to be no proof of their connection with Jean Guez de Balzac, 
 the founder, as some will have him, of modern French prose, 
 and the contemporary and fellow-reformer of Malherbe. 
 Indeed, as the novelist pointed out with sufficient pertinence, 
 his earlier namesake had no hereditary right to the name at 
 all, and merely took it from some property. Balzac's father, 
 who, as the zac pretty surely indicates, was a southerner and 
 a native of Languedoc, was fifty-three years old at the birth 
 of his son, whose Christian name was selected on the ordinary 
 principle of accepting that of the saint on whose day he was 
 born. Balzac the elder had been a barrister before the Revo- 
 lution, but under it he obtained a post in the commissariat, 
 and rose to be head of that department for a military division. 
 His wife, who was much younger than himself, and who sur- 
 vived her son, is said to have possessed both beauty and for- 
 tune, and was evidently endowed with the business faculties 
 so common among Frenchwomen. When Honore was born, 
 the family had not long been established at Tours, where 
 Balzac the elder (besides his duties) had a house and some 
 land; and this town continued to be their headquarters till 
 
 (xiii)
 
 xiv BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 the novelist, who was the eldest of the family, was about six- 
 teen. He had two sisters (of whom the elder, Laure, after- 
 wards Madame Surville, was his confidante and his only 
 authoritative biographer) and a younger brother, who seems 
 to have been, if not a scapegrace, rather a burden to his 
 friends, and who later went abroad. 
 
 The eldest boy was, in spite of Rousseau, put out to nurse, 
 and at seven years old was sent to the Oratorian grammar 
 school at Vendome, where he stayed another seven years, 
 going through, according to his own account, the future ex- 
 periences and performances of Louis Lambert, but making no 
 reputation for himself in the ordinary school course. If, how- 
 ever, he would not work in his teacher's way, he overworked 
 himself in his own by devouring books ; and was sent home 
 at fourteen in such a state of health that his grandmother 
 (who, after the French fashion, was living with her daughter 
 and son-in-law), ejaculated, "And this is the way the college 
 returns the fine children we send her!" It would seem, 
 indeed, that after making all due allowance for grand- 
 motherly and sisterly partiality, Balzac was actually a very 
 good-looking boy and young man, though the portraits of 
 him in later life may not satisfy the more romantic expecta- 
 tions of his admirers. He must have had at all times eyes 
 full of character, perhaps the only feature that never fails in 
 men of intellectual eminence ; but he certainly does not seem 
 to have been in his manhood either exactly handsome or ex- 
 actly (to use a foolish-sounding term which yet has no exact 
 equivalent of better sound) "distinguished-looking." But 
 the portraits of the middle of the century are, as a rule, 
 rather wanting in this characteristic when compared with 
 those of its first and last periods. 
 
 For a short time he was left pretty much to himself, and 
 recovered rapidly. But late in 1814 a change of official 
 duties removed the Balzacs to Paris, and when they had estab- 
 lished themselves in the famous old bourgeois quarter of the
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC. xv 
 
 Marais, Honore was sent to divers private tutors or private 
 schools till he had "finished his classes " in 1816 at the age 
 of seventeen and a half. Then he attended lectures at the 
 Sorbonne, where Villemain, Guizot aud Cousin were lectur- 
 ing, and heard them, as his sister tells us, enthusiastically, 
 though there are probably no three writers of any considera- 
 ble repute in the history of French literature who stand fur- 
 ther apart from Balzac. For all three made and kept their 
 fame by spirited and agreeable generalizations and expatia- 
 tions, as different as possible from the savage labor of observa- 
 tion on the one hand and the gigantic developments of 
 imagination on the other, which were to compose Balzac's 
 appeal. His father destined him for the law ; and for three 
 years more he dutifully attended the offices of an attorney 
 and a notary, besides going through the necessary lectures 
 and examinations. All these trials he seems to have passed, 
 if not brilliantly, yet sufficiently. 
 
 And then came the inevitable crisis, which was of an un- 
 usually severe nature. A notary, who was a friend of the 
 elder Balzac and owed him some gratitude, offered not merely 
 to take Honore into his office, but to allow him to succeed 
 to his business, which was a very good one, in a few years on 
 very favorable terms. Most fathers, and nearly all French 
 fathers, would have jumped at this ; and it so happened that 
 about the same time M. de Balzac was undergoing that un- 
 pleasant process of compulsory retirement which his son has 
 described in one of the best passages of the " Works of His 
 Youth," * the opening scene of " Argow le Pirate." It does 
 not appear that Honore had revolted during his probation 
 indeed he is said, and we can easily believe it from his books, 
 to have acquired a very solid knowledge of law, especially in 
 bankruptcy matters, of which he was himself to have a very 
 close shave in future. A solicitor, indeed, told Laure de 
 Balzac that he found "Cesar Birotteau," a kind of " Balzac on 
 
 * CEuvres de Jeunnesse.
 
 xvi BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 Bankruptcy;" but this may have been only the solicitor's 
 fun. 
 
 It was no part of Honore's intentions to use this knowl- 
 edge however content he had been to acquire it in the 
 least interesting, if nearly the most profitable, of the branches 
 of the legal profession ; and he protested eloquently, and not 
 unsuccessfully, that he would be a man of letters and nothing 
 else. Not unsuccessfully ; but at the same time with distinctly 
 qualified success. He was not turned out of doors ; nor were 
 the supplies, as in Quinet's case only a few month's later, 
 absolutely withheld even for a short time. But his mother 
 (who seems to have been less placable than her husband) 
 thought that cutting them down to the lowest point might 
 have some effect. So, as the family at this time (April, 1819) 
 left Paris for a house some twenty miles out of it, she estab- 
 lished her eldest son in a garret furnished in the most Spartan 
 fashion, with a starvation allowance and an old woman to 
 look after him. He did not literally stay in this garret for 
 the ten years of his astonishing and unparalleled probation ; 
 but without too much metaphor it may be said to have been 
 his Wilderness, and his Wanderings in it to have lasted for 
 that very considerable time. 
 
 We know, in detail, very little of him during this period. 
 For the first years, between 1819 and 1822, we have a good 
 number of letters to Laure; between 1822 and 1829, when he 
 first made his mark, very few. He began, of course, with 
 verse, for which he never had the slightest vocation, and 
 almost equally of course with a tragedy. But by degrees, and 
 apparently pretty soon, he slipped into what was his vocation, 
 and like some, though not very many, great writers, at first 
 did little better in it than if it had not been his vocation at 
 all. The singular tentatives which, after being allowed for a 
 time a sort of outhouse in the structure of the " Comedie 
 Humaine," were excluded from the octavo " Edition Defini- 
 tive " five-and-twenty years ago, have never been the object
 
 HONORS DE BALZAC. xvii 
 
 of that exhaustive bibliographical and critical attention which 
 has been bestowed on those which follow them. They were 
 not absolutely unproductive we hear of sixty, eighty., a hun- 
 dred pounds being paid for them, though whether this was 
 the amount of Balzac's always sanguine expectations, or hard 
 cash actually handed over, we cannot say. They were very 
 numerous, though the reprints never extended to more than 
 ten. 
 
 It is generally agreed that these singular " Works of His 
 Youth" were of service to Balzac as exercises, and no doubt 
 they were so ; but something may be said on the other side. 
 They must have done a little, if not much, to lead him into 
 and confirm him in those defects of style and form which dis- 
 tinguish him so remarkably from most writers of his rank. 
 It very seldom happens when a very young man writes very 
 much, be it book-writing or journalism, without censure and 
 without " editing," that he does not at the same time get into 
 loose and slipshod habits. And we may set down to this 
 peculiar form of apprenticeship of Balzac's not merely his 
 failure ever to attain, except in passages and patches, a thor- 
 oughly great style, but also that extraordinary method of 
 composition which in after days cost him and his publishers 
 so much money. 
 
 However, if these ten years of probation taught him his 
 trade, they taught him also a most unfortunate avocation or 
 by-trade, which he never ceased to practise, or to try to prac- 
 tise, which never did him the very least good, and which not un- 
 frequently lost him much of the not too abundant gains which 
 he earned with such enormous labor. This was the "game 
 of speculation." His sister puts the tempter's part on an 
 unknown "neighbor," who advised him to try to procure 
 independence by a good speculation. Those who have read 
 Balzac's books and his letters will hardly think that he re- 
 quired much tempting. He began by trying to publish an 
 attempt which has never yet succeeded with a single man of
 
 xviii BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 letters, so far as we can remember. His scheme was not a 
 bad one ; indeed, it was one which has brought much money 
 to other pockets since, being neither more nor less than the 
 issuing of cheap one-volume editions of French classics. But 
 he had hardly any capital ; he was naturally quite ignorant of 
 his trade, and as naturally the established publishers and 
 booksellers boycotted him as an intruder. So his " Moliere " 
 and his " La Fontaine " are said to have been sold as waste 
 paper, though if any copies escaped they would probably 
 bring a very comfortable price now. Then, such capital as 
 he had having been borrowed, the lender, either out of good 
 nature or avarice, determined to throw the helve after the 
 hatchet. He partly advanced himself, and partly induced 
 Balzac's parents to advance more, in order to start the young 
 man as a printer, to which business Honore himself added 
 that of typefounder. The story was just the same : knowl- 
 edge and capital were again wanting, and though actual 
 bankruptcy was avoided, Balzac got out of the matter at the 
 cost not merely of giving the two businesses to a friend (in 
 whose hands they proved profitable), but of a margin of debt 
 from which he may be said never to have fully cleared 
 himself. 
 
 He had more than twenty years to live, but he never cured 
 himself of this hankering after a good speculation. Some- 
 times it was ordinary stock-exchange gambling ; but his 
 special weakness was, to do him justice, for schemes that had 
 something more grandiose in them. Thus, to finish here with 
 the subject, though the chapter of it never actually finished 
 till his death, he made years afterwards, when he was a suc- 
 cessful and a desperately busy author, a long, troublesome, 
 and costly journey to Sardinia to carry out a plan of resmelt- 
 ing the slag from Roman and other mines there. Thus in 
 his very latest days, when he was living at Vierzschovnia with 
 the Hanska and Mniszech household, he conceived the mag- 
 nificently absurd notion of cutting down twenty thousand
 
 HO NO RE DE BALZAC. xix 
 
 acres of oak wood in the Ukraine, and sending it by railway 
 right across Europe to be sold in France. And he was rather 
 reluctantly convinced that by the time a single log reached its 
 market the freight would have eaten up the value of a whole 
 plantation. 
 
 It was perhaps not entirely chance that the collapse of the 
 printing scheme, which took place in 1827, the ninth year of 
 the Wanderings in the Wilderness, coincided with or immedi- 
 ately preceded the conception of the book which was to give 
 Balzac passage into the Promised Land. This was " The 
 Chouans," called at its first issue, which differed considerably 
 from the present form, " The Last Chouan or Brittany in 
 1800" (later 1799). It was published in 1829 without any 
 of the previous anagrammatic pseudonyms, and whatever were 
 the reasons which had induced him to make his bow in person 
 to the public, they were well justified, for the book was a dis- 
 tinct success, if not a great one. It occupies a kind of mid- 
 dle position between the melodramatic romance of his nonage 
 and the strictly analytic romance-novel of his later time ; and, 
 though dealing with war and love chiefly, inclines in concep- 
 tion distinctly to the latter. Corentin, Hulot, and other per- 
 sonages of the actual Comedy (then by no means planned or 
 at least avowed) appear ; and though the influence of Scott is 
 in a way paramount on the surface, the under- work is quite 
 different, and the whole scheme of the loves of Montauran 
 and Mademoiselle de Verneuil is pure Balzac. 
 
 It would seem as if nothing but this sun of popular approval 
 had been wanted to make Balzac's genius burst out in full 
 bloom. Although we have a fair number of letters for the 
 ensuing years, it is not very easy to make out the exact 
 sequence of production of the marvelous harvest which his 
 genius gave. It is sufficient to say that in the three years 
 following 1829 there were actually published the charming 
 story of " The Sign of the Cat and the Racket," the " Wild 
 Ass' Skin," the most original and splendid, if not the most
 
 xx BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 finished and refined of all Balzac's novels, most of the short 
 "Philosophical Stories," of which some are among their 
 author's greatest triumphs, many other stories (chiefly included 
 in the "Scenes of Private Life,") and the beginning of the 
 "Droll Stories." 
 
 It is well known that from the time almost of his success as 
 a novelist he was given, like too many successful novelists 
 (not like Scott), to rather undignified and foolish attacks on 
 critics. The explanation may or may not be found in the 
 fact that we have abundant critical work of his, and that it is 
 nearly all bad. Now and then we have an acute remark in 
 his own special sphere ; but as a rule he cannot be compli- 
 mented on these performances, and when he was half-way 
 through his career this critical tendency of his culminated in 
 the unlucky Revue Parisienne, which he wrote almost entirely 
 himself, with slight assistance from his friends, MM. de 
 Belloy and de Grammont. It covers a wide range, but the 
 literary part of it is considerable, and this part contains that 
 memorable and disastrous attack on Sainte-Beuve, for which 
 the critic afterwards took a magnanimous revenge in his 
 obituary chat. Although the thing is not quite unex- 
 ampled, it is not easily to be surpassed in the blind fury of its 
 abuse. Sainte-Beuve was by no means invulnerable, and an 
 anti-critic who kept his head might have found, as M. de 
 Pontmartin and others did find, the joints in his armor. But 
 when, apropos of the " Port Royal " more especially, and of 
 the other works in general, Balzac informs us that Sainte- 
 Beuve's great characteristic as a writer is tediousness, tedi- 
 ousness knee-deep that his style is intolerable, that his 
 historical handling is like that of Gibbon, Hume and other 
 dull people, when he jeers at him for exhuming "The Holy 
 Mother," and scolds him for presuming to obscure the 
 glory of the " Sun King," the thing is partly ludicrous, 
 partly melancholy. One remembers that agreeable Bohemian, 
 who at a symposium once interrupted his host by crying,
 
 HONOR DE BALZAC. xxi 
 
 " Man o' the hoose, gie us less o' yer clack and mair o' yer 
 Jairman wine ! " Only in human respect and other, we 
 phrase it: " Oh, dear M. de Balzac ! give us more ' Eugenie 
 Grandets,' more ' Pere Goriots,' more ' Peaux de Chagrin,' 
 and don't talk about what you do not understand ! " 
 
 Balzac was a great politician also, and here, though he 
 may not have been very much more successful, he talked with 
 more knowledge and competence. He must have given him- 
 self immense trouble in reading the papers, foreign as well as 
 French ; he had really mastered a good deal of the political 
 religion of a French publicist. It is curious to read, sixty 
 years after date, his grave assertion that " France should make 
 a conquest of Madagascar," and with certain very pardonable 
 defects (such as his Anglophobia), his politics may be pro- 
 nounced not unintelligent and not ungenerous, though some- 
 what inconsistent and not very distinctly traceable to any 
 coherent theory. As for the Anglophobia, the Englishman 
 who thinks the less of him for that must have very poor and 
 unhappy brains. A Frenchman who does not more or 
 less hate and fear England, an Englishman who does not 
 regard France with a more or less good-humored impatience, 
 is usually " either a god or a beast," as Aristotle saith. Bal- 
 zac began with an odd but not unintelligible compound, 
 something like Hugo's, of Napoleonism and Royalism. In 
 1824, when he was still in the shades of anonymity, he wrote 
 and published two by no means despicable pamphlets in favor 
 of primogeniture and the Jesuits, the latter of which was 
 reprinted in 1880 at the last Jesuitical Congress in France. 
 His "Letters on Paris," in 1830-31, and his "France and 
 the Foreigner," in 1836, are two considerable series of letters 
 from " Our Own Correspondent," handling the affairs of the 
 world with boldness and industry if not invariably with wis- 
 dom. They rather suggest (as does the later Revue Parisicnnc 
 still more) the political writing of the age of Anne in Eng- 
 land, and perhaps a little later, when "the wits" handled
 
 xxii BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 politics and society, literature and things in general with 
 unquestioned competence and an easy universality. 
 
 Besides this work in books, pamphlets, etc., Balzac, as has 
 been said, did a certain amount of journalism, especially in 
 the Caricature, his performances including, we regret to say, 
 more than one puff of his own work; and in this, as well as 
 by the success of "The Chouans," he became known about 
 1830 to a much wider circle, both of literary and of private 
 acquaintance. It cannot indeed be said that he ever mixed 
 much in society ; it was impossible that he should do so, con- 
 sidering the vast amount of work he did and the manner in 
 which he did it. This subject, like that of his speculations, 
 may be better finished off in a single passage than dealt with 
 by scattered indications here and there. He was not one of 
 those men who can do work by fits and starts in the intervals 
 of business or of amusement ; nor was he one who, like Scott, 
 could work very rapidly. It is true that he often achieved 
 immense quantities of work (subject to a caution to be given 
 presently) in a very few days, but then his working day was 
 of the most peculiar character. He could not bear disturb- 
 ance ; he wrote (as probably most people do) best at night, 
 and he could not work at all after heavy meals. His favorite 
 plan (varied sometimes in detail) was therefore to dine lightly 
 about five or six, then to go to bed and sleep till eleven, 
 twelve, or one, and then to get up, and with the help only of 
 coffee (which he drank very strong and in enormous quanti- 
 ties) to work for indefinite stretches of time into the morning 
 or afternoon of the next day. He speaks of a sixteen hours' 
 day as a not uncommon shift or spell of work, and almost a 
 regular one with him ; and on one occasion he avers that in 
 the course of forty-eight hours he took but three of rest, 
 working for twenty-two hours and a half continuously on each 
 side thereof. In such spells, supposing reasonable facility of 
 composition, and mechanical power in the hand to keep going 
 all the time, an enormous amount can of course be accom-
 
 HONORS DE BALZAC. xxiii 
 
 plished. A thousand words an hour is anything but an extra- 
 ordinary rate of writing, and fifteen hundred by no means 
 unheard of with persons who do not write rubbish. 
 
 The references to this subject in Balzac's letters are very 
 numerous; but it is not easy to extract very definite informa- 
 tion from them. It would be not only impolite but incorrect 
 to charge him with unveracity. But the very heat of imagi- 
 nation which enabled him to produce his work created a sort 
 of mirage, through which he seems always to have regarded 
 it ; and in writing to publishers, editors, creditors, and even 
 his own family, it was too obviously his interest to make the 
 most of his labor, his projects, and his performance. Even 
 his contemporary, though elder, Southey, the hardest-working 
 and the most scrupulously honest man of letters in England 
 who could pretend to genius, seems constantly to have exag- 
 gerated the idea of what he could perform, if not of what he 
 had performed in a given time. The most definite statement 
 of Balzac's is one which claims the second number of "Sur 
 Catherine de Medicis" (" La Confidence des Ruggieri ") as 
 the production of a single night, and not one of the most 
 extravagant of his nights. Now, " La Confidence des Rug- 
 gieri " fills, in the small edition, eighty pages of nearer four 
 hundred than three hundred words each, or some thirty thou- 
 . sand words in all. Nobody in the longest of nights could 
 manage that, except by dictating it to shorthand clerks. But 
 in the very context of this assertion Balzac assigns a much 
 longer period to the correction than to the composition, and 
 this brings us to one of the most curious and one of the most 
 famous points of his literary history. 
 
 Some doubts have been thrown on the most minute account 
 of his ways of composition which we have, that of the pub- 
 lisher Werdet. But there is too great a consensus of evidence 
 as to his general system to make the received description of 
 it doubtful. According to this, the first draft of Balzac's 
 work never presented it in anything like fulness, and some-
 
 xxiv BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 times did not amount to a quarter of the bulk finally pub- 
 lished. This being returned to him from the printer " in 
 slip" on sheets with very large margins, he would set to 
 work on the correction ; that is to say, on the practical re- 
 writing of the thing, with excisions, alterations, and above 
 all, additions. A " revise " being executed, he would attack 
 this revise in the same manner, and not unfrequently more 
 than once, so that the expenses of mere composition and 
 correction of the press were enormously heavy (so heavy as to 
 eat into not merely his publisher's but his own profits), and 
 that the last state of the book, when published, was something 
 utterly different from its first state in manuscript. And it 
 will be obvious that if anything like this was usual with him, 
 it is quite impossible to judge his actual rapidity of composi- 
 tion by the extent of the published result. 
 
 However this may be (and it is at least certain that in the 
 years above referred to he must have worked his very hardest, 
 even if some of the work then published had been more or 
 less excogitated and begun during the wilderness period), he 
 certainly so far left his eremitical habits as to become ac- 
 quainted with most of the great men of letters of the early 
 thirties, and also with certain ladies of more or less high 
 rank, who were to supply, if not exactly the full models, the 
 texts and starting-points for some of the most interesting 
 figures of the "Comedie." He knew Victor Hugo, but 
 certainly not at this time intimately ; for as late as 1839 the 
 letter in which he writes to Hugo to come and breakfast with 
 him at Les Jardies (with interesting and minute directions 
 how to find that frail abode of genius) is couched in anything 
 but the tone of a familiar friendship. The letters to Beyle 
 of about the same date are also incompatible with intimate 
 knowledge. Nodier (after some contrary expressions) he 
 seems to have regarded as most good people did regard that 
 true man of letters and charming tale-teller ; while among the 
 younger generation Theophile Gautier and Charles de Bernard*
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC. xxv 
 
 as well as Gozlan and others, were his real and constant 
 friends. But he does not figure frequently or eminently in 
 any of the genuine gossip of the time as a haunter of literary 
 circles, and it is very nearly certain that the assiduity with 
 which some of his heroes attend salons and clubs had no 
 counterpart in his own life. In the first place he was too 
 busy ; in the second he would not have been at home there. 
 Like the young gentleman in Punch, who " did not read 
 books but wrote them," though in no satiric sense, he felt it 
 his business not to frequent society but to create it. 
 
 He was, however, aided in the task of creation by the ladies 
 already spoken of, who were fairly numerous and of divers 
 degrees. The most constant after his sister Laure was that 
 sister's schoolfellow, Madame Zulma Carraud, the wife of a 
 military official at Angouleme and the possessor of a small 
 country estate at Frapesle, near Tours. At both of these 
 places Balzac, till he was a very great man, was a constant 
 visitor, and with Madame Carraud he kept up for years a 
 correspondence which has been held to be merely friendly, 
 and which was certainly in the vulgar sense innocent, but 
 which seems to us to be tinged with something of that feeling, 
 midway between love and friendship, which appears in Scott's 
 letters to Lady Abercorn, and which is probably not so rare 
 as some think. Madame de Berny, another family friend of 
 higher rank, was the prototype of most of his "angelic" 
 characters, but she died in 1836. He knew the Duchess 
 d'Abrantes, otherwise Madame Junot, and Madame deGirardin, 
 otherwise Delphine Gay ; but neither seems to have exercised 
 much influence over him. It was different with another and 
 more authentic duchess, Madame de Castries, after whom he 
 dangled for a considerable time, who certainly first encour- 
 aged him and probably then snubbed him, and who is 
 thought to have been the model of his wickeder great 
 ladies. And it was comparatively early in the thirties that 
 he met the woman whom, after nearly twenty years,
 
 xxvi BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 he was at last to marry, getting his death in so doing, the 
 Polish Madame Hanska. These, with some relations of the 
 last named, especially her daughter, and with a certain 
 "Louise" an unknown who never ceased to be so were 
 Balzac's chief correspondents of the other sex, and as far 
 as is known, his chief friends in it. 
 
 About his life, without extravagant "padding" of guess- 
 work or of mere quotation and abstract of his letters, it 
 would be not so much difficult as impossible to say much; 
 and accordingly it is a matter of fact that most lives of 
 Balzac, including all good ones, are rather critical than 
 narrative. From his real debut with "The Last Chouan " 
 to his departure for Poland on the long visit, or brace of 
 visits, from which he returned finally to die, this life con- 
 sisted solely of work. One of his earliest utterances, " I must 
 keep digging away," was his motto to the very last, varied 
 only by a certain amount of traveling. Balzac was always 
 a considerable traveler ; indeed if he had not been so his 
 constitution would probably have broken down long before 
 it actually did ; and the expense of these voyagings (though 
 by his own account he generally conducted his affairs with 
 the most rigid economy), together with the interruption to 
 his work which they occasioned, entered no doubt for some- 
 thing into his money difficulties. He would go to Baden 
 or Vienna for a day's sight of Madame Hanska; his Sar- 
 dinian visit has been already noted ; and as a specimen of 
 others it may be mentioned that he once journeyed from 
 Paris to Besancon, then from Besancon right across France 
 to Angouleme, and then back to Paris on some business of 
 selecting paper for one of the editions of his books, which 
 his publishers would probably have done much better and at 
 much less expense. 
 
 Still his actual receipts were surprisingly small, partly, it 
 may be, owing to his expensive habits of composition, but 
 far more, according to his own account, because of the
 
 HO NO RE DE BALZAC. xxvii 
 
 Belgian piracies, from which all popular French authors 
 suffered till the government of Napoleon the Third managed 
 to put a stop to them. He also lived in such a thick atmos- 
 phere of bills and advances and cross-claims on and by his 
 publishers, that even if there were more documents than there 
 are it would be exceedingly difficult to get at facts which are, 
 after all, not very important. He never seems to have been 
 paid much more than $2500 for the newspaper publication 
 (the most valuable by far because the pirates could not inter- 
 fere with its profits) of any one of his novels. And to 
 expensive fashions of composition and complicated accounts, 
 a steady back-drag of debt and the rest, must be added the 
 very delightful, and to a novelist not useless, but very expen- 
 sive mania of the collector. Balzac had a genuine taste for, 
 and thought himself a genuine connoisseur in, pictures, 
 sculpture, and objects of art of all kinds, old and new ; and 
 though prices in his day were not what they are in these, a 
 great deal of money must have run through his hands in this 
 way. He calculated the value of the contents of the house, 
 which in his last days he furnished with such loving care for 
 his wife, and which turned out to be a chamber rather of 
 death than of marriage, at some $80,000. But part of this 
 was of Madame Hanska's own purchasing, and there were 
 offsets of indebtedness against it almost to the last. In 
 short, though during the last twenty years of his life such 
 actual " want of pence " as vexed him was not due, as it had 
 been earlier, to the fact that the pence refused to come 
 in, but only to imprudent management of them, it certainly 
 cannot be said that Honore de Balzac, the most desperately 
 hard worker in all literature for such time as was allotted 
 him, and perhaps the man of greatest genius who was ever a 
 desperately hard worker, falsified that most uncomfortable but 
 truest of proverbs, " Hard work never made money." 
 
 If, however, he was but scantily rewarded with the money 
 for which he had a craving (not absolutely devoid of a touch
 
 xxviii BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 of genuine avarice, but consisting chiefly of the artist's desire 
 for pleasant and beautiful things, and partly presenting a 
 variety or phase of the grandiose imagination, which was his 
 ruling characteristic), Balzac had plenty of the fame, for 
 which he cared quite as much as he cared for money. Per- 
 haps no writer except Voltaire and Goethe earlier made such 
 a really European reputation ; and his books were of a kind 
 to be more widely read by the general public than either 
 Goethe's or Voltaire's. In England, this popularity was, for 
 obvious reasons, rather less than elsewhere. The respectful 
 vogue which French literature had had in England in the 
 eighteenth century had ceased, owing partly to the national 
 enmity revived and fostered by the great war, and partly to 
 the growth of a fresh and magnificent literature at home dur- 
 ing the first thirty years of the nineteenth. But Balzac could 
 not fail to be read almost at once by the lettered ; and he 
 was translated pretty early, though not perhaps to any great 
 extent. 
 
 It was in England, it may be said, that by far his greatest 
 follower appeared, and appeared very shortly. For it would 
 be absurd in the most bigoted admirer of Thackeray to deny 
 that the author of "Vanity Fair," who was in Paris and 
 narrowly watching French literature and French life at the 
 very time of Balzac's most exuberant flourishing and educa- 
 tion, owed something to the author of "Father Goriot." 
 There was no copying or imitation ; the lessons taught by 
 Balzac were too much blended with those of native masters, 
 such as Fielding, too much informed and transformed by indi- 
 vidual genius. Some may think it is a point at issue not 
 merely between Frenchmen and Englishmen, but between 
 good judges of both nations on each side that in absolute 
 veracity and likeness to life, in limiting the operation of the 
 inner consciousness on the outward observation to strictly 
 artistic scale, Thackeray excelled Balzac as far as he fell short 
 of him in the powers of the seer and in the gigantic imagina-
 
 HO NO RE DE BALZAC. xxix 
 
 tion of the prophet. But the relations of pupil and master in 
 at least some degree are not deniable. 
 
 So things went on in light and in shade, in home-keeping 
 and in travel, in debts and in earnings, but always in work of 
 some kind or another, for eighteen years from the turning 
 point of 1829. By degrees he gained fame and ceased to be 
 in the most pressing want of money, Balzac left off to some 
 extent, though never entirely, those miscellaneous writings 
 reviews (including puffs), comic or general sketches, political 
 diatribes, "physiologies" and the like which with his dis- 
 carded prefaces and much other interesting matter, were at 
 last, not many years ago, included in four stout volumes of 
 the " Edition Definitive." With the exception of the " Physi- 
 ologies " (a sort of short satiric analysi? of this or that class, 
 character or personage), which were very popular in the reign 
 of Louis Philippe in France, and which Albert Smith and 
 others introduced into England, Balzac did not do any of this 
 miscellaneous work extremely well. Very shrewd observations 
 are to be found in his reviews, for instance, his indication, in 
 reviewing La Touche's " Fragoletta," of that common fault 
 of ambitious novels, a sort of woolly and '" ungraspable " 
 looseness of construction and story, which const: ntly bewilders 
 the reader as to what is going on. But, as a rule> he was think- 
 ing too much of his own work and his own principles of 
 working to enter very thoroughly into the work of others. His 
 politics, those of a moderate but decided Royalist and Con- 
 servative, were, as has been said, intelligent in theory, but in 
 practice a little distinguished by that neglect of actual busi- 
 ness detail which has been noticed in his speculations. 
 
 At last, in the summer of 1847, it seemed as if the Rachel 
 for whom he had served nearly if not quite the full fourteen 
 years already, and whose husband had long been out of the 
 way, would at last grant herself to him. He was invited to 
 Vierzschovnia in the Ukraine, the seat of Madame Hanska, or 
 in strictness of her son-in-law, Count Georges Mniszech ; and
 
 xxx BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 as the visit was apparently for no restricted period, and Bal- 
 zac's pretensions to the lady's hand were notorious, it might 
 have seemed that he was as good as accepted. But to assume 
 this would have been to mistake what perhaps the greatest 
 creation of Balzac's great English contemporary and coun- 
 terpart on the one side, as Thackeray was his contemporary 
 and counterpart on the other, considered to be the malignity 
 of widows. What the reasons were which made Madame 
 Hanska delay so long in doing what she did at last, and might 
 just as well, it would seem, have done years before, is not 
 certainly known, and it would be quite unprofitable to discuss 
 them. But it was on the 8th of October, 1847, tnat Balzac 
 first wrote to his sister from Vierzschovnia, and it was not till 
 the i4th of March, 1850, that, " in the parish church of Saint 
 Barbara at Berditchef, by the Count Abbe Czarski, represent- 
 ing the Bishop of Jitomir [this as characteristic of Balzac in 
 one way as what follows is in another], a Madame Eve de 
 Balzac, born Countess Rzevuska, or a Madame Honore de 
 Balzac or a Madame de Balzac the elder " came into existence. 
 It does not appear that Balzac was exactly unhappy during 
 this huge probation, which was broken by one short visit to 
 Paris. The interest of uncertainty was probably much for his 
 ardent and unquiet spirit, and though he did very little literary 
 work for him, one may suspect that he would not have done 
 very much if he had stayed at Paris, for signs of exhaustion, 
 not of genius but of physical power, had shown themselves 
 before he left home. But it is not unjust or cruel to say that 
 by the delay " Madame Eve de Balzac " (her actual baptismal 
 name was Evelina) practically killed her husband. These 
 winters in the severe climate of Russian Poland were abso- 
 lutely fatal to a constitution, and especially to lungs already 
 deeply affected. At Vierzschovnia itself he had illnesses, from 
 which he narrowly escaped with life, before the marriage; his 
 heart broke down after it ; and he and his wife did not reach 
 Paris till the end of May. Less than three months afterwards,
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC. xxxi 
 
 on the i8th of August, he died, having been visited on the 
 very day of his death in the Paradise of bric-a-brac which he 
 had created for his Eve in the Rue Fortunee a name too 
 provocative of Nemesis by Victor Hugo, the chief maker in 
 verse as he himself was the chief maker in prose of France. 
 He was buried at Pere la Chaise. The after fortunes of his 
 house and its occupants were not happy ; but they do not 
 concern us. 
 
 In person Balzac was a typical Frenchman, as indeed he 
 was in most ways. From his portraits there would seem to 
 have been more force and address than distinction or refine- 
 ment in his appearance, but, as has been already observed, his 
 period was one ungrateful to the iconographer. His charac- 
 ter, not as a writer, but as a man, must occupy us a little 
 longer. For some considerable time indeed it may be said 
 until the publication of his letters it was not very favorably 
 judged on the whole. We may, of course, dismiss the childish 
 scandals (arising, as usual, from clumsy or malevolent misin- 
 terpretation), which gave rise to caricatures of him such as 
 that of which we read, representing him in a monk's dress at 
 a table covered with bottles and supporting a young person 
 on his knee, the whole garnished with the epigraph : " Scenes 
 of Hidden Life." They seem to have given him, personally, 
 a very unnecessary annoyance, and indeed he was always 
 rather sensitive to critcism. This kind of stupid libel will 
 never cease to be devised by the envious, swallowed by the 
 vulgar, and simply neglected by the wise. But Balzac's 
 peculiarities, both of life and of work, lent themselves rather 
 fatally to a subtler misconstruction which he also anticipated 
 and tried to remove, but which took a far stronger hold. He 
 was represented and in the absence of any intimate male 
 friends to contradict the representation, it was certain to 
 obtain some currency as in his artistic person a sardonic 
 libeler of mankind, who cared only to take foibles and vices 
 for his subjects, and who either left goodness and virtue out
 
 xxxii BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 of sight altogether, or represented them as the qualities of 
 fools. In private life he was held up as at the best a self- 
 centred egotist who cared for nothing but himself and his own 
 work, capable of interrupting one friend who told him of the 
 death of a sister by a suggestion that they should change the 
 subject and talk of "something real, of ' Eugenie Grandet,' ' 
 and of levying a fifty percent, commission on another who 
 had written a critical notice of his, Balzac's life and works. 
 With the first of these charges he himself, on different occa- 
 sions, rather vainly endeavored to grapple, once drawing up 
 an elaborate list of his virtuous and vicious women, and show- 
 ing that the former outnumbered the latter ; and, again, labor- 
 ing (with that curious lack of sense of humor which distin- 
 guishes of all Frenchmen but a very few, and distinguished him 
 eminently) to show that though no doubt it is very difficult 
 to make virtuous persons interesting, he, Honore de Balzac, 
 had attempted it, and succeeded in it, on a quite surprising 
 number of occasions. 
 
 The fact is that if he had handled this last matter rather 
 more lightly his answer would have been a sufficient one, and 
 that in any case the charge is not worth answering. It does 
 not lie against the whole of his work ; and if it lay as con- 
 clusively as it does against Swift's, it would not necessarily 
 matter. To the artist in analysis as opposed to the romance- 
 writer, folly always, and villainy sometimes, does supply a 
 much better subject than virtuous success, and if he makes his 
 fools and his villains lifelike and supplies them with a fair 
 contrast of better things, there is nothing more to be said. 
 He will not, indeed, be a Shakespeare, or a Dante, or even a 
 Scott ; but we may be very well satisfied with him as a Field- 
 ing, a Thackeray, or a Balzac. His education in a lawyer's 
 office, the accursed advice about the bonne speculation, and 
 his constant straitenings for money, will account for his some- 
 times looking after the main chance rather too narrowly ; and 
 as for the "Eugenie Grandet" story it requires no great
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC. xxxiii 
 
 stretch of charity or comprehension to see in it nothing more 
 than the awkward, very easily misconstrued, but not neces- 
 sarily in the least heartless or brutal attempt of a rather absent 
 and very much self-centred recluse absorbed in one subject, 
 to get his interlocutor as well as himself out of painful and 
 useless dwelling on sorrowful matters. Self-centred and self- 
 absorbed Balzac no doubt was ; he could not have lived his 
 life or produced his work if he had been anything else. And 
 it must be remembered that he owed extremely little to 
 others ; that he had the independence as well as the isolation 
 of the self-centred ; that he never spunged or fawned on a 
 great man, or wronged others of what was due to them. The 
 only really unpleasant thing about him, perhaps due to ignor- 
 ance of all sides of the matter, is a slight touch of snobbish- 
 ness now and then, especially in those late letters from 
 Vierzschovnia to Madame de Balzac and Madame Surville, 
 in which, while inundating his mother and sister with com- 
 missions and requests for service, he points out to them what 
 great people the Hanskas and Mniszechs are, what infinite 
 honor and profit it will be to be connected with them, and 
 how desirable it is to keep struggling engineer brothers-in-law 
 and ne'er-do-well brothers in the colonies out of sight lest 
 they should disgust the magnates. 
 
 But these are "sma' sums, sma' sums," as Bailie Jarvie 
 says ; and smallness of any kind has, whatever it may have 
 to do with Balzac the man, nothing to do with Balzac the 
 writer. With him as with some others, but not as with the 
 larger number, the sense of greatness increases the longer 
 and the more fully he is studied. He resembles Goethe 
 more than any other man of letters certainly more than 
 any other of the present century in having done work 
 which is very frequently, if not even commonly, faulty, and 
 in yet requiring that his work shall be known as a whole. 
 His appeal is cumulative ; it repeats itself on each occasion 
 with a slight difference, and though there may now and
 
 xxxiv BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 then be the same faults to be noticed, they are almost in- 
 variably accompanied, not merely by the same, but by fresh 
 merits. 
 
 There are two things which it is more especially desirable to 
 keep constantly before one in reading Balzac two tilings, 
 which, taken together, constitute his almost unique value, and 
 two things which not a few critics have failed to take together 
 in him, being under the impression that the one excludes the 
 other, and that to admit the other is tantamount to a denial 
 of the one. These two things are, first, an immense attention 
 to detail, sometimes observed, sometimes invented or im- 
 agined ; and, secondly, a faculty of regarding these details 
 through a mental lens or arrangement of lenses almost peculiar 
 to himself, which at once combines, enlarges, and invests them 
 with a peculiar magical halo or mirage. The two thousand 
 personages of the " Comedie Humaine " are, for the most 
 part, "signaled," as the French official word has it, marked 
 and denoted by the minutest traits of character, gesture, gait, 
 clothing, abode, what not; the transactions recorded are very 
 often (more often indeed than not) given with a scrupulous 
 and microscopic accuracy of reporting which no detective 
 could outdo. Defoe is not more circumstantial in detail of 
 fact than Balzac ; Richardson is hardly more prodigal of char- 
 acter-stroke. Yet a very large proportion of these characters, 
 of these circumstances, are evidently things invented or im- 
 agined, not observed. And in addition to this the artist's 
 magic glass, his Balzacian speculum, if we may so say (for 
 none else has ever had it) transform even the most rigid ob- 
 servation into something flickering and fanciful, the outline as 
 of shadows on the wall, not the precise contour of etching or 
 of the camera. 
 
 It is curious, but not unexampled, that both Balzac himself 
 when he struggled in argument with his critics and those of 
 his partisans who have been most jealously devoted to him, 
 have usually tried to exalt the first and less remarkable of these
 
 HONOR& DE BALZAC. xxxv 
 
 gifts over the second and infinitely more remarkable. Balzac 
 protested strenuously against the use of the word "gigan- 
 tesque " in reference to his work; and of course it is susceptible 
 of an unhandsome innuendo. But if we leave that innuendo 
 aside, if we adopt the same reflection that " gigantesque " 
 does not exclude "gigantic," or assert a constant failure of 
 greatness, but only indicates that the magnifying process is 
 carried on with a certain indiscriminateness, we shall find 
 none, I think, which so thoroughly well describes him. 
 
 The effect of this singular combination of qualities, appar- 
 ently the most opposite, may be partly anticipated, but not 
 quite. It results occasionally in a certain shortcoming as 
 regards the very truth, absolute artistic truth to nature. Those 
 who would range Balzac in point of such artistic veracity on 
 a level with poetical and universal realists like Shakespeare 
 and Dante, or prosaic and particular realists like Thackeray 
 and Fielding, seem not only to be utterly wrong but to pay 
 their idol the worst of all compliments, that of ignoring his 
 own special qualifications. The province of Balzac may not 
 be I do not think it is identical, much less coextensive, 
 with that of nature. But it is his own a partly real, partly 
 fantastic region, where the lights, the shades, the dimensions, 
 and physical laws are slightly different from those of this 
 world of ours, but with which, owing to things it has in com- 
 mon with that world, we are able to sympathize, which we 
 can traverse and comprehend. Every now and then the artist 
 uses his observing faculty more, and his magnifying and (since 
 there is no better word) distorting lens less ; every now and 
 then he reverses the proportion. Some tastes will like him 
 best in the one stage ; some in the other ; the happier con- 
 stituted will like him best in both. These latter declined to 
 put "Eugenie Grandet " above the " Wild Ass' Skin," or 
 " Father Goriot " above the wonderful handful of tales which 
 includes "The Quest of the Absolute" and "The Unknown 
 Masterpiece," though they will no doubt recognize that even
 
 xxxvi BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 in the two first named members of these pairs of the Bal- 
 zacian quality, that of magnifying and rendering grandiose, 
 is present, and that the martyrdom of Eugenie, the avarice 
 of her father, the blind self-devotion of Goriot to his thank- 
 less and worthless children, would not be what they are if they 
 were seen through a perfectly achromatic and normal medium. 
 This specially Balzacian quality is unique. It is like it 
 may almost be said to be the poetic imagination, present in 
 magnificent volume and degree, but in some miraculous way 
 deprived and sterilized of the specially poetical quality. By 
 this we do not of course mean that Balzac did not write in 
 verse ; we have a few verses of his, and they are pretty poor, 
 but that is neither here nor there. The difference between 
 Balzac and a great poet lies not in the fact that the one fills 
 the whole page with printed words, and the other only a part 
 of it but in something else. If we could put that something 
 else into distinct words we should therein attain the philoso- 
 pher's stone, the elixir of life, the first cause, the great 
 secret, not merely of criticism but of all things. It might 
 be possible to coast about it, to hint at it, by adumbrations 
 and in consequences. But it is better and really more helpful 
 to face the difficulty boldly, and to say that Balzac, approach- 
 ing a great poet nearer perhaps than any other prose writer in 
 any language, is distinguished from one by the absence of the 
 very last touch, the finally constituting quiddity, which makes 
 a great poet different from Balzac. 
 
 Now, when we make this comparison, it is of the first in- 
 terest to remember and it is one of the uses of the compari- 
 son, that it suggests the remembrance of the fact that the 
 great poets have usually been themselves extremely exact ob- 
 servers of detail. It has not made them great poets ; but 
 they would not be great poets without it. And when Eugenie 
 Grandet starts from the little wooden bench at the reference to 
 it in her scoundrelly cousin's letter (to take only one instance 
 out of a thousand), we see in Balzac the same observation.
 
 HO NO RE DE BALZAC. xxxvii 
 
 subject to the limitations just mentioned, that we see in Dante 
 and Shakespeare, in Chaucer and Tennyson. But the great 
 poets do not as a rule accumulate detail. Balzac does, and 
 from his very accumulation he manages to derive that singular 
 gigantesque vagueness differing from poetic vague, but rank- 
 ing next to it which we have here ventured to note as his 
 distinguishing quality. He bewilders us a very little by it, 
 and he gives us the impression that he has slightly bewildered 
 himself. But the compensations of the bewilderment are 
 large. 
 
 For in this labyrinth and whirl of things, in this heat and 
 hurry of observation and imagination, the special intoxication 
 of Balzac consists. Every great artist has his own means of 
 producing this intoxication, and it differs in result like the 
 stimulus of beauty or of wine. Those persons who are unfor- 
 tunate enough to see in Balzac little or nothing but an inge- 
 nious piler-up of careful strokes a man of science taking his 
 human documents and classing them after an orderly fashion 
 in portfolio and deed-box must miss this intoxication alto- 
 gether. It is much more agreeable as well as much more 
 accurate to see in the manufacture of the "Comedie" the 
 process of a Cyclopean workshop the bustle, the hurry, the 
 glare and shadow, the steam and sparks of Vulcan ian forging. 
 The results, it is true, are by no means confused or disorderly 
 neither were those of the forges that worked under Lipari 
 but there certainly went much more to them than the dainty 
 fingering of a literary fretwork-maker or the dull rummagings 
 of a realist a la Zola. 
 
 In part no doubt, and in great part, the work of Balzac is 
 dream-stuff rather than life-stuff, and it is all the better for 
 that. What is better than dreams ? But the coherence of 
 his visions, their bulk, their solidity, the way in which they 
 return to us and we return to them, make them such dream- 
 stuff as there is all too little of in this world. If it is true 
 that evil on the whole predominates over good in the vision
 
 xxxviii BRIEF SKETCH OF 
 
 of this " Voyant," as Philarete Chasles so justly called him 
 (and we think it does, though not to the same extent as we 
 once thought), two very respectable, and in one case very 
 large, though somewhat opposed divisions of mankind, the 
 philosophic pessimist and the convinced and consistent Chris- 
 tian believer, will tell us that this is at least not one of the 
 points in which it is unfaithful to life. If the author is closer 
 and more faithful in his study of meanness and vice than in 
 his studies of nobility and virtue, the blame is due at least as 
 much to his models as to himself. If, as we fear must be 
 confessed, he has seldom succeeded in combining a really 
 passionate with a really noble conception of love, very few 
 of his countrymen have been more fortunate in that respect. 
 If in some of his types his journalists, his married women, 
 and others he seems to have sacrificed to conventions, let us 
 remember that those who know attribute to his conventions 
 such a powerful if not altogether such a holy influence that 
 two generations of the people he painted have actually lived 
 more and more up to his painting of them. 
 
 And last of all, but also greatest, has to be considered the 
 immensity of his imaginative achievement, the huge space 
 that he has filled for us with vivid creation, the range of 
 amusement, of instruction, of (after a fashion) edification 
 which he has thrown open for us to walk in. It is possible 
 that he himself and others more or less well-meaningly, 
 though more or less maladroitly, following his lead, may have 
 exaggerated the coherence and the architectural design of the 
 " Comedie." But it has coherence and it has design; nor 
 shall we find anything exactly to parallel it. In mere bulk 
 the " Comedie " probably, if not certainly, exceeds the pro- 
 duction of any novelist of the first class in any kind of fiction 
 except Dumas, and with Dumas, for various and well-known 
 reasons, there is no possibility of comparing it. All others 
 yield in bulk ; all in a certain concentration and intensity ; 
 none even aims at anything like the same system and com-
 
 HONORE DE BALZAC. xxxix 
 
 pleteness. It must be remembered that owing to shortness 
 of life, lateness of beginning, and the diversion of the author 
 to other work, the " Comedie " is the production, and not 
 the sole production, of some seventeen or eighteen years at 
 most. Not a volume of it, for all that failure to reach the 
 completes! perfection in form and style which has been 
 acknowledged, can be accused of thinness, of scamped work, 
 of mere repetition, of mere cobbling up. Every one bears 
 the marks of steady and ferocious labor, as well as of the 
 genius which had at last come where it had been so earnestly 
 called and had never gone away again. It is possible to 
 overpraise Balzac in parts or to mispraise him as a whole. 
 But so long as inappropriate and superfluous comparisons are 
 avoided and as his own excellence is recognized and appre- 
 ciated, it is scarcely possible to overestimate that excellence 
 in itself and for itself. He stands alone ; even with Dickens, 
 who is his nearest analogue, he shows far more points of 
 difference than of likeness. His vastness of bulk is not more 
 remarkable than his peculiarity of quality ; and when these 
 two things coincide in literature or elsewhere, then that in 
 which they coincide may be called, and must be called, 
 Great, without hesitation and without reserve.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 IN giving the general title of " The Comedie Humaine " to 
 a work begun nearly thirteen years since, it is necessary to 
 explain its motive, to relate its origin, and briefly sketch its 
 plan, while endeavoring to speak of these matters as though 
 I had no personal interest in them. This is not so difficult 
 as the public might imagine. Few works conduce to much 
 vanity; much labor conduces to great diffidence. This obser- 
 vation accounts for the study of their own works made by 
 Corneille, Moliere, and other great writers ; if it is impossible 
 to equal them in their fine conceptions, we may try to imitate 
 them in this feeling. 
 
 The idea of "The Comedie Humaine" was at first as a 
 dream to me, one of those impossible projects which we 
 caress and then let fly ; a chimera that gives us a glimpse of 
 its smiling woman's face, and forthwith spreads its wings and 
 returns to a heavenly realm of phantasy. But this chimera, 
 like many another, has become a reality; has its behests, its 
 tyranny, which must be obeyed. 
 
 The idea originated in a comparison between humanity 
 and animality. 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose that the great dispute which has 
 lately made a stir, between Cuvier and Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire, 
 arose from a scientific innovation. Unity of structure, under 
 other names, had occupied the greatest minds during the two 
 previous centuries. As we read the extraordinary writings of 
 the mystics who studied the sciences in their relation to infin- 
 ity, such as Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, and others, and the 
 works of the greatest authors on Natural History Leibnitz, 
 BufFon, Charles Bonnet, etc., we detect in the monads of Leib- 
 
 (xli)
 
 xlii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 nitz, in the organic molecules of Buffon, in the vegetative force 
 of Needham, in the correlation of similar organs of Charles 
 Bonnet who in 1760 was so bold as to write, "Animals 
 vegetate as plants do " we detect, I say, the rudiments of 
 the great law of self for self, which lies at the root of unity 
 of plan. There is but one animal. The Creator works on a 
 single model for every organized being. "The animal" is 
 elementary, and takes its external form, or, to be accurate, 
 the differences in its form, from the environment in which it 
 is obliged to develop. Zoological species are the result of these 
 differences. The announcement and defence of this system, 
 which is indeed in harmony with our preconceived ideas of 
 divine power, will be the eternal glory of Geoffroi Saint- 
 Hilaire, Cuvier's victorious opponent on this point of higher 
 science, whose triumph was hailed by Goethe in the last 
 article he wrote. 
 
 I, for my part, convinced of this scheme of nature long 
 before the discussion to which it has given rise, perceived that 
 in this respect society resembled nature. For does not society 
 modify man, according to the conditions in which he lives and 
 acts, into men as manifold as the species in zoology? The 
 differences between a soldier, an artisan, a man of business, a 
 lawyer, an idler, a student, a statesman, a merchant, a sailor, 
 a poet, a beggar, a priest, are as great, though not so easy to 
 define, as those between the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, 
 the shark, the seal, the sheep, etc. Thus social species have 
 always existed, and will always exist, just as there are zoolog- 
 ical species. If Buffon could produce a magnificent work by 
 attempting to represent in a book the whole realm of zoology, 
 was there not room for a work of the same kind on society ? 
 But the limits set by nature to the variations of animals have 
 no existence in society. When Buffon describes the lion, lie 
 dismisses the lioness with a few phrases ; but in society a wife 
 is not always the female of the male. There may be two per- 
 fectly dissimilar beings in one household. The wife of a
 
 INTRODUCTION. xliii 
 
 shopkeeper is sometimes worthy of a prince, and the wife of a 
 prince is often worthless compared with the wife of an artisan. 
 The social state has freaks which nature does not allow her- 
 self; it is nature plus society. The description of social 
 species would thus be at least double that of animal species, 
 merely in view of the two sexes. Then, among animals the 
 drama is limited; there is scarcely any confusion ; they turn 
 and rend each other that is all. Men, too, rend each other ; 
 but their greater or less intelligence makes the struggle far 
 more complicated. Though some savants do not yet admit 
 that the animal nature flows into human nature through an 
 immense tide of life, the grocer certainly becomes a peer, and 
 the noble sometimes sinks to the lowest social grade. Again, 
 Buffon found that life was extremely simple among animals. 
 Animals have little property, and neither arts nor sciences ; 
 while man, by a law that has yet to be sought, has a tendency 
 to express his culture, his thoughts, and his life in everything 
 he appropriates to his use. Though Leuwenhoek, Swammer- 
 dam, Spallanzani, Reaumur, Charles Bonnet, Miiller, Hallen 
 and other patient investigators have shown us how interesting 
 are the habits of animals, those of each kind are, at least to 
 our eyes, always and in every age alike ; whereas the dress, 
 the manners, the speech, the dwelling of a prince, a banker, 
 an artist, a citizen, a priest, and a pauper are absolutely 
 unlike, and change with every phase of civilization. 
 
 Hence the work to be written needed a threefold form 
 men, women, and things; that is to say, persons and the 
 material expression of their minds ; man, in short, and life. 
 
 As we read the dry and discouraging list of events called 
 history, who can have failed to note that the writers of all 
 periods, in Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, have forgotten 
 to give us the history of manners? The fragment of Pet- 
 ronius on the private life of the Romans excites rather than 
 satisfies our curiosity. It was from observing this great void 
 in the field of history that the Abbe Barthelemy devoted his
 
 xliv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 life to a reconstruction of Greek manners in "Le Jeune 
 Anacharsis." 
 
 But how could such a drama, with the four or five thousand 
 persons which a society offers, be made interesting ? How, 
 at the same time, please the poet, the philosopher, and the 
 masses who want both poetry and philosophy under striking 
 imagery? Though I could conceive of the importance and 
 of the poetry of such a history of the human heart, I saw no 
 way of writing it ; for hitherto the most famous story-tellers 
 had spent their talent in creating two or three typical actors, 
 in depicting one aspect of life. It was with this idea that I 
 read the works of Walter Scott. Walter Scott, the modern 
 troubadour, or finder (trouvere trouveur), had just then 
 given an aspect of grandeur to a class of composition unjustly 
 regarded as of the second rank. Is it not really more diffi- 
 cult to compete with personal and parochial interests by writ- 
 ing of Daphnis and Chloe, Roland, Amadis, Panurge, Don 
 Quixote, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa, Lovelace, Robinson Crusoe, 
 Gil Bias, Ossian, Julie d'Etanges, My Uncle Toby, Werther, 
 Corinne, Adolphe, Paul and Virginia, Jeanie Deans, Claver- 
 house, Ivanhoe, Manfred, Mignon, than to set forth in order 
 facts more or less similar in every country, to investigate the 
 spirit of laws that have fallen into desuetude, to review the 
 theories which mislead nations, or, like some metaphysicians, 
 to explain what Is ? In the first place, these actors, whose 
 existence becomes more prolonged and more authentic than 
 that of the generations which saw their birth, almost always 
 live solely on condition of there being a vast reflection of the 
 present. Conceived in the womb of their own period, the 
 whole heart of humanity stirs within their frame, which often 
 covers a complete system of philosophy. Thus Walter Scott 
 raised to the dignity of the philosophy of history the liter- 
 ature which, from age to age, sets perennial gems in the poetic 
 crown of every nation where letters are cultivated. He vivi- 
 fied it with the spirit of the past; he combined drama, dia-
 
 // TR OD UCTION. xlv 
 
 logue, portrait, scenery, and description ; he fused the 
 marvelous with truth the two elements of the times ; and he 
 brought poetry into close contact with the familiarity of the 
 humblest speech. But as he had not so much devised a 
 system as hit upon a manner in the ardor of his work, or as 
 its logical outcome, he never thought of connecting his com- 
 positions in such a way as to form a complete history of which 
 each chapter was a novel, and each novel the picture of a 
 period. 
 
 It was by discerning this lack of unity, which in no way 
 detracts from the Scottish writer's greatness, that I perceived 
 at once the scheme which would favor the execution of my 
 purpose, and the possibility of executing it. Though dazzled, 
 so to speak, by Walter Scott's amazing fertility, always himself 
 and always original, I did not despair, for I found the source 
 of his genius in the infinite variety of human nature. Chance 
 is the greatest romancer in the world ; we have only to study 
 it. French society would be the real author ; I should only 
 be the secretary. By drawing up an inventory of vices and 
 virtues, by collecting the chief facts of the passions, by 
 depicting characters, by choosing the principal incidents of 
 social life, by composing types out of a combination of 
 homogeneous characteristics, I might perhaps succeed in writ- 
 ing the history which so many historians have neglected: that 
 of manners. By patience and perseverance I might produce 
 for France in the nineteenth century the book which we 
 must all regret that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, 
 and India have not bequeathed to us ; that history of their 
 social life which, prompted by the Abbe Barthelemy, Mon- 
 teil patiently and steadily tried to write for the middle ages, 
 but in an unattractive form. 
 
 The work, so far, was nothing. By adhering to the strict 
 lines of a reproduction a writer might be a more or less 
 faithful, and more or less successful painter of types of 
 humanity, a narrator of the dramas of private life, an arch-
 
 xlvi INTRODUCTION. 
 
 geologist of social furniture, a cataloguer of professions, a 
 registrar of good and evil ; but to deserve the praise of 
 which every artist must be ambitious, must I not also inves- 
 tigate the reasons or the cause of these social effects, detect 
 the hidden sense of this vast assembly of figures, passions, 
 and incidents? And finally, having sought I will not say 
 having found this reason, this motive power, must I not 
 reflect on first principles, and discover in what particulars 
 societies approach or deviate from the eternal law of truth 
 and beauty ? In spite of the wide scope of the prelimi- 
 naries, which might of themselves constitute a book, the work, 
 to be complete, would need a conclusion. Thus depicted, 
 society ought to bear in itself the reason of its working. 
 
 The law of the writer, in virtue of which he is a writer, 
 and which I do not hesitate to say makes him the equal, 
 or perhaps the superior, of the statesman, is his judgment, 
 whatever it may be, on human affairs, and his absolute devo- 
 tion to certain principles. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bossuet, 
 Leibnitz, Kant, Montesquieu are the science which statesmen 
 apply. " A writer ought to have some settled opinions on 
 morals and politics ; he should regard himself as a tutor 
 of men; for men need no masters to teach them to doubt," 
 says Bonald. I took these noble words as my guide long 
 ago ; they are the written law of the monarchical writer. 
 And those who would confute me by my own words will 
 find that they have misinterpreted some ironical phrase, or 
 that they have turned against me a speech given to one of 
 my actors a trick peculiar to calumniators. 
 
 As to the intimate purpose, the soul of this work, these 
 are the principles on which it is based. 
 
 Man is neither good nor bad ; he is born with instincts 
 and capabilities ; society, far from depraving him, as Rousseau 
 asserts, improves him, makes him better ; but self-interest 
 also develops his evil tendencies. Christianity, above all, 
 Catholicism, being as I have pointed out in the " Country
 
 INTRODUCTION. xlvii 
 
 Doctor " (Le Medecin de Campagne) a complete system for 
 the repression of the depraved tendencies of man, is the 
 most powerful element of social order. 
 
 In reading attentively the presentment of society cast, as 
 it were, from the life, with all that is good and all that is bad 
 in it, we learn this lesson if thought, or if passion, which 
 combines thought and feeling, is the vital social element, it is 
 also its destructive element. In this respect social life is like the 
 life of man. Nations live long only by moderating their vital 
 energy. Teaching, or rather education, by religious bodies is 
 the grand principle of life for nations, the only means for 
 diminishing the sum of evil and increasing the sum of good 
 in all society. Thought, the living principle of good and ill, 
 can only be trained, quelled, and guided by religion. The 
 only possible religion is Christianity (see the letter from Paris 
 in "Louis Lambert," in which the young mystic explains, a 
 propos to Swedenborg's doctrines, how there has ever been 
 but one religion since the world began). Christianity created 
 modern nationalities, and it will preserve them. Hence, no 
 doubt, the necessity for the monarchical principle. Catholi- 
 cism and royalty are twin principles. 
 
 As to the limits within which these two principles should be 
 confined by various institutions, so that they may not become 
 absolute, every one will feel that a brief preface ought not to 
 be a political treatise. I cannot, therefore, enter on religious 
 discussion, nor on the political discussions of the day. I 
 write under the light of two eternal truths religion and mon- 
 archy ; two necessities, as they are shown to be by contem- 
 porary events, towards which every writer of sound sense 
 ought to try to guide the country back. Without being an 
 enemy to election, which is an excellent principle as a basis 
 of legislation, I reject election regarded as the only social 
 instrument, especially so badly organized as it now is ; for it 
 fails to represent imposing minorities, whose ideas and inter- 
 ests would occupy the attention of a monarchical government.
 
 xlviii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Elective power extended to all gives us government by the 
 masses, the only irresponsible form of government, under 
 which tyranny is unlimited, for it calls itself law. Besides, I 
 regard the family and not the individual as the true social 
 unit. In this respect, at the risk of being thought retrograd- 
 ing, I side with Bossuet and Bonald instead of going with 
 modern innovators. Since election has become the only social 
 instrument, if I myself were to exercise it no contradiction 
 between my acts and my words should be inferred. An engi- 
 neer points out that a bridge is about to fall, that it is danger- 
 ous for any one to cross it ; but he crosses it himself when it 
 is the only road to the town. Napoleon adapted election to 
 the spirit of the French nation with wonderful skill. The 
 least important members of his legislative body became the 
 most famous orators of the chamber after the Restoration. No 
 chamber has ever been the equal of the " Corps Legislatif," 
 (Legislative Body), comparing them man for man. The elec- 
 tive system of the empire was, then, indisputably the best. 
 
 Some persons may, perhaps, think that this declaration is 
 somewhat autocratic and self-assertive. They will quarrel 
 with the novelist for wanting to be an historian, and will call 
 him to account for writing politics. I am simply fulfilling an 
 obligation that is my reply. The work I have undertaken 
 will be as long as a history ; I was compelled to explain the 
 logic of it, hitherto unrevealed, and its principles and moral 
 purpose. 
 
 Having been obliged to withdraw the prefaces formerly 
 published, in response to essentially ephemeral criticisms, I 
 will retain only one remark. 
 
 Writers who have a purpose in view, were it only a rever- 
 sion to principles familiar in the past because they are eternal, 
 should always clear the ground. Now every one who, in the 
 domain of ideas, brings his stone by pointing out an abuse, or 
 setting a mark on some evil that it may be removed every 
 such man is stigmatized as immoral. The accusation of
 
 INTRODUCTION. xlix 
 
 immorality, which has never failed to be cast at the cour- 
 ageous writer, is, after all, the last that can be brought when 
 nothing else remains to be said to a romancer. If you are 
 truthful in your pictures; if by dint of daily and nightly 
 toil you succeed in writing the most difficult language in the 
 world, the word " immoral" is flung in your teeth. Socrates 
 was immoral; Jesus Christ was immoral ; they both were per- 
 secuted in the name of the society they overset or reformed. 
 When a man is to be killed he is taxed with immorality. 
 These tactics, familiar in party warfare, are a disgrace to 
 those who use them. Luther and Calvin knew well what they 
 were about when they shielded themselves behind damaged 
 worldly interests ! And they lived all the days of their life. 
 
 When depicting all society, sketching it in the immensity 
 of its turmoil, it happened it could not but happen that the 
 picture displayed more of evil than of good ; that some part of 
 the fresco represented a guilty couple ; and the critics at once 
 raised the cry of immorality, without pointing out the moral- 
 ity of another portion intended to be a perfect contrast. As 
 the critic knew nothing of the general plan I could forgive 
 him, all the more because one can no more hinder criticism 
 than the use of eyes, tongues and judgment. Also the time 
 for an impartial verdict has not yet come for me. And, after 
 all, the author who cannot make up his mind to face the fire 
 of criticism should no more think of writing than a traveler 
 should start on his journey counting on a perpetually clear 
 sky. On this point it remains to be said that the most con- 
 scientious moralists doubt greatly whether society can show 
 as many good actions as bad ones ; and in the picture I 
 have painted of it there are more virtuous figures than repre- 
 hensible ones. Blameworthy actions, faults and crimes, from 
 the lightest to the most atrocious, always meet with punish- 
 ment, human or divine, signal or secret. I have done better 
 than the historian, for I am free. Cromwell here on earth 
 escaped all punishment but that inflicted by thoughtful men.
 
 1 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 And on this point there have been divided schools. Bossuet 
 even showed some consideration for the great regicide. 
 William of Orange, the usurper, Hugues Capet, another 
 usurper, lived to old age with no more qualms or fears than 
 Henri IV. or Charles I. The lives of Catherine II. and of 
 Frederic of Prussia would be conclusive against any kind of 
 moral law, if they were judged by the twofold aspect of the 
 morality which guides ordinary mortals, and that which is in 
 use by crowned heads ; for, as Napoleon said, for kings and 
 statesmen there are the lesser and the higher morality. My 
 scenes of political life are founded on this profound observa- 
 tion. It is not a law to history, as it is to romance, to make 
 for a beautiful ideal. History is, or ought to be, what it was ; 
 while romance ought to be " the better world," as was said 
 by Mme. Necker, one of the most distinguished thinkers of the 
 last century. 
 
 Still, with this noble falsity, romance would be nothing if 
 it were not true in detail. Walter Scott, obliged as he was 
 to conform to the ideas of an essentially hypocritical nation, 
 was false to humanity in his picture of woman, because his 
 models were schismatics. The Protestant woman has no 
 ideal. She may be chaste, pure, virtuous ; but her unexpan- 
 sive love will always be as calm and methodical as the fulfil- 
 ment of a duty. It might seem as though the Virgin Mary 
 had chilled the hearts of those sophists who have banished 
 her from heaven with her treasures of lovingkindness. In 
 Protestantism there is no possible future for the woman who 
 has sinned ; while, in the Catholic Church, the hope of for- 
 giveness makes her sublime. Hence, for the Protestant writer 
 there is but one woman, while the Catholic writer finds a new 
 woman in each new situation. If Walter Scott had been a 
 Catholic, if he had set himself the task of describing truly 
 the various phases of society which have successively existed 
 in Scotland, perhaps the painter of Effie and Alice the two 
 figures for which he blamed himself in his later years might
 
 INTR OD UCTION. \\ 
 
 have admitted passion with its sins and punishments, and the 
 virtues revealed by repentance. Passion is the sum-total of 
 humanity. Without passion, religion, history, romance, art, 
 would all be useless. 
 
 Some persons, seeing me collect such a mass of facts and 
 paint them as they are, with passion for their motive power, 
 have supposed, but wrongly, that I must belong to the school 
 of sensualism and materialism two aspects of the same thing 
 Pantheism. But their misapprehension was perhaps justi- 
 fied or inevitable. I do not share the belief in indefinite 
 progress for society as a whole ; I believe in man's improve- 
 ment in himself. Those who insist on reading in me the 
 intention to consider man as a finished creation are strangely 
 mistaken. Seraphita, the doctrine in action of the Christian 
 Buddha, seems to me an ample answer to this rather heedless 
 accusation. 
 
 In certain fragments of this long work I have tried to 
 popularize the amazing facts, I may say the marvels of elec- 
 tricity, which in man is metamorphosed into an incalculable 
 force ; but in what way do the phenomena of brain and nerves, 
 which prove the existence of an undiscovered world of psy- 
 chology, modify the necessary and undoubted relations of the 
 worlds to God ? In what way can they shake the Catholic 
 dogma ? Though irrefutable facts should some day place 
 thought in the class of fluids which are discerned only by 
 their effects while their substance evades our senses, even 
 when aided by so many mechanical means, the result will 
 be the same as when Christopher Columbus detected that the 
 earth is a sphere, and Galileo demonstrated its rotation. Our 
 future will be unchanged. The wonders of animal magnetism, 
 with which I have been familiar since 1820; the beautiful 
 experiments of Gall, Lavater's successor ; all the men who 
 have studied mind as opticians have studied light two not 
 dissimilar things point to a conclusion in favor of the 
 mystics, the disciples of St. John, and of those great thinkers
 
 lii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 who have established the spiritual world the sphere in which 
 are revealed the relations of God and man. 
 
 A sure grasp of the purport of this work will make it clear 
 that I attach to common, daily facts, hidden or patent to the 
 eye, to the acts of individual lives, and to their causes and 
 principles, the importance which historians have hitherto 
 ascribed to the events of public national life. The unknown 
 struggle which goes on in a valley of the Indre between Mme. 
 de Mortsauf and her passion is perhaps as great as the most 
 famous of battles (Z<? Lys dans la Vallee). In one the glory 
 of the victor is at stake; in the other it is heaven. The 
 misfortunes of the two Birotteaus, the priest and the perfumer, 
 tOrme are those of mankind. LaFosseuse (in " The Country 
 Doctor ")and Mme. Graslin(in "The Village Pastor") are 
 almost the sum-total of woman. We all suffer thus every day. 
 I have had to do a hundred times what Richardson did but 
 once. Lovelace has a thousand forms, for social corruption 
 takes the hues of the medium in which it lives. Clarissa, on 
 the contrary, the lovely image of impassioned virtue, is drawn 
 in lines of distracting purity. To create a variety of virgins 
 it needs a Raphael. In this respect, perhaps literature must 
 yield to painting. 
 
 Still, I may be allowed to point out how many irreproach- 
 able figures as regards their virtue are to be found in the 
 portions of this work already published : Pierrette, Lorrain, 
 Ursule Mirouet, Constance Birotteau, La Fosseuse, Eugenie 
 Grandet, Marguerite Claes, Pauline de Villenoix, Madame 
 Jules, Madame de la Chanterie, Eve Chardon, Mademoiselle 
 d'Esgrignon, Madame Firmiani, Agathe Rouget, Renee de 
 Maucombe ; besides several figures in the middle-distance, 
 who, though less conspicuous than these, nevertheless, offer 
 the reader an example of domestic virtue ; Joseph Lebas, 
 Genestas, Benassis, Bonnet the cure, Minoret the doctor, 
 Pillerault, David Schard, the two Birotteaus, Chaperon the 
 priest, Judge Popinot, Bourgeat, the Sauviats, the Tascherons,
 
 INTR OD UC TION. liii 
 
 and many more. Do not all these solve the difficult liter- 
 ary problem which consists in making a virtuous person 
 interesting? 
 
 It was no small task to depict the two or three thousand 
 conspicuous types of a period ; for this is, in fact, the number 
 presented to us by each generation, and which the " Comedie 
 Humaine " will require. This crowd of actors, of characters, 
 this multitude of lives, needed a setting if I may be par- 
 doned the expression, a gallery. Hence the very natural 
 division, as already known, into Scenes of Private Life, of 
 Provincial Life, of Parisian, Political, Military, and Country 
 Life. Under these six heads are classified all the studies of 
 manners which form the history of society at large, of all its 
 doings and movements, as our ancestors would have said. 
 These six classes correspond, indeed, to familiar conceptions. 
 Each has its own sense and meaning, and answers to an epoch 
 in the life of man. I may repeat here, but very briefly, what 
 was written by Felix Davin a young genius snatched from 
 literature by an early death. After being informed of my plan, 
 he said that the Scenes of Private Life represented childhood 
 and youth and their errors, as the Scenes of Provincial Life 
 represented the age of passion, scheming, self-interest and 
 ambition. Then the Scenes of Parisian Life give a picture 
 of the tastes and vice and unbridled powers which conduce 
 to the habits peculiar to great cities, where the extremes of 
 good and evil meet. Each of these divisions has its local 
 color Paris and the Provinces a great social antithesis which 
 held for me immense resources. 
 
 And not man alone, but the principal events of life, fall 
 into classes by types. There are situations which occur in 
 every life, typical phases, and this is one of the details I most 
 sought after. I have tried to give an idea of the different 
 districts of our fine country. My work has its geography, as 
 it has its genealogy and its families, its places and things, its 
 persons and their deeds ; as it has its heraldry, its nobles and
 
 liv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 commonalty, its artisans and peasants, its politicians and 
 dandies, its army in short, a whole world of its own. 
 
 After describing social life in these three portions, I had to 
 delineate certain exceptional lives, which comprehend the 
 interests of many people, or of every body, and are in a degree 
 outside of the general law. Hence we have Scenes of Political 
 Life. This vast picture of society being finished and com- 
 plete, was it not needful to display it in its most violent 
 phase, beside itself, as it were, either in self-defence, or for 
 the sake of conquest ? Hence the Scenes of Military Life, as 
 yet the most incomplete portion of my work, but for which 
 room will be allowed in this edition, that it may form part of 
 it when done. Finally, the Scenes of Country Life are, in a 
 way, the evening of this long day, if I may so call the social 
 drama. In that part are to be found the purest natures, and 
 the application of the great principles of order, politics and 
 morality. 
 
 Such is the foundation, full of actors, full of comedies and 
 tragedies, on which are raised the Philosophical Studies the 
 second part of my work, in which the social instrument of all 
 these effects is displayed, and the ravages of the mind are 
 painted, feeling after feeling; the first of this series, "Wild 
 Ass' Skin," to some extent forms a link between the Philo- 
 sophical Studies and Studies of Manners, by a work of almost 
 Oriental fancy, in which life itself is shown in a mortal strug- 
 gle with the very element of all passion. 
 
 In looking forward to what remains to be done, my readers 
 will perhaps echo what my publishers say, " Please God to spare 
 you ! " I only ask to be less tormented by men and things 
 than I have hitherto been since I began this terrific labor. I 
 have had this in my favor, and I thank God for it, that the 
 talents of the time, the finest characters and the truest friends, 
 as noble in their private lives as the former are in public life, 
 have wrung my hand and said " courage ! " 
 
 And why should I not confess that this friendship, and the
 
 INTRODUCTION. Iv 
 
 testimony here and there of persons unknown to me, have up- 
 held me in my career, both against myself and against unjust 
 attacks ; against the calumny which has often persecuted me, 
 against discouragement, and against the too eager hopefulness, 
 whose utterances are misinterpreted as those of overweening 
 conceit? I had resolved to display stolid stoicism in the face 
 of abuse and insults ; but on two occasions base slanders have 
 necessitated a reply. Though the advocates of forgiveness of 
 injuries may regret that I should have displayed my skill in 
 literary fence, there are many Christians who are of opinion 
 that we live in times when it is as well to show sometimes 
 that silence springs from generosity. 
 
 The vastness of a plan which includes both a history and a 
 criticism of society, an analysis of its evils, and a discussion 
 of its principles, authorizes me, I think, in giving my work 
 the title under which it now appears "THE COMEDIE 
 HUMAINE." Is this too ambitious ? Is it not exact ? That, 
 when it is complete, the public must pronounce. 
 
 PARIS, July, 1842.
 
 THE WILD ASS' SKIN 
 
 To MONSIEUR SAVARY 
 
 Member of L! Academic des Sciences 
 
 STERNE Tristram Shandy, ch. cccxzi 
 
 THE TALISMAN. 
 
 TOWARDS the end of the month of October, 1829, a young 
 man entered the Palais-Royal just as the gaming-houses 
 opened, agreeably to the law which protect* a passion by its 
 very nature easily excitable. He mounted the staircase of 
 one of the gambling hells distinguished by the number 36, 
 without too much deliberation. 
 
 "Your hat, sir, if you please?" a thin, querulous voice 
 called out. A little old man, crouching in the darkness be- 
 hind a railing, suddenly rose and exhibited his features, 
 carved after a mean design.
 
 2 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your 
 hat at the outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation? 
 Or by exacting some pledge or other, is not an infernal com- 
 pact implied ? Is it done to compel you to preserve a re- 
 spectful demeanor towards those who are about to gain money 
 of you ? Or must the detective who squats in our social sewers 
 know the name of your hatter, or your own, if you happen to 
 have written it on the lining inside ? Or, after all, is the 
 measurement of your skull required for the compilation of 
 statistics as to the cerebral capacity of gamblers ? The execu- 
 tive is absolutely silent on this point. But be sure of this, 
 that though you have scarcely taken a step towards the tables, 
 your hat no more belongs to you now than you belong to 
 yourself. Play possesses you, your fortune, your cap, your 
 cane, your cloak. 
 
 As you go out, it will be made clear to you, by a savage 
 irony, that play has yet spared you something, since your 
 property is returned. For all that, if you bring a new hat 
 with you, you will have to pay for the knowledge that a 
 special costume is needed for a gambler. 
 
 The evident astonishment with which the young man took 
 a numbered tally in exchange for his hat, which was fortu- 
 nately somewhat rubbed at the brim, showed clearly enough 
 that his mind was yet untainted ; and the little old man, who 
 had wallowed from his youth up in the furious pleasures of a 
 gambler's life, cast a dull, indifferent glance over him, in 
 which a philosopher might have seen wretchedness lying in 
 the hospital, the vagrant lives of ruined folk, inquests on 
 numberless suicides, life-long penal servitude and transporta- 
 tions to Guazacoalco. 
 
 His pallid, lengthy visage appeared like a haggard embodi- 
 ment of the passion reduced to its simplest terms. There 
 were traces of past anguish in its wrinkles. He supported 
 life on the glutinous soups at Darcet's, and gambled away his 
 meagre earnings day by day. Like some old hackney which
 
 THE TALISMAN. 3 
 
 takes no heed of the strokes of the whip, nothing could move 
 him now. The stifled groans of ruined players, as they passed 
 out, their mute imprecations, their stupefied faces, found him 
 impassive. He was the spirit of play incarnate. If the 
 young man had noticed this sorry Cerberus, perhaps he would 
 have said, " There is only a pack of cards in that heart of 
 his." 
 
 The stranger did not heed this warning written in flesh and 
 blood, put there, no doubt, by Providence, who has set loath- 
 ing on the threshold of all evil haunts. He walked boldly into 
 the saloon, where the rattle of coin brought his senses under the 
 dazzling spell of an agony of greed. Most likely he had been 
 drawn thither by that most convincing of Jean Jacques' elo~ 
 quent periods, which expresses, I think, this melancholy 
 thought, " Yes, I can imagine that a man may take to gam- 
 bling when he sees only his last shilling between him and 
 death." 
 
 There is an illusion about a gambling saloon at night as vul- 
 gar as that of a bloodthirsty drama, and just as effective. The 
 rooms are filled with players and onlookers, with poverty- 
 stricken age, which drags itself thither in search of stimulation, 
 with excited faces, and revels that began in wine, to end 
 shortly in the Seine. The passion is there in full measure, 
 but the great number of the actors prevents you from seeing 
 the gambling-demon face to face. The evening is a harmony 
 or chorus in which all take part, to which each instrument in 
 the orchestra contributes its share. You would see there 
 plenty of respectable people who have come in search of di- 
 version, for which they pay as they pay for the pleasures of the 
 theatre, or of gluttony, or they come hither as to some garret 
 where they cheapen poignant regrets for three months to come. 
 
 Do you understand all the force and frenzy in a soul 
 which impatiently waits for the opening of a gambling hell ? 
 Between the daylight gambler and the player at night there 
 is the same difference that lies between a careless husband
 
 4 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 and the lover swooning under his lady's window. Only with 
 morning comes the real throb of the passion and the crav- 
 ing in its stark horror. Then you can admire the real gam- 
 bler, who has neither eaten, slept, thought, nor lived, he has 
 so smarted under the scourge of his martingale, so suffered 
 on the rack of his desire for a game or two of cards. At 
 that accursed hour you encounter eyes whose calmness ter- 
 rifies you, faces that fascinate, glances that seem as if they had 
 power to turn the cards over and consume them. The grand- 
 est hours of a gambling saloon are not the opening ones. If 
 Spain has bull-fights, and Rome once had her gladiators, 
 Paris waxes proud of her Palais-Royal, where the inevitable 
 roulettes cause blood to flow in streams, and the public can 
 have the pleasure of watching without fear of their feet slip- 
 ping in it. 
 
 Take a quiet peep at the arena. How bare it looks ! The 
 paper on the walls is greasy to the height of your head, there 
 is nothing to bring one reviving thought. There is not so 
 much as a nail for the convenience of suicides. The floor is 
 worn and dirty. An oblong table stands in the middle of 
 the room, the tablecloth is worn by the friction of gold, but 
 the straw-bottomed chairs about it indicate an odd indiffer- 
 ence to luxury in the men who will lose their lives here in 
 the quest of the fortune that is to put luxury within their 
 reach. 
 
 This contradiction in humanity is seen wherever the soul 
 reacts powerfully upon itself. The gallant would clothe his 
 mistress in silks, would deck her out in soft Eastern fabrics, 
 though he and she must lie on a truckle-bed. The ambitious 
 dreamer sees himself at the summit of power, while he slav- 
 ishly prostrates himself in the mire. The tradesman stagnates 
 in his damp, unhealthy shop, while he builds a great mansion 
 for his son to inherit prematurely, only to be ejected from it 
 by law proceedings at his own brother's instance. 
 
 After all, is there a less pleasing thing in the world than a
 
 THE TALISMAN. 5 
 
 house of pleasure ? Singular question ! Man is always at 
 strife with himself. His present woes give the lie to his 
 hopes ; yet he looks to a future which is not his, to indemnify 
 him for these present sufferings ; setting upon all his actions 
 the seal of inconsequence and of the weakness of his nature. 
 We have nothing here below in full measure but mis- 
 fortune. 
 
 There were several gamblers in the room already when the 
 young man entered. Three bald-headed- seniors were loung- 
 ing round the green table. Imperturbable as diplomatists, 
 those plaster-cast faces of theirs betokened blunted sensibil- 
 ities, and hearts which had long forgotten how to throb, even 
 when a woman's dowry was the stake. A young Italian, 
 olive-hued and dark-haired, sat at one end, with his elbows 
 on the table, seeming to listen to the presentiments of luck 
 that dictate a gambler's " Yes " or " No." The glow of fire 
 and gold was on that southern face. Some seven or eight 
 onlookers stood, by way of an audience, awaiting a drama 
 composed of the strokes of chance, the faces of the actors, 
 the circulation of coin, and the motion of the croupier's 
 rake, much as a silent, motionless crowd watches the heads- 
 man in the Place de Greve. A tall, thin man, in a threadbare 
 coat, held a card in one hand, and a pin in the other, to 
 mark the numbers of red or black. He seemed a modern 
 Tantalus, with all the pleasures of his epoch at his lips, a 
 hoardless miser drawing in imaginary gains, a sane species of 
 lunatic who consoles himself in his misery by chimerical 
 dreams, a man who touches peril and vice as a young priest 
 handles the unconsecrated wafer in the white mass. 
 
 One or two experts at the game, shrewd speculators, had 
 placed themselves opposite the bank, like old convicts, who 
 have lost all fear of the hulks ; they meant to try two or 
 three coups, and then to depart at once with the expected 
 gains, on which they lived. Two elderly waiters dawdled 
 about with their arms folded, looking from time to time into
 
 6 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 the garden from the windows, as if to show their insignificant 
 faces as a sign to passers-by. 
 
 The croupier and banker threw a ghastly and withering 
 glance at the punters, and cried, in a sharp voice, " Make 
 your game!" as the young man came in. The silence 
 seemed to grow deeper as all heads turned curiously towards 
 the new arrival. Who would have thought it ? The jaded 
 elders, the fossilized waiters, the onlookers, the fanatical 
 Italian himself, felt an indefinable dread at sight of the 
 stranger. Is he not wretched indeed who can excite pity 
 here ? Must he not be very helpless to receive sympathy, 
 ghastly in appearance to raise a shudder in these places, 
 where pain utters no cry, where wretchedness looks gay, and 
 despair is decorous ? Such thoughts as these produced a 
 new -emotion in these torpid hearts as the young man entered. 
 Were not executioners known to shed tears over the fair- 
 haired, girlish heads that had to fall at the bidding of the 
 Revolution? 
 
 The gamblers saw at a glance a dreadful mystery in the 
 novice's face. His young features were stamped with a 
 melancholy grace, his looks told of unsuccess and many 
 blighted hopes. The dull apathy of the suicide had made 
 his forehead so deadly pale, a bitter smile carved faint lines 
 about the corners of his mouth, and there was an abandon- 
 ment about him that was painful to see. Some sort of a 
 demon sparkled in the depth of his eyes, which drooped, 
 wearied perhaps with pleasure. Could it have been dissi- 
 pation that had set its foul mark on the proud face, once 
 pure and bright, and now brought low? Any doctor seeing 
 the yellow circles about his eyelids, and the color in his 
 cheeks, would have set them down to some affection of 
 the heart or lungs, while poets would have attributed them 
 to the havoc brought by the search for knowledge and to 
 night-vigils by the student's lamp. 
 
 But a complaint more fatal than any disease, a disease
 
 THE TALISMAN. 7 
 
 more merciless than genius or study, had drawn this young 
 face, and had wrung a heart which dissipation, study, and 
 sickness had scarcely disturbed. When a notorious criminal 
 is taken to the convicts' prison, the prisoners welcome him 
 respectfully, and these evil spirits in human shape, experi- 
 enced in torments, bowed before an unheard-of anguish. By 
 the depth of the wound which met their eyes, they recog- 
 nized a prince among them, by the majesty of his unspoken 
 irony, by the refined wretchedness of his garb. The frock- 
 coat that he wore was well cut, but his cravat was on terms 
 so intimate with his waistcoat that no one could suspect 
 him of underlinen. His hands, shapely as a woman's, were 
 not perfectly clean ; for two days past indeed he had ceased 
 to wear gloves. If the very croupier and the waiters shud- 
 dered, it was because some traces of the spell of innocence 
 yet hung about his meagre, delicately-shaped form, and his 
 scanty fair hair in its natural curls. 
 
 He looked only about twenty-five years of age, and any 
 trace of vice in his face seemed to be there by accident. A 
 young constitution still resisted the inroads of lubricity. 
 Darkness and light, annihilation and existence, seemed to 
 struggle in him, with effects of mingled beauty and terror. 
 There he stood like some erring angel that has lost his radi- 
 ance ; and these emeritus-professors of vice and shame were 
 ready to bid the novice depart, even as some toothless crone 
 might be seized with pity for a beautiful girl who offers 
 herself up to infamy. 
 
 The young man went straight up to the table, and, as 
 he stood there, flung down a piece of gold which he held 
 in his hand, without deliberation. It rolled on to the black; 
 then, as strong natures can, he looked calmly, if anxious- 
 ly, at the croupier, as if he held useless subterfuges in 
 scorn. 
 
 The interest this coup awakened was so great that the old 
 gamesters laid nothing upon it ; only the Italian, inspired
 
 8 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 by a gambler's enthusiasm, ^smiled suddenly at some thought, 
 and punted his heap of coin against the stranger's stake. 
 
 The banker forgot to pronounce the phrases that use and 
 wont have reduced to an inarticulate cry "Make your 
 
 game The game is made Bets are closed ! " The 
 
 croupier spread out the cards, and seemed to wish luck to 
 the new-comer, indifferent as he was to the losses or gains 
 of those who took part in these sombre pleasures. Every 
 bystander thought he saw a drama, the closing scene of a 
 noble life, in the fortunes of that bit of gold ; and eagerly 
 fixed his eyes on the prophetic cards; but however closely 
 they watched the young man, they could discover not the 
 least sign of feeling on his cool but restless face. 
 
 "Even! ra/wins," said the croupier officially. A dumb 
 sort of rattle came from the Italian's throat when he saw 
 the folded notes that the banker showered upon him, one 
 after another. The young man only understood his calamity 
 when the croupier's rake was extended to sweep away his 
 last napoleon. The ivory touched the coin with a little 
 click, as it swept it with the speed of an arrow into the 
 heap of gold before the bank. The stranger turned pale at 
 the lips, and softly shut his eyes, but he unclosed them again 
 at once, and the red color returned as he affected the airs 
 of an Englishman, to whom life can offer no new sensation, 
 and disappeared without the glance full of entreaty for com- 
 passion that a desperate gamester will often give the bystanders. 
 How much can happen in a second's space; how many 
 things depend on a throw of the die ! 
 
 "That was his last cartridge, of course," said the croupier, 
 smiling after a moment's silence, during which he picked up 
 the coin between his finger and thumb and held it up. 
 
 " He is a cracked brain that will go and drown him- 
 self," said a frequenter of the place. He looked round about 
 at the other players, who all knew each other. 
 
 "Bah!" said a waiter, as he took a pinch of snuff.
 
 THE TALISMAN. y 
 
 "If we had but followed his example," said an old game- 
 ster to the others, as he pointed out the Italian. 
 
 Everybody looked at the lucky player, whose hands shook 
 as he counted his bank-notes. 
 
 " A voice seemed to whisper to me, " he said. " The luck 
 is sure to go against that young man's despair." 
 
 " He is a new hand," said the banker, " or he would have 
 divided his money into three parts to give himself more 
 chance." 
 
 The young man went out without asking for his hat ; but 
 the old watch-dog, who had noted its shabby condition, 
 returned it to him without a word. The gambler mechani- 
 cally gave up the tally, and went down-stairs whistling Di 
 tanti Palpiti so feebly, that he himself scarcely heard the delic- 
 ious notes. 
 
 He found himself immediately under the arcades of the 
 Palais- Royal, reached the Rue Saint Honore, took the direc- 
 tion of the Tuileries, and crossed the gardens with an unde- 
 cided step. He walked as if he were in some desert, elbowed 
 by men whom he did not see, hearing through all the voices 
 of the crowd one voice alone the voice of Death. He was 
 lost in the thoughts that benumbed him at last, like the crim- 
 inals who used to be taken in carts from the Palais de Justice 
 to the Place de Greve, where the scaffold awaited them red- 
 dened with all the blood spilt there since 1793. 
 
 There is something great and terrible about suicide. Most 
 people's downfalls are not dangerous ; they are like children 
 who have not far to fall, and cannot injure themselves ; but 
 when a great nature is dashed down, he is bound to fall from 
 a height. He must have been raised almost to the skies; 
 he has caught glimpses of some heaven beyond his reach. 
 Vehement must the storms be which compel a soul to seek 
 for peace from the trigger of a pistol. 
 
 How much young power starves and pines away in a garret 
 for want of a friend, for lack of a woman's consolation, in the
 
 10 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 midst of millions of fellow-creatures, in the presence of a 
 listless crowd that is burdened by its wealth ! When one 
 remembers all this, suicide looms large. Between a self- 
 sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a 
 young man to Paris, God only knows what may intervene ; 
 what contending ideas have striven within the soul ; what 
 poems have been set aside ; what moans and what despair 
 have been repressed ; what abortive masterpieces and vain 
 endeavors ! Every suicide is an awful poem of sorrow. 
 Where will you find a work of genius floating above the seas 
 of literature that can compare with this paragraph : 
 
 "Yesterday, at four o'clock, a young woman threw herself 
 into the Seine from the Pont des Arts." 
 
 Dramas and romances pale before this concise Parisian 
 phrase; so must even that old frontispiece, "The Lamenta- 
 tions of the glorious king of Kaernavan, put in prison by his 
 children," the sole remaining fragment of a lost work that 
 drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal the same Sterne 
 who deserted his own wife and family. 
 
 The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these, which 
 passed in fragments through his mind, like tattered flags flut- 
 tering above the combat. If he set aside for a moment the 
 burdens of consciousness and of memory, to watch the flower 
 heads gently swayed by the breeze among the green thickets, 
 a revulsion came over him, life struggled against the oppres- 
 sive thought of suicide, and his eyes rose to the sky : gray 
 clouds, melancholy gusts of the wind, the stormy atmosphere, 
 all decreed that he should die. 
 
 He bent his way toward the Pont Royal, musing over the 
 last fancies of others who had gone before him. He smiled 
 to himself as he remembered that Lord Castlereagh had satis- 
 fied the humblest of our needs before he cut his throat, and 
 that the academician Auger had sought for his snuff-box as 
 he went to his death. He analyzed these extravagances, and 
 even examined himself; for as he stood aside against the
 
 THE TALISMAN. 11 
 
 parapet to allow a porter to pass, his coat had been whit- 
 ened somewhat by the contact, and he carefully brushed the 
 dust from his sleeve, to his own surprise. He reached the 
 middle of the arch, and looked forebodingly at the water. 
 
 " Wretched weather for drowning yourself," said a ragged 
 old woman, who grinned at him ; " isn't the Seine cold and 
 dirty?" 
 
 His answer was a ready smile, which showed the frenzied 
 nature of his courage ; then he shivered all at once as he saw 
 at a distance, by the door of the Tuileries, a shed with an 
 inscription above it in letters twelve inches high : THE ROYAL 
 HUMANE SOCIETY'S APPARATUS. 
 
 A vision of M. Dacheux rose before him, equipped by his 
 philanthropy, calling out and setting in motion the too effi- 
 cacious oars which break the heads of drowning men, if 
 unluckily they should rise to the surface ; he saw a curious 
 crowd collecting, running for a doctor, preparing fumigations; 
 he read the maundering paragraph in the papers, put between 
 notes on a festivity and on the smiles of a ballet dancer; he 
 heard the francs counted down by the prefect of police to the 
 watermen. As a corpse, he was worth fifteen francs ; but now 
 while he lived he was only a man of talent without patrons, 
 without friends, without a mattress to lie on, or any one to 
 speak a word for him a perfect social cipher, useless to a 
 State which gave itself no trouble about him. 
 
 A death in broad daylight seemed degrading to him ; he 
 made up his mind to die at night so as to bequeath an unrecog- 
 nizable corpse to a world which had disregarded the greatness 
 of his life. He began his wanderings again, turning towards 
 the Quai Voltaire, imitating the lagging gait of an idler seek- 
 ing to kill time. As he came down the steps at the end of 
 the bridge, his attention was drawn to the second-hand books 
 displayed on the parapet, and he was on the point of bargain- 
 ing for some. He smiled, thrust his hands philosophically 
 into his pockets, and fell to strolling on again with a proud
 
 12 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 disdain in his manner, when he heard to his surprise some 
 coin rattling fantastically in his pocket. 
 
 A smile of hope lit his face, and slid from his lips over his 
 features, over his brow, and brought a joyful light to his eyes 
 and his dark cheeks. It was a spark of happiness like one of 
 the red dots that flit over the remains of a burnt scrap of 
 paper ; but as it is with the black ashes, so it was with his face, 
 it became dull again when he drew out his hand and perceived 
 only three pennies. 
 
 A little chimney-sweeper, with puffed cheeks, all black with 
 soot, and clad in tatters, held out his hand to beg for the 
 man's last pence. 
 
 "Ah, kind gentleman ! charity, charity : for the love of St. 
 Catherine ! only a halfpenny to buy some bread ! " 
 
 Two paces from the little Savoyard stood an old pauvre 
 hontcux,* sickly and feeble, in wretched garments of ragged 
 druggeting, who asked in a thick, muffled voice 
 
 "Anything you like to give, monsieur; I will pray to God 
 for you " 
 
 But the young man turned his eyes on him, and the old 
 beggar stopped without another word, discerning in that 
 mournful face an abandonment of wretchedness more bitter 
 than his own. 
 
 "Charity! charity!" 
 
 The young man threw the coins to the old man and the 
 child, left the footway, and turned towards the houses ; the 
 harrowing sight of the Seine fretted him beyond endurance. 
 
 " May God lengthen your days !" cried the two beggars. 
 
 As he reached the shop window of a print seller, this man 
 on the brink of death met a young woman alighting from a 
 showy carriage. He looked in delight at her prettiness, at 
 the pale face appropriately framed by the satin of her fashion- 
 able bonnet. Her slender form and graceful movements 
 entranced him. Her skirt had been slightly raised as she 
 * Bashful beggar.
 
 THE TALISMAN. 13 
 
 stepped to the pavement, disclosing a daintily-fitting white 
 stocking over the delicate outlines beneath. The young lady 
 went into the shop and purchased albums and sets of litho- 
 graphs ; giving several gold coins for them, which glittered 
 and rang upon the counter. The young man, seemingly occu- 
 pied with the prints in the window, fixed upon the fair stranger 
 a gaze as eager as man can give, to receive in exchange an 
 indifferent glance, such as lights by accident on a passer-by. 
 For him it was a leave-taking of love and of woman ! but his 
 final and strenuous questioning glance was neither understood 
 nor felt by the slight-natured woman there ; her color did not 
 rise, her eyes did not droop. What was it to her? one more 
 piece of adulation, yet another sigh only prompted the delight- 
 ful thought at night, "I looked rather well to-day." 
 
 The young man quickly turned to another picture, and only 
 left it when she returned to her carriage. The horses started 
 off, the final vision of luxury and refinement went under an 
 eclipse, just as that life of his would soon do also. Slowly 
 and sadly he followed the line of the shops, listlessly examin- 
 ing the specimens on view. When the shops came to an end, 
 he reviewed the Louvre, the Institute, the towers of Notre 
 Dame, of the Palais, the Pont des Arts ; all these public 
 monuments seemed to have taken their tone from the heavy 
 gray sky. 
 
 Fitful gleams of light gave a foreboding look to Paris ; like 
 a pretty woman, the city has mysterious fits of ugliness or 
 beauty. So the outer world seemed to be in a plot to steep 
 this man about to die in a painful trance. A prey to the 
 maleficent power which acts relaxingly upon us by the fluid 
 circulating through our nerves, his whole frame seemed gradu- 
 ally to experience a dissolving process. He felt the anguish 
 of these throes passing through him in waves, and the houses 
 and the crowd seemed to surge to and fro in a mist before his 
 eyes. He tried to escape the agitation wrought in his mind 
 by the revulsions of his physical nature, and went toward the 
 2
 
 14 THE WILD ASS 1 SKIN. 
 
 shop of a dealer in antiquities, thinking to give a treat to his 
 senses, and to spend the interval till nightfall in bargaining 
 over curiosities. 
 
 He sought, one might say, to regain courage and to find a 
 stimulant, like a criminal who doubts his power to reach the 
 scaffold. The consciousness of approaching death gave him, 
 for the time being, the intrepidity of a duchess with a couple 
 of lovers, so that he entered the place with an abstracted look, 
 while his lips displayed a set smile like a drunkard's. Had 
 not life, or rather had not death, intoxicated him ? Dizziness 
 soon overcame him again. Things appeared to him in strange 
 colors, or as making slight movements ; his irregular pulse 
 was no doubt the cause ; the blood that sometimes rushed like 
 a burning torrent through his veins, and sometimes lay torpid 
 and stagnant as tepid water. He merely asked leave to see if 
 the shop contained any curiosities y which he required. 
 
 A plump-faced young shopman with red hair, in an otter- 
 skin cap, left an old peasant woman in charge of the shop a 
 sort of feminine Caliban, employed in cleaning a stove made 
 marvelous by Bernard Palissy's work. This youth remarked 
 carelessly 
 
 "Look round, monsieur! We have nothing very re- 
 markable here down stairs ; but if I may trouble you to go 
 up to the first floor, I will show you some very fine mum- 
 mies from Cairo, some inlaid pottery, and some carved ebony 
 genuine Renaissance work, just come in, and of perfect 
 beauty." 
 
 In the young man's fearful position this cicerone's prattle and 
 shopman's empty talk seemed like the petty vexations by which 
 narrow minds destroy a man of genius. But as he must even 
 go through with it, he appeared to listen to his guide, answer- 
 ing him by gestures or monosyllables; but imperceptibly he 
 arrogated the privilege of saying nothing, and gave himself 
 up without hindrance to his closing meditations, which were 
 appalling. He had a poet's temperament, his mind had
 
 THE TALISMAN. 15 
 
 entered by chance on a vast field ; and he must see perforce 
 the dry bones of twenty future worlds. 
 
 At a first glance the place presented a confused picture in 
 which every achievement, human and divine, was mingled. 
 Crocodiles, monkeys, and serpents stuffed with straw grinned 
 at glass from church windows, seemed to wish to bite sculp- 
 tured heads, to chase lacquered work, or to scramble up chan- 
 deliers. A Sevres vase, bearing Napoleon's portrait by Mine. 
 Jacotot, stood beside a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The 
 beginnings of the world and the events of yesterday were 
 mingled with grotesque cheerfulness. A kitchen jack leaned 
 against a pyx, a republican sabre on a mediaeval hackbut. 
 Mme. du Barry, with a star above her head, naked, and sur- 
 rounded by a cloud, seemed to look longingly out of Latour's 
 pastel at an Indian chibook, while she tried to guess the pur- 
 pose of the spiral curves that wound towards her. Instru- 
 ments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised 
 weapons had been flung down pell-mell among the parapher- 
 nalia of daily life ; porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, trans- 
 lucent cups from China, old salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belong- 
 ing to feudal times. A carved ivory ship sped full sail on 
 the back of a motionless tortoise. 
 
 The Emperor Augustus remained unmoved and imperial 
 with an air-pump thrust into one eye. Portraits of French 
 sheriffs and Dutch burgomasters, phlegmatic now as when in 
 life, looked down pallid and unconcerned on the chaos of 
 past ages below them. 
 
 Every land of earth seemed to have contributed some stray 
 fragment of its learning, some example of its art. Nothing 
 seemed lacking to this philosophical kitchen-midden, from a 
 redskin's calumet, a green and golden slipper from the serag- 
 lio, a Moorish yataghan, a Tartar idol, to the soldier's tobacco 
 pouch, to the priest's ciborium, and the plumes that once 
 adorned a throne. This extraordinary combination was ren- 
 dered yet more bizarre by the accidents of lighting, by a
 
 16 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 multitude of confused reflections of various hues, by the 
 sharp contrast of blacks and whites. Broken cries seemed to 
 reach the ear, unfinished dramas seized upon the imagination, 
 smothered lights caught the eye. A thin coating of invisi- 
 ble dust covered all the multitudinous corners and convolu- 
 tions of these objects of various shapes which gave highly 
 picturesque effects. 
 
 First of all, the young man compared the three galleries 
 which civilization, cults, divinities, masterpieces, dominions, 
 carousals, sanity, and madness had filled to repletion, to a 
 mirror with numerous facets, each depicting a world. After 
 this first hazy idea he would fain have selected his pleasures, 
 but by dint of using his eyes, thinking and musing, a fever 
 began to possess him, caused perhaps by the gnawing pain of 
 hunger. The spectacle of so much existence, individual or 
 national, to which these pledges bore witness, ended by 
 numbing his senses the purpose with which he entered 
 the shop was fulfilled. He had left the real behind, and 
 had climbed gradually up to an ideal world ; he had at 
 tained to the enchanted palace of ecstasy, whence the universe 
 appeared to him by fragments and in shapes of flame, as 
 once the future blazed out before the eyes of St. John in 
 Patmos. 
 
 A crowd of sorrowing faces, beneficent and appalling, dark 
 and luminous, far and near, gathered in numbers, in myriads, 
 in whole generations. Egypt, rigid and mysterious, arose 
 from her sands in the form of a mummy swathed in black 
 bandages ; then the Pharaohs swallowed up nations, that they 
 might build themselves a tomb; and he beheld Moses and 
 the Hebrews and the desert, and a solemn antique world. 
 Fresh and joyous, a marble statue spoke to him from a twisted 
 column of the pleasure-loving myths of Greece and Ionia. 
 Ah ! who would not have smiled with him to see, against the 
 earthen, red background, the brown-faced maiden dancing 
 with gleeful reverence before the god Priapus, wrought in the
 
 THE TALISMAN. 17 
 
 fine clay of an Etruscan vase ? The Latin queen caressed her 
 chimera. 
 
 The whims of imperial Rome were there in life, the bath 
 was disclosed, the toilette of a languid Julia, dreaming, wait- 
 ing for her Tibullus. Strong with the might of Arabic spells, 
 the head of Cicero evoked memories of a free Rome, and 
 unrolled before him the scrolls of Titus Livius. The young 
 man beheld Senatus Pc/pulusque Romanus ; consuls, lictors, 
 togas with purple fringes ; the fighting in the Forum, the 
 angry people, passed in review before him like the cloudy 
 faces of a dream. 
 
 Then Christian Rome predominated in his vision. A 
 painter had laid heaven open ; he beheld the Virgin Mary 
 wrapped in a golden cloud among the angels, shining more 
 brightly than the sun, receiving the prayers of sufferers, 
 on whom this second Eve Regenerate smiles pityingly. At 
 the touch of a mosaic, made of various lavas from Vesuvius 
 and Etna, his fancy fled to the hot tawny south of Italy. 
 He was present at Borgia's orgies, he roved among the 
 Abruzzi, sought for Italian love intrigues, grew ardent over 
 pale faces and dark, almond-shaped eyes. He shivered over 
 midnight adventures, cut short by the cool thrust of a jealous 
 blade, as he saw a mediaeval dagger with a hilt wrought like 
 lace, and spots of rust like splashes of blood upon it. 
 
 India and its religions took the shape of the idol with his 
 peaked cap of fantastic form, with little bells, clad in silk 
 and gold. Close by, a mat, as pretty as the bayadere who 
 once lay upon it, still gave out a faint scent of sandal wood. 
 His fancy was stirred by a goggle-eyed Chinese monster, with 
 mouth awry and twisted limbs, the invention of a people 
 who, grown weary of the monotony of beauty, found an 
 indescribable pleasure in an infinite variety of ugliness. A 
 salt-cellar from Benvenuto Cellini's workshop carried him 
 back to the Renaissance at its height, to the time when there 
 was no restraint on art or morals, when torture was the sport
 
 18 THE WILD ASS 1 SKIN. 
 
 of sovereigns ; and from their councils, churchmen with 
 courtesans' arms about them issued decrees of chastity for 
 simple priests. 
 
 On a cameo he saw the conquests of Alexander, the mas- 
 sacres of Pizarro in a matchlock, and religious wars dis- 
 orderly, fanatical, and cruel, in the shadows of a helmet. 
 Joyous pictures of chivalry were called up by a suit of Milan- 
 ese armor, brightly polished and richly wrought ; a paladin's 
 eyes seemed to sparkle yet under the visor. 
 
 This sea of inventions, fashions, furniture, works of art 
 and fiascos, made for him a poem without end. Shapes and 
 colors and projects all lived again for him, but his mind re- 
 ceived no clear and perfect conception. It was the poet's 
 task to complete the sketches of the great master, who had 
 scornfully mingled on his palette the hues of the numberless 
 vicissitudes of human life. When the world at large at last 
 released him, when he had pondered over many lands, many 
 epochs, and various empires, the young man came back to the 
 life of the individual. He impersonated fresh characters, 
 and turned his mind to details, rejecting the life of nations 
 as a burden too overwhelming for a single soul. 
 
 Yonder was a sleeping child, modeled in wax, a relic of 
 Ruysch's collection, an enchanting creation which brought 
 back the happiness of his own childhood. The cotton gar- 
 ment of a Tahitian maid next fascinated him ; he beheld the 
 primitive life of nature, the real modesty of naked chastity, 
 the joys of an idleness natural to mankind, a peaceful fate by 
 a slow river of sweet water under a plantain tree that bears its 
 pleasant manna without the toil of man. Then all at once 
 he became a corsair, investing himself with the terrible 
 poetry that Lara has given to the part : the thought came at the 
 sight of the mother-of-pearl tints of a myriad of sea-shells, and 
 grew as he saw madrepores redolent of the sea-weeds and the 
 storms of the Atlantic. 
 
 The sea was forgotten again at a distant view of exquisite
 
 THE TALISMAN. 19 
 
 miniatures; he admired a precious missal in manuscript, 
 adorned with arabesques in gold and blue. Thoughts of 
 peaceful life swayed him ; he devoted himself afresh to study 
 and research, longing for the easy life of the monk, devoid 
 alike of cares and pleasures; and from the depths of his cell 
 he looked out upon the meadows, woods, and vineyards of his 
 convent. Pausing before some work of Teniers, he took for 
 his own the helmet of the soldier or the poverty of the arti- 
 san ; he wished to wear a smoke-begrimed cap with these 
 Flemings, to drink their beer and join their game at cards, 
 and smiled upon the comely plumpness of a peasant woman. 
 He shivered at a snowstorm by Mieris ; he seemed to take 
 part in Salvator Rosa's battle-piece; he ran his fingers over a 
 tomahawk from Illinois, and felt his own hair rise as he 
 touched a Cherokee scalping-knife. He marveled over the 
 rebec that he set in the hands of some lady of the land, drank 
 in the musical notes of her ballad, and in the twilight by the 
 Gothic arch above the hearth he told his love in a gloom so 
 deep that he could not read his answer in her eyes. 
 
 He caught at all delights, at all sorrows ; grasped at exist- 
 ence in every form ; and endowed the phantoms conjured up 
 from that inert and plastic material so liberally with his own 
 life and feelings, that the sound of his own footsteps reached 
 him as if from another world, or as the hum of Paris reaches 
 the towers of Notre Dame. 
 
 He ascended the inner staircase which led to the first floor, 
 with its votive shields, panoplies, carved shrines, and figures 
 on the wall at every step. Haunted by the strangest shapes, 
 by marvelous creations belonging to the borderland betwixt 
 life and death, he walked as if under the spell of a dream. 
 His own existence became a matter of doubt to him ; he 
 was neither wholly alive nor dead, like the curious objects 
 about him. The light began to fade as he reached the show- 
 rooms, but the treasures of gold and silver heaped up there 
 scarcely seemed to need illumination from without. The
 
 20 THE WILD ASS* SKIN. 
 
 most extravagant whims of prodigals, who have run through 
 millions to perish in garrets, had left their traces here in this 
 vast bazaar of human follies. Here, beside a writing desk, 
 made at the cost of 100,000 francs, and sold for a hundred 
 pence, lay a lock with a secret worth a king's ransom. The 
 human race was revealed in all the grandeur of its wretched- 
 ness ; in all the splendor of its infinite littleness. An ebony 
 table that an artist might worship, carved after Jean Goujon 
 designs, in years of toil, had been purchased perhaps at the 
 price of firewood. Precious caskets, and things that fairy 
 hands might have fashioned, lay there in heaps like rubbish. 
 
 "You must have the worth of millions here! " cried the 
 young man as he entered the last of an immense suite of 
 rooms, all decorated and gilded by eighteenth century artists. 
 
 "Thousands of millions, you might say," said the florid 
 shopman; "but you have seen nothing as yet. Go up to the 
 third floor, and you shall see ! " 
 
 The young man followed his guide to a fourth gallery, 
 where one by one there passed before his wearied eyes several 
 pictures by Poussin, a magnificent statue by Michael Angelo, 
 enchanting landscapes by Claude Lorraine, a Gerard Dow 
 (like a stray page from Sterne), Rembrandts, Murillos, and 
 pictures by Velasquez, as dark and full of color as a poem of 
 Byron's; then came classic bas-reliefs, finely-cut agates, 
 wonderful cameos! Works of art upon works of art, till the 
 craftsman's skill palled on the mind, masterpiece after master- 
 piece till art itself became hateful at last and enthusiasm died. 
 He came upon a Madonna by Raphael, but he was tired of 
 Raphael; a figure by Correggio never received the glance it 
 demanded of him. A priceless vase of antique porphyry 
 carved round about with pictures of the most grotesquely 
 wanton of Roman divinities, the pride of some Corinna, 
 scarcely drew a smile from him. 
 
 .The ruins of fifteen hundred vanished years oppressed him; 
 he sickened under all this human thought; felt bored by all
 
 THE TALISMAN. 21 
 
 this luxury and art. He struggled in vain against the con- 
 stantly renewed fantastic shapes that sprang up from under 
 his feet, like children of some sportive demon. 
 
 Are not fearful poisons set up in the soul by a swift concen- 
 tration of all her energies, her enjoyments, or ideas ; as 
 modern chemistry, in its caprice, repeats the action of crea- 
 tion by some gas or other? Do not many men perish under 
 the shock of the sudden expansion of some moral acid within 
 them? 
 
 "What is there in that box?" he inquired, as he reached 
 a large closet final triumph of human skill, originality, 
 wealth, and splendor, in which there hung a large, square 
 mahogany coffer, suspended from a nail by a silver chain. 
 
 "Ah, monsieur keeps the key of it," said the stout assistant 
 mysteriously. "If you wish to see the portrait, I will gladly 
 venture to tell him." 
 
 " Venture ! " said the young man ; "then is your master a 
 prince?" 
 
 "I don't know what he is," the other answered. Equally 
 astonished, each looked for a moment at the other. Then 
 construing the young man's silence as an order, the appren- 
 tice left him alone in the closet. 
 
 Have you never launched into the immensity of time and 
 space as you read the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried 
 by his fancy, have you hung as if suspended by a magician's 
 wand over the illimitable abyss of the past ? When the fossil 
 bones of animals belonging to civilizations before the Flood 
 are turned up in bed after bed and layer upon layer of the 
 quarries of Montmartre or among the schists of the Ural 
 range, the soul receives with dismay a glimpse of millions 
 of peoples forgotten by feeble human memory and unrec- 
 ognized by permanent divine tradition, peoples whose ashes 
 cover our globe with two feet of earth that yields bread to 
 us and flowers. 
 
 Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era ? Byron has given
 
 22 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 admirable expression to certain moral conflicts, but our im- 
 mortal naturalist has reconstructed past worlds from a few 
 bleached bones; has rebuilt cities, like Cadmus, with mon- 
 sters' teeth; has animated forests with all the secrets of 
 zoology gleaned from a piece of coal ; has discovered a giant 
 population from the footprints of a mammoth. These forms 
 stand erect, grow large, and fill regions commensurate with 
 their giant size. He treats figures like a poet; a nought set 
 beside a seven by him produces awe. 
 
 He can call up nothingness before you without the phrases 
 of a charlatan. He searches a lump of gypsum, finds an im- 
 pression in it, says to you, "Behold!" All at once marble 
 takes an animal shape, the dead come to life, the history of 
 the world is laid open before you. After countless dynasties 
 of giant creatures, races of fish and clans of molluscs, the race 
 of man appears at last as the degenerate copy of a splendid 
 model, which the Creator has perchance destroyed. Em- 
 boldened by his gaze into the past, this petty race, children 
 of yesterday, can overstep chaos, can raise a psalm without 
 end, and outline for themselves the story of the Universe in 
 an Apocalypse that reveals the past. After the tremendous 
 resurrection that took place at the voice of this man, the 
 little drop in the nameless Infinite, common to all the spheres, 
 that is ours to use, and that we call Time, seems to us a 
 pitiable moment of life. We ask ourselves the purpose of 
 our triumphs, our hatreds, our loves, overwhelmed as we are 
 by the destruction of so many past universes, and whether 
 it is worth while to accept the pain of life in order that here- 
 after we may become an intangible speck. Then we remain 
 as if dead, completely torn away from the present till the 
 valet de chambre comes in and says, " Madame la comtesse 
 answers that she is expecting monsieur." 
 
 All the wonders which had brought the known world 
 before the young man's mind wrought in his soul much the 
 same feeling of dejection that besets the philosopher investi-
 
 THE TALISMAN. 23 
 
 gating unknown creations. He longed more than ever for 
 death as he flung himself back in a curule chair and let his 
 eyes wander across the illusions composing a panorama of 
 the past. The pictures seemed to light up, the Virgin's 
 heads smiled on him, the statues seemed alive. Everything 
 danced and swayed around him, with a motion due to the 
 gloom and the tormenting fever that racked his brain ; each 
 monstrosity grimaced at him, while the portraits on the 
 canvas closed their eyes for a little relief. Every shape 
 seemed to tremble and start, and to leave its place gravely 
 or flippantly, gracefully or awkwardly, according to its fashion, 
 character, and surroundings. 
 
 A mysterious Sabbath began, rivalling the fantastic scenes 
 witnessed by Faust upon the Brocken. But these optical 
 illusions, produced by weariness, over-strained eyesight, or the 
 accidents of twilight, could not alarm the young man. The 
 terrors of life had no power over a soul grown familiar with 
 the terrors of death. He even gave himself up, half -amused 
 by its bizarre eccentricities, to the influence of this moral 
 galvanism ; its phenomena, closely connected with his last 
 thoughts, assured him that he was still alive. The silence 
 about him was so deep that he embarked once more in dreams 
 that grew gradually darker and darker as if by magic, as the 
 light slowly faded. A last struggling ray from the sun lit up 
 rosy answering lights. He raised his head and saw a skeleton 
 dimly visible, with its skull bent doubtfully to one side, as 
 if to say, " The dead will none of thee as yet." 
 
 He passed his hand over his forehead to shake off the drow- 
 siness, and felt a cold breath of air as an unknown furry some- 
 thing swept past his cheeks. He shivered. A muffled clatter 
 of the windows followed ; it was a bat, he fancied, that had 
 given him this chilly sepulchral caress. He could yet dimly 
 see for a moment the shapes that surrounded him, by the 
 vague light in the west ; then all these inanimate objects 
 were blotted out in uniform darkness. Night and the hour
 
 34 THE WILD ASS' SA'IW. 
 
 of death had suddenly come. Thenceforward, for a while, 
 he lost consciousness of the things about him ; he was either 
 buried in deep meditation, or sleep overcame him, brought 
 on by weariness or by the stress of those many thoughts that 
 lacerated his heart. 
 
 Suddenly he thought that an awful voice called him by 
 name ; it was like some feverish nightmare, when at a step 
 the dreamer falls headlong over into an abyss, and he trembled. 
 He closed his eyes, dazzled by bright rays from a red circle 
 of light that shone out from the shadows. In the midst of 
 the circle stood a little old man who turned the light of a 
 lamp upon him, yet he had not heard him enter, nor move, 
 nor speak. There was something magical about the appari- 
 tion. The boldest man, awakened in such a way, would have 
 felt alarm at the sight of this figure, which might have issued 
 from some sarcophagus hard by. 
 
 A curiously youthful look in the unmoving eyes of the 
 spectre forbade the idea of anything supernatural ; but for all 
 that, in the brief space between his dreaming and waking life, 
 the young man's judgment remained philosophically sus- 
 pended, as Descartes claims. He was, in spite of himself, 
 under the influence of an unaccountable hallucination, a 
 mystery that our pride rejects, and that our imperfect science 
 vainly tries to solve. 
 
 Imagine a short old man, thin and spare, in a long black 
 velvet gown girded round him by a thick silk cord. His long 
 white hair escaped on either side of his face from under a 
 black velvet cap which closely fitted his head and made a 
 formal setting for his countenance. His gown enveloped his 
 body like a winding-sheet, so that all that was left visible was 
 a narrow bleached human face. But for the wasted arm, thin 
 as a draper's wand, which held aloft the lamp that cast all its 
 light upon him, the face would have seemed to hang in mid- 
 air. A gray pointed beard concealed the chin of this fantas- 
 tical appearance, and gave him the look of one of those
 
 A LITTLE OLD MAN TURNED THE LIGHT OF A LAMP 
 UPON HIM.
 
 THE TALISMAN. 25 
 
 Jewish types which serve artists as models for Moses. His 
 lips were so thin and colorless that it needed a close inspec- 
 tion to find the lines of his mouth at all in the pallid face. 
 His great wrinkled brow and hollow bloodless cheeks, the 
 inexorably stern expression of his small green eyes that no 
 longer possessed eyebrows or lashes, might have convinced 
 the young man that Gerard Dow's "Money Changer" had 
 come down from his frame. The craftiness of an inquisitor, 
 revealed in those curving wrinkles and creases that wound 
 about his temples, indicated a profound knowledge of life. 
 There was no deceiving this man, who seemed to possess a 
 power of detecting the secrets of the most wary heart. 
 
 The wisdom and the moral codes of every people seemed 
 gathered up in his passive face, just as all the productions of 
 the globe had been heaped up in his dusty show-rooms. He 
 seemed to possess the tranquil luminous vision of some god 
 before whom all things are open, or the haughty power of a 
 man who knows all things. 
 
 With two strokes of the brush a painter could have so 
 altered the expression of this face, that what had been a 
 serene representation of the Eternal Father should change 
 to the sneering mask of a Mephistopheles ; for though 
 sovereign power was revealed by the forehead, mocking 
 folds lurked about the mouth. He must have sacrificed 
 all the joys of earth, as he had crushed all human sorrows 
 beneath his potent will. The man at the brink of death shiv- 
 ered at the thought of the life led by this spirit, so solitary 
 and remote from our world ; joyless, since he had no one 
 illusion left; painless, because pleasure had ceased to exist 
 for him. There he stood, motionless and serene as a star in 
 a bright mist. His lamp lit up the obscure closet, just as his 
 green eyes, with their quiet malevolence, seemed to shed a 
 light on the moral world. 
 
 This was the strange spectacle that startled the young man's 
 returning sight, as he shook off the dreamy fancies and
 
 26 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 thoughts of death that had lulled him. An instant of dismay, 
 a momentary return to belief in nursery tales, may be for- 
 given him, seeing that his senses were obscured. Much 
 thought had wearied his mind, and his nerves were exhausted 
 with the strain of the tremendous drama within him, and by 
 the scenes that had heaped on him all the horrid pleasures 
 that a piece of opium can produce. 
 
 But this apparition .had appeared in Paris, on the Quai 
 Voltaire, and in the nineteenth century ; the time and place 
 made sorcery impossible. The idol of French scepticism had 
 died in the house just opposite, the disciple of Gay-Lussac 
 and Arago, who had held the charlatanism of intellect in con- 
 tempt. And yet the young man submitted himself to the 
 influence of an imaginative spell, as all of us do at times, when 
 we wish to escape from an inevitable certainty, or to tempt 
 the power of Providence. So some mysterious apprehension 
 of a strange force made him tremble before the old man with 
 the lamp. All of us have been stirred in the same way by 
 the sight of Napoleon, or of some other great man, made 
 illustrious by his genius or by fame. 
 
 "You wish to see Raphael's portrait of Jesus Christ, mon- 
 sieur?" the old man asked politely. There was something 
 metallic in the clear, sharp ring of his voice. 
 
 He set the lamp upon a broken column, so that all its light 
 might fall on the brown case. 
 
 At the sacred names of Christ and Raphael the young man 
 showed some curiosity. The merchant, who no doubt looked 
 for this, pressed a spring, and suddenly the mahogany panel 
 slid noiselessly back in its groove, and discovered the canvas 
 to the young man's admiring gaze. At sight of this death- 
 less creation, he forgot his fancies in the show-rooms and the 
 freaks of his dreams, and became himself again, The old 
 man became a being of flesh and blood, very much alive, with 
 nothing chimerical about him, and took up his existence at 
 once upon solid earth.
 
 THE TALISMAN. 27 
 
 The sympathy and love, and the gentle serenity in the 
 divine face, exerted an instant sway over the younger spec- 
 tator. Some influence failing from heaven bade cease the 
 burning torment that consumed the marrow of his bones. 
 The head of the Saviour of mankind seemed to issue from 
 among the shadows represented by a dark background ; an 
 aureole of light shone out brightly from his hair; an impas- 
 sioned belief seemed to glow through him, and to thrill every 
 feature. The word of life had just been uttered by those red 
 lips, the sacred sounds seemed to linger still in the air; the 
 spectator besought the silence for those captivating parables, 
 hearkened for them in the future, and had to turn to the 
 teachings of the past. The untroubled peace of the divine 
 eyes, the comfort of sorrowing souls, seemed an interpreta- 
 tion of the Evangel. The sweet triumphant smile revealed 
 the secret of the Catholic religion, which sums up all things 
 in the precept, "Love one another." This picture breathed 
 the spirit of prayer, enjoined forgiveness, overcame self, 
 caused sleeping powers of good to waken. For this work 
 of Raphael's had the imperious charm of music; you were 
 brought under the spell of memories of the past ; his triumph 
 was so absolute that the artist was forgotten. The witchery 
 of the lamplight heightened the wonder ; the head seemed 
 at times to flicker in the distance, enveloped in cloud. 
 
 "I covered the surface of that picture with gold-pieces," 
 said the merchant carelessly. 
 
 "And now for death !" cried the young man, awakened from 
 his musings. His last thought had recalled his fate to him, 
 as it led him imperceptibly back from the forlorn hopes to 
 which he clung. 
 
 "Ah, ha! then my suspicions were well founded !" said the 
 other, and his hands held the young man's wrists in a grip 
 like that of a vise. 
 
 The young man smiled wearily at his mistake, and said 
 gently
 
 28 7 HE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 "You, sir, have nothing to fear; it is not your life, but 
 
 my own that is in question But why should I hide a 
 
 harmless fraud?" he went on, after a look at the anxious old 
 man. "I came to see your treasure to while away the time 
 till night should come and I could drown myself decently. 
 Who would grudge this last pleasure to a poet and a man of 
 science?" 
 
 While he spoke, the jealous merchant watched the haggard 
 face of his pretended customer with keen eyes. Perhaps the 
 mournful tones of his voice reassured him, or he also read the 
 dark signs of fate in the faded features that had made the 
 gamblers shudder; he released his hands, but with a touch of 
 caution, due to the experience of some hundred years at least, 
 he stretched his arm out to a sideboard as if to steady himself, 
 took up a little dagger and said 
 
 " Have you been a supernumerary clerk of the Treasury for 
 three years without receiving any perquisites?" 
 
 The young man could scarcely suppress a smile as he shook 
 his head. 
 
 " Perhaps your father has expressed his regret for your birth 
 a little too sharply? Or have you disgraced yourself?" 
 
 "If I meant to be disgraced, I should live." 
 
 "You have been hissed perhaps at the Funambules? Or 
 you have had to compose couplets to pay for your mistress' 
 funeral? Do you want to be cured of the gold fever? Or 
 to be quit of the spleen ? For what blunder is your life a 
 forfeit?" 
 
 "You must not look among the common motives that 
 impel suicides for the reason of my death. To spare myself 
 the task of disclosing my unheard-of sufferings, for which 
 language has no name, I will tell you this that I am in the 
 deepest, most humiliating, and most cruel trouble, and," he 
 went on in proud tones that harmonized ill with the words 
 just uttered, " I have no wish to beg for either help or sym- 
 pathy."
 
 THE TALISMAN. 29 
 
 "Eh! eh!" 
 
 The two syllables which the old man pronounced resembled 
 the sound of a rattle. Then he went on thus : 
 
 " Without compelling you to entreat me, without making 
 you blush for it, and without giving you so much as a French 
 centime, a para from the Levant, a German heller, a Russian 
 kopeck, a Scottish farthing, a single obolus or sestercius from 
 the ancient world, or one piastre from the new, without offer- 
 ing you anything whatever in gold, silver, or copper, notes or 
 drafts, I will make you richer, more powerful, and of more 
 consequence than a constitutional king." 
 
 The young man thought that the old man must be in his 
 dotage, and waited in bewilderment without venturing to reply. 
 
 "Turn round," said the merchant, suddenly catching up 
 the lamp in order to light up the opposite wall ; " look at that 
 leathern skin," he went on. 
 
 The young man rose abruptly, and showed some surprise at 
 the sight of a piece of shagreen which hung on the wall behind 
 his chair. It was only about the size of a fox's skin, but 
 it seemed to fill the deep shadows of the place with such 
 brilliant rays that it looked like a small comet, an appearance 
 at first sight inexplicable. The young sceptic went up to this 
 so-called talisman, which was to rescue him from his woes, 
 with a scoffing phrase in his thoughts. Still a harmless curi- 
 osity led him to bend over it and look at it from all points of 
 view, and he soon found out the cause of its singular brilliancy. 
 The dark grain of the leather had been so carefully burnished 
 and polished, the striped markings of the graining were so 
 sharp and clear, that every particle of the surface of the bit 
 of Oriental leather was in itself a focus which concentrated 
 the light, and reflected it vividly. 
 
 He accounted for this phenomenon categorically to the old 
 man, who only smiled meaningly by way of answer. His 
 superior smile led the young scientific man to fancy that he 
 himself had been deceived by some imposture. He had no
 
 30 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 wish to carry one more puzzle to his grave, and hastily turned 
 the skin over, like some child eager to find out the mysteries 
 of a new toy. 
 
 "All," he cried, "here is the mark of a seal which they 
 call in the East the Signet of Solomon." 
 
 "So you know that then," asked the merchant. His pecu- 
 liar method of laughter, two or three quick breathings 
 through the nostrils, said more than any words however elo- 
 quent. 
 
 " Is there anybody in the world simple enough to believe 
 in that idle fancy?" said the young man, nettled by the spite- 
 fulness of the silent chuckle. " Don't you know," he con- 
 tinued, " that the superstitions of the East have perpetuated 
 the mystical form and the counterfeit characters of the symbol, 
 which represents a mythical dominion ? I have no more laid 
 myself open to a charge of credulity in this case, than if I 
 had mentioned sphinxes or griffins, whose existence mythology 
 in a manner admits." 
 
 "As you are an Orientalist," replied the other, "perhaps 
 you can read that sentence." 
 
 He held the lamp close to the talisman, which the young 
 man held towards him, and pointed out some characters 
 inlaid in the surface of the wonderful skin, as if they had 
 grown on the animal to which it once belonged. 
 
 "I must admit," said the young man, "that I have no 
 idea how the letters could be engraved so deeply on the skin 
 of a wild ass." And he turned quickly to the tables strewn 
 with curiosities, and seemed to look for something. 
 
 "What is it that you want?" asked the old man. 
 
 " Something that will cut the leather, so that I can see 
 whether the letters are printed or inlaid." 
 
 The old man held out his stiletto. The young man took 
 it and tried to cut the skin above the lettering ; but when 
 he had removed a thin shaving of leather from them, the 
 characters still appeared below, so clear and so exactly like
 
 THE TALISMAN. 31 
 
 the surface impression, that for a moment he was not sure 
 that he had cut anything away after all. 
 
 " The craftsmen of the Levant have secrets known only to 
 themselves," he said, half in vexation, as he eyed the char- 
 acters of this Oriental sentence. 
 
 "Yes," said the old man, "it is better to attribute it to 
 man's agency than to God's." 
 
 The mysterious words were thus arranged : 
 
 Or, as it runs in English : 
 
 POSSESSING ME THOU SHALT POSSESS ALL THINGS, 
 
 BUT THY LIFE IS MINE, FOR GOD HAS SO WILLED IT. 
 
 WISH, AND THY WISHES SHALL BE FULFILLED ; 
 
 BUT MEASURE THY DESIRES, ACCORDING 
 
 TO THE LIFE THAT IS IN THEE. 
 
 THIS IS THY LIFE, 
 WITH EACH WISH I MUST SHRINK 
 
 EVEN AS THY OWN DAYS. 
 
 WILT THOU HAVE ME? TAKE ME. 
 
 GOD WILL HEARKEN UNTO THEE. 
 
 SO BE IT!
 
 32 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 " So you read Sanskrit fluently," said the old man. " You 
 have been in Persia perhaps, or in Bengal?" 
 
 "No, sir," said the stranger, as he felt the emblematical 
 skin curiously. It was almost as rigid as a sheet of metal. 
 
 The old merchant set the lamp back again upon the column, 
 giving the other a lock as he did so. " He has given up the 
 notion of dying already," the glance said with phlegmatic 
 irony. 
 
 "Is it a jest, or is it an enigma?" asked the young man. 
 
 The other shook his head and said soberly 
 
 "I don't know how to answer you. I have offered this 
 talisman with its terrible powers to men with more energy in 
 them than you seem to me to have; but though they laughed 
 at the questionable power it might exert over their futures, 
 not one of them was ready to venture to conclude the fateful 
 contract ' proposed by an unknown force. I am of their 
 opinion, I have doubted and refrained, and 
 
 "Have you never even tried its power?" interrupted the 
 young stranger. 
 
 "Tried it ! " exclaimed the old man. " Suppose that you 
 were on the column in the Place Vendome, would you try 
 flinging yourself into space ? Is it possible to stay the course 
 of life? Has a man ever been known to die by halves? 
 Before you came here, you had made up your mind to kill 
 yourself, but all at once a mystery fills your mind, and you think 
 no more about death. You child ! Does not any one day 
 of your life afford mysteries more absorbing ? Listen to me. 
 I saw the licentious days of the Regency. I was like you, 
 then, in poverty ; I have begged my bread; but for all that, I 
 am now a centenarian with a couple of years to spare, and a 
 millionaire to boot. Misery was the making of me, ignorance 
 has made me learned. I will tell you in a few words the 
 great secret of human life. By two instinctive processes man 
 exhausts the springs of life within him. Two verbs cover all 
 the forms which these two causes of death may take ' To
 
 THE TALISMAN. 33 
 
 will and to have your will.' Between these two limits of 
 human activity the wise have discovered an intermediate 
 formula, to which I owe my good fortune and long life. ' To 
 will ' consumes us, and ' To have our will ' destroys us, but ' To 
 know' steeps our feeble organisms in perpetual calm. In me 
 Thought has destroyed Will, so that Power is relegated to the 
 ordinary functions of my economy. In a word, it is not in 
 the heart which can be broken, nor in the senses that become 
 deadened, but it is in the brain that cannot waste away and 
 survives everything else, that I have set my life. Moderation 
 has kept mind and body unruffled. Yet I have seen the 
 whole world. I have learned all languages, lived after every 
 manner. I have loaned a Chinaman money, taking his father's 
 corpse as a pledge, slept in an Arab's tent on the security of 
 his bare word, signed contracts in every capital of Europe, 
 and left my gold without hesitation in savage wigwams. I 
 have attained everything, because I have known how to 
 despise all things. 
 
 " My one ambition has been to see. Is not sight in a 
 manner insight? And to have knowledge or insight, is not 
 that to have instinctive possession? To be able to discover 
 the very substance of fact and to unite its essence to our 
 essence ? Of material possession what abides with you but an 
 idea? Think, then, how glorious must be the life of a man 
 who can stamp all realities upon his thought, place the springs 
 of happiness within himself, and draw thence uncounted 
 pleasures in idea, unsoiled by earthly stains. Thought is a 
 key to all treasures; the miser's gains are ours without his 
 cares. Thus I have soared above this world, where my enjoy- 
 ments have been intellectual joys. I have reveled in the 
 contemplation of seas, peoples, forests, and mountains ! I 
 have seen all things, calmly, and without weariness ; I have 
 set my desires on nothing ; I have waited in expectation of 
 everything. I have walked to and fro in the world as in a 
 garden round about my own dwelling. Troubles, loves,
 
 34 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 ambitions, losses, and sorrows, as men call them, are for me 
 ideas, which I transmute into waking dreams ; I express and 
 transpose instead of feeling them ; instead of permitting them 
 to prey upon my life, I dramatize and expand them ; I divert 
 myself with them as if they were romances which I could read 
 by the power of vision within me. As I have never overtaxed 
 my constitution, I still enjoy robust health ; and as my mind 
 is endowed with all the force that I have not wasted, this 
 head of mine is even better furnished than my galleries. The 
 true millions lie here," he said, striking his forehead. "I 
 spend delicious days in communings with the past; I summon 
 before me whole countries, places, extents of sea, the fair 
 faces of history. In my imaginary seraglio I have all the 
 women I have never possessed. Your wars and revolutions 
 come up before me for judgment. What is a feverish fugitive 
 admiration for some more or less brightly colored piece of 
 flesh and blood ; some more or less rounded human form ; 
 what are all the disasters that wait on your erratic whims, com- 
 pared with the magnificent power of conjuring up the whole 
 world within your soul, compared with the immeasurable 
 joys of movements, unstrangled by the cords of time, un- 
 clogged by the fetters of space ; the joys of beholding all 
 things, of comprehending all things, of leaning over the 
 parapet of the world to question the other spheres, to hearken 
 to the voice of God? There," he burst out, vehemently, 
 "there are To Will and To have your Will, both together," he 
 pointed to the bit of shagreen ; " there are your social ideas, 
 your immoderate desires, your excesses, your pleasures that 
 end in death, your sorrows that quicken the pace of life, for 
 pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure. Who could determine 
 the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a 
 pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world 
 soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical 
 world annoy? Is not knowledge the secret of wisdom? And 
 what is folly but a riotous expenditure of Will or Power ?"
 
 THE TALISMAN. 35 
 
 "Very good, then, a life of riotous excess for me! " said 
 the young man, pouncing upon the piece of shagreen. 
 
 "Young man, beware!" cried the other with incredible 
 vehemence. 
 
 " I had resolved my existence into thought and study," the 
 young man replied; "and yet they have not even supported 
 me. I am not to be gulled by a sermon worthy of Sweden- 
 borg, nor by your Oriental amulet, nor yet by your charitable 
 endeavors to keep me in a world wherein existence is no 
 
 longer possible for me. Let me see, now," he added, 
 
 clutching the talisman convulsively, as he looked at the old 
 man, "I wish for a royal banquet, a carouse worthy'of this 
 century, which, it is said, has brought everything to perfec- 
 tion ! Let me have young boon companions, witty, unwarped 
 by prejudice, merry to the verge of madness ! Let one wine 
 succeed another, each more biting and perfumed than the 
 last, and strong enough to bring about three days of delirium ! 
 Passionate women's forms should grace that night ! I would 
 be borne away to unknown regions beyond the confines of 
 this world by the car and four-winged steeds of a frantic and 
 uproarious orgie. Let us ascend to the skies, or plunge our- 
 selves in the mire. I do not know if one soars or sinks at 
 such moments, and I do not care ! Next, I bid this enig- 
 matical power to concentrate all delights for me in one single 
 joy. Yes, I must comprehend every pleasure of earth and 
 heaven in the final embrace that is to kill me. Therefore, 
 after the wine, I wish to hold high festival to Priapus, with 
 songs that might rouse the dead, and kisses without end ; the 
 sound of them should pass like the crackling of flame through 
 Paris, should revive the heat of youth and passion in husband 
 and wife, even in hearts of seventy years." 
 
 A laugh burst from the little old man. It rang in the 
 young man's ears like an echo from hell, and tyrannously cut 
 him short. He said no more. 
 
 " Do you imagine that my floors are going to open sud-
 
 36 THE WILD ^ASS* SKIN. 
 
 denly, so that luxuriously-appointed tables may rise through 
 them, and guests from another world ? No, no, young mad- 
 cap. You have entered into the compact now, and there is 
 an end of, it. Henceforward, your wishes will be accurately 
 fulfilled, but at the expense of your life. The compass of 
 your days, visible in that skin, will contract according to the 
 strength and number of your desires, from the least to the 
 most extravagant. The Brahmin from whom I had this skin 
 once explained to me that it would bring about a mysterious 
 connection between the fortunes and the wishes of its pos- 
 sessor. Your first wish is a vulgar one, which I could fulfil, 
 but I leave that to the issues of your new existence. After 
 all, you were wishing to die ; very well, your suicide is only 
 put off for a time." 
 
 The young man was surprised and irritated because the 
 singular old man persisted in not taking him seriously. A 
 half philanthropic intention peeped so clearly forth from his 
 last jesting observation, that he exclaimed 
 
 " I shall soon see, sir, if any change comes over my fortunes 
 in the time it will take to cross the width of the quay. But 
 I should like us to be quits for such a momentous service ; that 
 is, if you are not laughing at an unlucky wretch, so I wish 
 that you may fall in love with an opera-dancer. You would 
 understand the pleasures of intemperance then, and might 
 perhaps grow lavish of the wealth that you have husbanded so 
 philosophically." 
 
 He went out without heeding the old man's heavy sigh, 
 went back through the galleries and down the staircase, fol- 
 lowed by the stout assistant who vainly tried to light his pas- 
 sage ; he fled with the haste of a robber caught in the 
 act. Blinded by a kind of delirium, he did not even notice 
 the unexpected flexibility of the piece of shagreen, which 
 coiled itself up, pliant as a glove in his excited fingers, till it 
 would go into the pocket of his coat, where he mechani- 
 cally thrust it. As he rushed out of the door into the street,
 
 THE TALISMAN. 37 
 
 he ran up against three young men who were passing arm in 
 arm. 
 
 "Brute ! " 
 
 "Idiot! " 
 
 Such were the gratifying expressions exchanged between 
 them. 
 
 "Why, it is Raphael ! " 
 
 " Good ! we were looking for you." 
 
 " What ! it is you, then ? " 
 
 These three friendly exclamations quickly followed the in- 
 sults, as the light of a street lamp, flickering in the wind, fell 
 upon the astonished faces of the group. 
 
 " My dear fellow, you must come with us ! " said the 
 young man that Raphael had all but knocked down. 
 
 " What is all this about? " 
 
 " Come along, and I will tell you the history of it as 
 we go." 
 
 By fair means or foul, Raphael must go along with his 
 friends towards the Pont des Arts ; they surrounded him, and 
 linked him by the arm among their merry band. 
 
 " We have been after you for about a week," the speaker 
 went on. " At your respectable hotel de Saint Quentin, 
 where, by the way, the sign with the alternate black and red 
 letters cannot be removed, and hangs out just as it did in the 
 time of Jean Jacques, that Leonarda of yours told us that you 
 were off into the country. For all that, we certainly did not 
 look like duns, creditors, sheriffs officers, or the like. But 
 no matter ! Rastignac had seen you the evening before at the 
 Bouffons; we took courage again, and made it a point of 
 honor to find out whether you were roosting in a tree in the 
 Champs Elysees, or in one of those philanthropic abodes 
 where the beggars sleep on a twopenny rope, or if, more 
 lucky, you were bivouacking in some boudoir or other. We 
 could not find you anywhere. Your name was not in the 
 jailer's registers at St. Pelagic nor at La Force ! Government
 
 38 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 departments, cafes, libraries, lists of prefects' names, news- 
 paper offices, restaurants, greenrooms to cut it short, every 
 lurking place in Paris, good or bad, has been explored in the 
 most expert manner. We bewailed the loss of a man endowed 
 with such genius, that one might look to find him either at 
 Court or in the common jails. We talked of canonizing you 
 as a hero of July, and, upon my word, we regretted you ! " 
 
 As he spoke, the friends were crossing the Pont des Arts. 
 Without listening to them, Raphael looked at the Seine, at 
 the clamoring waves that reflected the lights of Paris. Above 
 that river, in which but now he had thought to fling himself, 
 the old man's prediction had been fulfilled, the hour of his 
 death had been already put back by fate. 
 
 " We really regretted you," said his friend, still pursuing 
 his theme. " It was a question of a plan in which we in- 
 cluded you as a superior person, that is to say, somebody who 
 can put himself above other people. The constitutional 
 thimble-rig is carried on to-day, dear boy, more seriously than 
 ever. The infamous monarchy, displaced by the heroism of 
 the people, was a sort of drab, you could laugh and revel with 
 her ; but La Patrie is a shrewish and virtuous wife, and willy- 
 nilly you must take her prescribed endearments. Then be- 
 sides, as you know, authority passed over from the Tuileries 
 to the journalists, at the time when the Budget changed its 
 quarters and went from the Faubourg Saint Germain to the 
 Chaussee d'Antin. But this you may not know, perhaps. 
 The Government, that is, the aristocracy of lawyers and bank- 
 ers who represent the country to-day, just as the priests used 
 to do in the time of the monarchy, has felt the necessity of 
 mystifying the worthy people of France with a few new words 
 and old ideas, like philosophers of every school, and all strong 
 intellects ever since time began. So now Royalist-national 
 ideas must be inculcated, by proving to us that it is far better 
 to pay twelve hundred million francs thirty-three centimes to 
 La Patrie, represented by Messieurs Such-and-Such, than to
 
 THE TALISMAN". 3D 
 
 pay eleven hundred million francs nine centimes to a king 
 who used to say /instead of we. In a word, a journal, with 
 two or three hundred thousand francs, good, at the back of it, 
 has just been started, with a view to making an opposition 
 paper to content the discontented, without prejudice to the 
 national government of the citizen-king. We scoff at liberty 
 .as at despotism now, and at religion or incredulity quite im- 
 partially. And since, for us, 'our country' means a capital 
 where ideas circulate and are sold at so much a line, a succu- 
 lent dinner every day, and the play at frequent intervals, 
 where profligate women swarm, where suppers last on into the 
 next day, and light loves are hired by the hour like cabs ; and 
 since Paris will always be the most adorable of all countries, 
 the country of joy, liberty, wit, pretty women, mauvais sujets^ 
 and good wine ; where the truncheon of authority never makes 
 itself disagreeably felt, because one is so close to those who 
 wield it we, therefore, sectaries of the god Mephisiopheles, 
 have engaged to whitewash the public mind, to give fresh 
 costumes to the actors, to put a new plank or two in the Gov- 
 ernment booth, to doctor doctrinaires, and warm up old Re- 
 publicans, to touch up the Bonapartists a bit, and revictual 
 the Centre ; provided that we are allowed to laugh in secret 
 at both kings and peoples, to think one thing in the morning 
 and another at night, and to lead a merry life a la Panurge, 
 or to recline upon soft cushions, like the Orientals. 
 
 "The sceptre of this burlesque and macaronic kingdom," 
 he went on, "we have reserved for you; so we are taking 
 you straightway to a dinner given by the founder of the said 
 newspaper, a retired banker, who, at a loss to know what to 
 do with his money, is going to buy some brains with it. You 
 will be welcomed as a brother, we shall hail you as king of 
 these free lances who will undertake anything ; whose per- 
 spicacity discovers the intentions of Austria, England, or Russia, 
 before either Russia, Austria, or England have formed any. 
 * Good-for-nothings.
 
 40 THE WILD ASh 
 
 Yes, we will invest you with the sovereignty of those puissant 
 intellects which give to the world its Mirabeaus, Talleyrands, 
 Pitts, and Metternichs all the clever Crispins who treat the 
 destinies of a kingdom as gamblers' stakes, just as ordinary 
 men play dominoes for kirschenwasser. We have given you 
 out to be the most undaunted champion who ever wrestled in 
 a drinking-bout at close quarters with the monster called 
 Carousal, who all bold spirits wish to try a fall with ; we have 
 gone so far as to say that you have never yet been worsted. 
 I hope you will not make liars of us. Taillefer, our amphi- 
 tryon, has undertaken to surpass the circumscribed saturnalias 
 of the petty modern Lucullus. He is rich enough to infuse 
 
 pomp into trifles, and style and charm into dissipation. 
 
 Are you listening, Raphael?" asked the orator, interrupting 
 himself. 
 
 "Yes," answered the young man, less surprised by the ac- 
 complishment of his wishes than by the natural manner in 
 which the events had come about. 
 
 He could not bring himself to believe in magic, but he 
 marveled at the accidents of human fate. 
 
 "Yes, you say, just as if you were thinking of your grand- 
 father's demise," remarked one of his neighbors. 
 
 "Ah !" cried Raphael, " I was thinking, my friends, that 
 we are in a fair way to become very great scoundrels, ' ' and there 
 was an ingenuousness in his tones that set these writers, the 
 hope of young France, in a roar. " So far our blasphemies 
 have been uttered over our cups ; we have passed our judg- 
 ments on life while drunk, and taken men and affairs in an 
 after-dinner frame of mind. We were innocent of action ; 
 we were bold in words. But now we are to be branded 
 with the hot iron of politics; we are going to enter the con- 
 vict's prison and to drop our illusions. Although one has no 
 belief left, except in the devil, one may regret the paradise 
 of one's youth and the age of innocence, when we devoutly 
 offered the tip of our tongue to some good priest for the con-
 
 THE TALISMAN. 41 
 
 secrated wafer of the sacrament. Ah, my good friends, our 
 first peccadilloes gave us so much pleasure because the conse- 
 quent remorse set them off and lent a keen relish to them ; 
 but nowadays " 
 
 " Oh ! now," said the first speaker, " there is still left 
 
 " What?" asked another. 
 
 " Crime " 
 
 " There is a word as high as the gallows and deeper than 
 the Seine," said Raphael. 
 
 "Oh, you don't understand me; I mean political crime. 
 Since this morning, a conspirator's life is the only one I covet. 
 I don't know that the fancy will last over to-morrow, but 
 to-night at least my gorge rises at the anaemic life of our civil- 
 ization and its railroad evenness. I am seized with a passion 
 for the miseries of the retreat from Moscow, for the excite- 
 ments of the Red Corsair, or for a smuggler's life. I should 
 like to go to Botany Bay, as we have no Chartreux left us 
 here in France ; it is a sort of infirmary reserved for little 
 Lord Byrons, who, having crumpled up their lives like a 
 serviette after dinner, have nothing left to do but to set their 
 country ablaze, blow their own brains out, plot for a republic, 
 or clamor for a war " 
 
 " Emile," Raphael's neighbor called eagerly to the speaker, 
 "on my honor, but for the revolution of July I would have 
 taken orders, and gone off down into the country somewhere 
 to lead the life of an animal, and " 
 
 "And you would have read your Breviary through every 
 day." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "You are a coxcomb." 
 
 "Why we read the newspapers as it is !" 
 
 "Not bad that for a journalist! But hold your tongue, 
 we are going through a crowd of subscribers. Journalism, 
 look you, is the religion of modern society, and has even 
 gone a little further."
 
 42 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 " What do you mean ?" 
 
 "Its pontiffs are not obliged to believe in it any more than 
 the people are." 
 
 Chatting thus, like good fellows who have known their De 
 Viris illustribus for years past, they reached a mansion in the 
 Rue Joubert. 
 
 Emile was a journalist who had acquired more reputation 
 by dint of doing nothing than others had derived from their 
 achievements. A bold, caustic, and powerful critic, he pos- 
 sessed all the qualities that his defects permitted. An out- 
 spoken giber, he made numberless epigrams on a friend to 
 his face, but would defend him if absent with courage and 
 loyalty. He laughed at everything, even at his own career. 
 Always impecunious, he yet lived, like all men of his calibre, 
 plunged in unspeakable indolence. He would fling some 
 word containing whole volumes in the teeth of folk who could 
 not put a syllable of sense into their books. He lavished 
 promises that he never fulfilled ; he made a pillow of his luck 
 and reputation, on which he slept, and ran the risk of waking 
 up to old age in a workhouse. A steadfast friend to the 
 gallows foot, a cynical swaggerer with a child's simplicity, a 
 worker only from necessity or caprice. 
 
 " In the language of Maitre Alcofribas, we are about to 
 make famous a piece of good cheer," he remarked to Raphael 
 as he pointed out the flower-stands that made a perfumed 
 forest of the staircase. 
 
 " I like a vestibule to be well warmed and richly carpeted," 
 Raphael said. " Luxury in the peristyle is not common in 
 France. I feel as if life had begun anew here." 
 
 "And up above we are going to drink and make merry once 
 more, my dear Raphael. Ah! yes," he went on, "and I 
 hope we are going to come off conquerors, too, and walk over 
 everybody else's head." 
 
 As he spoke, he jestingly pointed to the guests. They were 
 entering a large room which shone with gilding and lights,
 
 THE TALISMAN. 43 
 
 and there all the younger men of note in Paris welcomed 
 them. Here was one who had just revealed fresh powers ; 
 his first picture vied with the glories of imperial art. There, 
 another, who but yesterday had launched forth a volume, an 
 acrid book filled with a sort of literary arrogance, which opened 
 up new ways to the modern school. A sculptor, not far away, 
 with vigorous power visible in his rough features, was chatting 
 with one of those unenthusiastic scoffers who can either see 
 excellence anywhere or nowhere, as it happens. Here, the 
 cleverest of our caricaturists, with mischievous eyes and bitter 
 tongue, lay in wait for epigrams to translate into pencil 
 strokes; there stood the young and audacious writer, who 
 distilled the quintessence of political ideas better than any 
 other man, or compressed the work of some prolific writer as 
 he held him up to ridicule ; he was talking with the poet 
 whose works would have eclipsed all the writings of the time 
 if his ability had been as strenuous as his hatreds. Both were 
 trying not to say the truth while they kept clear of lies, as 
 they exchanged flattering speeches. A famous musician admin- 
 istered soothing consolation in a rallying fashion to a young 
 politician who had just fallen, quite unhurt, from his rostrum. 
 Young writers who lacked style stood beside other young 
 writers who lacked ideas, and authors of political prose by 
 prosaic poets. 
 
 At the sight of all these incomplete beings, a simple Saint 
 Simonian, ingenuous enough to believe in his own doctrine, 
 charitably paired them off, designing, no doubt, to convert 
 them into monks of his order. A few men of science mingled 
 in the conversation, like nitrogen in the atmosphere, and 
 several vaudevillistes shed rays like the sparkling diamonds 
 that give neither light nor heat. A few paradox-mongers, 
 laughing up their sleeves at any folk who embraced their likes 
 or dislikes in men or affairs, had already begun a two-edged 
 policy, conspiring against all systems, without committing 
 themselves to any side. Then there was the self-appointed
 
 44 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 critic who admires nothing, and will blow his nose in the 
 middle of a cavatina at the Bouffons, who applauds before 
 any one else begins, and contradicts every one who says what 
 he himself was about to say ; he was there giving out the 
 sayings of wittier men for his own. Of all the assembled 
 guests, a future lay before some five ; ten or so should 
 acquire a fleeting renown ; as for the rest, like all medioc- 
 rities, they might apply to themselves the famous falsehood of 
 Louis XVIII., Union and oblivion. 
 
 The anxious jocularity of a man who is expending two 
 thousand crowns sat on their host. His eyes turned impa- 
 tiently towards the door from time to time, seeking one of 
 his guests who kept him waiting. Very soon a stout little 
 person appeared, who was greeted by a complimentary 
 murmur ; it was the notary who had invented the newspaper 
 that very morning. A valet-de-chambre in black opened the 
 doors of a vast dining-room, whither every one went without 
 ceremony, and took his place at an enormous table. 
 
 Raphael took a last look round the room before he left it. 
 His wish had been realized to the full. The rooms were 
 adorned with silk and gold. Countless wax tapers set in 
 handsome candelabra lit up the slightest details of gilded 
 friezes, the delicate bronze sculpture, and the splendid colors 
 of the furniture. The sweet scent of rare flowers, set in 
 stands tastefully made of bamboo, filled the air. Everything, 
 even the curtains, was pervaded by elegance without preten- 
 sion, and there was a certain imaginative charm about it all 
 which acted like a spell on the mind of a needy man. 
 
 " An income of a hundred thousand livres a year is a very 
 nice beginning of the catechism, and a wonderful assistance 
 to putting morality into our actions," he said, sighing. 
 "Truly my sort of virtue can scarcely go afoot, and vice 
 means, to my thinking, a garret, a threadbare coat, a gray hat 
 in winter time, and sums owing to the porter. I should like 
 to live in the lap of luxury a year, or six months, no
 
 THE TALISMAN. 45 
 
 matter ! And then afterwards, die. I should have known, 
 exhausted, and consumed a thousand lives at any rate." 
 
 " Why, you are taking the tone of a stockbroker in good 
 luck," said Emile, who overheard him. "Pooh! your riches 
 would be a burden to you as soon as you found that they 
 would spoil your chances of coming out above the rest of us. 
 Hasn't the artist always kept the balance true between the 
 poverty of riches and the riches of poverty? And isn't 
 struggle a necessity to some of us ? Look out for your diges- 
 tion, and only look," he added, with a mock-heroic gesture, 
 " at the majestic, thrice holy, and edifying appearance of this 
 amiable capitalist's dining-room. That man has in reality 
 only made his money for our benefit. Isn't he a kind of 
 sponge of the polyp order, overlooked by naturalists, which 
 should be carefully squeezed before he is left for his heirs to 
 feed upon ? There is style, isn't there, about those bas-reliefs 
 that adorn the walls? And the lustres, and the pictures, 
 what luxury well carried out ! If one may believe those 
 who envy him, or who know, or think they know, the origins 
 of his life, then this man got rid of a German and some 
 others his best friend for one, and the mother of that friend, 
 during the Revolution. Could you house crimes under the 
 venerable Taillefer's silvering locks? He looks to me a very 
 worthy man. Only see how the silver sparkles, and is every 
 
 glittering ray like the stab of a dagger to him ? Let us 
 
 go in, one might as well believe in Mahomet. If common 
 report speaks truth, here are thirty men of talent, and good 
 fellows too, prepared to dine off the flesh and blood of a 
 
 whole family ; and here are we ourselves, a pair of 
 
 youngsters full of open-hearted enthusiasm, and we shall be 
 partakers in his guilt. I have a mind to ask our capitalist 
 whether he is a respectable character. " 
 
 " No, not now," cried Raphael, " but when he is dead 
 drunk; we shall have had our dinner then." 
 
 The two friends sat down laughing. First of all, by a 
 4
 
 46 THE WILD ASS' SA'f.V. 
 
 glance more rapid than a word, each paid his tribute of admi- 
 ration to the splendid general effect of the long table, white 
 as a bank of freshly-fallen snow, with its symmetrical line of 
 covers, crowned with their pale golden rolls of bread. Rain- 
 bow colors gleamed in the starry rays of light reflected by the 
 glass ; the lights of the tapers crossed and recrossed each 
 other indefinitely; the dishes covered with their silver domes 
 whetted both appetite and curiosity. 
 
 Few words were spoken. Neighbors exchanged glances as 
 the Madeira circulated. Then the first course appeared in all 
 its glory ; it would have done honor to the late Cambaceres, 
 Brillat-Savarin would have celebrated it. The wines of Bor- 
 deaux and Burgundy, white and red, were royally lavished. 
 This first part of the banquet might have been compared in 
 every way to a rendering of some classical tragedy. The 
 second act grew a trifle noisier. Every guest had had a fair 
 amount to drink, had tried various grades at his pleasure, so 
 that as the remains of the magnificent first course were re- 
 moved, tumultuous discussions began ; a pale brow here and 
 there began to flush, sundry noses took a purpler hue, faces lit 
 up, and eyes sparkled. 
 
 While intoxication was only dawning, the conversation did 
 not overstep the bounds of civility ; but banter and bon mots 
 slipped by degrees from every tongue; and then slander 
 began to rear its little snake's head, and spoke in dulcet 
 tones ; a few shrewd ones here and there gave heed to it, 
 hoping to keep their heads. So the second course found 
 their minds somewhat heated. Every one ate as he spoke, 
 spoke while he ate, and drank without heeding the quantity 
 of the liquor, the wine was so biting, the bouquet so fragrant, 
 the example around so infectious. Taillefer made a point of 
 stimulating his guests, and plied them with the formidable 
 wines of the Rhone, with fierce Tokay, and heady old 
 Roussillon. 
 
 The champagne, impatiently expected and lavishly poured
 
 THE TALISMAN. 47 
 
 out, was a scourge of fiery sparks to these men, released like 
 posthorses from some mail-coach by a relay ; they let their 
 spirits gallop away into the wilds of argument to which no one 
 listened, began to tell stories which had no auditors, and 
 repeatedly asked questions to which no answer was made. 
 Only the loud voice of wassail could be heard, a voice made 
 up of a hundred confused clamors, which rose and grew like 
 a crescendo of Rossini's. Insidious toasts, swagger, and chal- 
 lenges followed. 
 
 Each renounced any pride in his own intellectual capacity, 
 in order to vindicate that of hogsheads, casks, and vats ; and 
 each made noise enough for two. A time came when the 
 footmen smiled, while their masters all talked at once. A 
 philosopher would have been interested, doubtless, by the 
 singularity of the thoughts expressed, a politician would have 
 been amazed by the incongruity of the methods discussed 
 in that melee of words or doubtfully luminous paradoxes, 
 where truths, grotesquely caparisoned, met in conflict across 
 the uproar of brawling judgments, of arbitrary decisions and 
 folly, much as bullets, shells, and grapeshot are hurled across a 
 battlefield. 
 
 It was at once a volume and a picture. Every philosophy, 
 religion, and moral code differing so greatly in every latitude, 
 every government, every great achievement of the human 
 intellect fell before a scythe as long as Time's own ; and 
 you might have found it hard to decide whether it was 
 wielded by Gravity intoxicated, or by Inebriation grown 
 sober and clear-sighted. Borne away by a kind of tempest, 
 their minds, like the sea raging against the cliffs, seemed 
 ready to shake the laws which confine the ebb and flow 
 of civilizations ; unconsciously fulfilling the will of God, 
 who has suffered evil and good to abide in nature, and re- 
 served the secret of their continual strife to Himself. A 
 frantic travesty of debate ensued, a Walpurgis-revel of intel- 
 lects. Between the dreary jests of these children of the
 
 48 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 Revolution over the inauguration of a newspaper, and the 
 talk of the joyous gossips at Gargantua's birth, stretched the 
 gulf that divides the nineteenth century from the sixteenth. 
 Laughingly they had begun the work of destruction, and our 
 journalists laughed amid the ruins. 
 
 "What is the name of that young man over there?" said 
 the notary, indicating Raphael. " I thought I heard some 
 one call him Valentin." 
 
 " What stuff is this ? " said Emile, laughing ; " plain Val- 
 entin, say you? Raphael de Valentin, if you please. We 
 bear an eagle or, on a field sable, with a silver crown, beak, 
 and claws gules, and a fine motto : NON CECIDIT ANIMUS. 
 We are no foundling child, but a descendant of the Emperor 
 Valens, of the stock of the Valentinois, founders of the cities 
 of Valence in France, and Valencia in Spain, rightful heirs to 
 the Empire of the East. If we suffer Mahmoud on the 
 throne of Byzantium, it is out of pure condescension, and for 
 lack of funds and soldiers." 
 
 With a fork flourished above Raphael's head, Emile out- 
 lined a crown upon it. The notary bethought himself a 
 moment, but soon fell to drinking again, with a gesture 
 peculiar to himself; it was quite impossible, it seemed to 
 say, to secure in his clientele the cities of Valence and Byzan- 
 tium, the Emperor Valens, Mahmoud, and the house of Valen- 
 tinois. 
 
 " Should not the destruction of those ant-hills, Babylon, 
 Tyre, Carthage, and Venice, each crushed beneath the foot 
 of a passing giant, serve as a warning to man, vouchsafed by 
 some mocking power? " said Claude Vignon, who must play 
 the Bossuet, as a sort of purchased slave, at the rate of five- 
 pence a line. 
 
 " Perhaps Moses, Sylla, Louis XL, Richelieu, Robespierre, 
 and Napoleon were but the same men who cross our civili- 
 zations now and again, like a comet across the sky," said a 
 disciple of Ballanche.
 
 THE TALISMAN. 49 
 
 "Why try to fathom the designs of Providence?" said 
 Canalis, maker of ballads. 
 
 " Come, now," said the man who set up for a critic, 
 " there is nothing more elastic in the world than your Prov- 
 idence." 
 
 " Well, sir, Louis XIV. sacrified more lives over digging the 
 foundations of the Maintenon's aqueducts, than the Conven- 
 tion expended in order to assess the taxes justly, to make one 
 law for everybody, and one nation of France, and to establish 
 the rule of equal inheritance," said Massol, whom the lack 
 of a syllable before his name had made a Republican. 
 
 "Are you going to leave our heads on our shoulders?" 
 asked Moreau (of the Oise), a substantial farmer. " You, 
 sir, who took blood for wine just now?" 
 
 " Where is the use? Aren't the principles of social order 
 worth some sacrifices, sir ? " 
 
 " Hi ! Bixiou ! What's-his-name, the Republican, con- 
 siders a landowner's head a sacrifice ! " said a young man to 
 his neighbor. 
 
 " Men and events count for nothing," said the Republican, 
 following out his theory in spite of hiccoughs; " in politics, 
 as in philosophy, there are only principles and ideas." 
 
 " What an abomination ! Then you would ruthlessly put 
 your friends to death for a shibboleth?" 
 
 " Eh, sir ! the man who feels compunction is your thorough 
 scoundrel, for he has some notion of virtue ; while Peter the 
 Great and the Duke of Alva were embodied systems, and the 
 pirate Monbard an organization." 
 
 "But can't society rid itself of your systems and organiza- 
 tions?" said Canalis. 
 
 ''Oh, granted ! " cried the Republican. 
 
 " That stupid Republic of yours makes me feel queasy. 
 We sha'n't be able to carve a capon in peace, because we 
 shall find the agrarian law inside it." 
 
 " Ah, my little Brutus, stuffed with truffles, your principles
 
 50 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 are all right enough. But you are like my valet, the rogue is 
 so frightfully possessed with a mania for property that if I 
 left him to clean my clothes after his fashion, he would soon 
 clean me out." 
 
 "Crass idiots!" replied the Republican, "you are for 
 setting a nation straight with tooth-picks. To your way of 
 thinking, justice is more dangerous than thieves." 
 
 " Oh, dear ! " cried the attorney Desroches. 
 
 "Aren't they a bore with their politics ! " said the notary 
 Cardot. " Shut up ! That's enough of it. There is no knowl- 
 edge nor virtue worth shedding a drop of blood for. If Truth 
 were brought into liquidation, we might find her insolent." 
 
 "It would be much less trouble, no doubt, to amuse our- 
 selves with evil, rather than dispute about good. Moreover, 
 I would give all the speeches made for forty years past at the 
 Tribune for a trout, for one of Perrault's tales or Charlet's 
 sketches." 
 
 "Quite right! Hand me the asparagus. Because, after 
 all, liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and 
 despotism back again to liberty. Millions have died without 
 securing a triumph for any one system. Is not that the 
 vicious circle in which the whole moral world revolves? Man 
 believes that he has reached perfection, when in fact he has 
 but re-arranged matters." 
 
 " Oh ! oh ! " cried Cursy, the vaudevilliste ; "in that case, 
 gentlemen, here's to Charles X., the father of liberty." 
 
 " Why not ?" asked Emile. "When law becomes des- 
 potic, morals are relaxed, and vice versa."" 
 
 " Let us drink to the imbecility of authority, which gives us 
 such an authority over imbeciles ! " said the banker. 
 
 "Napoleon left us glory, at any rate, my good friend ! " 
 exclaimed a naval officer who had never left Brest. 
 
 " Glory is a poor bargain ; you buy it dear, and it will not 
 keep. Does not the egotism of the great take the form of 
 glory, just as for nobodies it is their own well-being?"
 
 77/7: TALISMAN. 51 
 
 " You are very fortunate, sir " 
 
 "The first inventor of ditches must have been a weakling, 
 for society is only useful to the puny. The savage and the 
 philosopher, at either extreme of the moral scale, hold prop- 
 erty in equal horror." 
 
 "All very fine!" said Cardot ; "but if there were no 
 property, there would be no documents to draw up." 
 
 " These green peas are excessively delicious ! " 
 
 "And the cure was found dead in his bed in the morning. 
 
 " Who is talking about death? Pray don't trifle, I have 
 an uncle." 
 
 " Could you bear his loss with resignation?" 
 
 "No question." 
 
 " Gentlemen, listen to me ! How TO KILL AN UNCLE. 
 Silence! (Cries of "Hush! hush!") In the first place, 
 take an uncle, large and stout, seventy years old at least, they 
 are the best uncles. (Sensation.) Get him to eat a pate de 
 foie gras, any pretext will do." 
 
 "Ah, but my uncle is a thin, tall man, and very niggardly 
 and abstemious." 
 
 "That sort of uncle is a monster; he misappropriates 
 existence." 
 
 "Then," the speaker on uncles went on, "tell him, while 
 he is digesting it, that his banker has failed." 
 
 " How if he bears up ? " 
 
 " Let loose a pretty girl on him." 
 
 "And if ?" asked the other, with a shake of the 
 
 head. 
 
 " Then he wouldn't be an uncle an uncle is a gay dog by 
 nature." 
 
 " Malibran has lost two notes in her voice." 
 
 " No, sir, she has not." 
 
 "Yes, sir, she has." 
 
 "Oh, ho ! No and yes, is not the sum-up of all religious,
 
 52 THE U'lLD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 political, or literary dissertations? Man is a clown dancing 
 on the edge of an abyss." 
 
 "You would make out that I am a fool." 
 
 "On the contrary, you cannot make me out." 
 
 "Education, there's a pretty piece of tomfoolery. M. 
 Heineffettermach estimates the number of printed volumes 
 at more than a thousand millions ; and a man cannot read 
 more than a hundred and fifty thousand in his lifetime. 
 So, just tell me what that word education means. For some 
 it consists in knowing the names of Alexander's horse, of the 
 dog Berecillo, of the Seigneur d'Accords, and in ignorance 
 of the man to whom we owe the discovery of rafting and the 
 manufacture of porcelain. For others it is the knowledge 
 how to burn a will and live respected, be looked up to and 
 popular, instead of stealing a watch with half-a-dozen aggra- 
 vating circumstances, after a previous conviction, and so 
 perishing, hated and dishonored, in the Place de Greve." 
 
 " Will Nathan's work live? " 
 
 " He has very clever collaborators, sir." 
 
 "Or Canalis'?" 
 
 " He is a great man ; let us say no more about him." 
 
 "You are all drunk! " 
 
 " The consequence of a Constitution is the immediate stul- 
 tification of intellects. Art, science, public works, every- 
 thing, is consumed by a horribly egotistic feeling, the leprosy 
 of the time. Three hundred of your bourgeoisie, set down on 
 benches, will only think of planting poplars. Tyranny does 
 great things lawlessly, while Liberty will scarcely trouble her- 
 self to do petty ones lawfully." 
 
 "Your reciprocal instruction will turn out counters in 
 human flesh," broke in an Absolutist. "All individuality 
 will disappear in a people brought to a dead level by educa- 
 tion." 
 
 "For all that, is not the aim of society to secure happiness 
 to each member of it? " asked the Saint-Simonian.
 
 THE TALISMAN. 53 
 
 "If you had an income of fifty thousand livres, you would 
 not think much about the people. If you are smitten with a 
 tender passion for the race, go to Madagascar ; there you will 
 find a nice little nation all ready to Saint-Simonize, classify, 
 and cork up in your phials, but here every one fits into his 
 niche like a peg in a hole. A porter is a porter, and a block- 
 head is a fool, without a college of fathers to promote them 
 to those positions." 
 
 "You are a Carlist." 
 
 " And why not ? " Despotism pleases me ; it implies a cer- 
 tain contempt for the human race. I have no animosity against 
 kings, they are so amusing. Is it nothing to sit enthroned in 
 a room, at a distance of thirty million leagues from the sun ? " 
 
 " Let us once more take a broad view of civilization," said 
 the man of learning who, for the benefit of the inattentive 
 sculptor, had opened a discussion on primitive society and 
 autochthono s races. " The vigor of a nation in its origin was 
 in a way pi ysical, unitary, and crude ; then as aggregations 
 increased, grvernment advanced by a decomposition of the 
 primitive rule, more or less skilfully managed. For example. 
 in remote ages national strength lay in theocracy, the priest 
 held both sword and censer; a little later there were two 
 priests, the pontiff and the king. To-day our society, the 
 latest word of civilization, has distributed power according to 
 the number of combinations, and we come to the forces called 
 business, thought, money, and eloquence. Authority thus 
 divided is steadily approaching a social dissolution, with in- 
 terest as its one opposing barrier. We depend no longer 
 on either religion or physical force, but upon intellect. Can 
 a book replace the sword ? Can discussion be a substitute for 
 action? That is the question." 
 
 "Intellect has made an end of everything," cried the 
 Carlist. " Come, now ! Absolute freedom has brought 
 about national suicides ; their triumph left them as listless as 
 an English millionaire."
 
 54 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 11 Won't you tell us something new? You have made fun 
 of authority of all sorts to-day, which is every bit as vulgar 
 as denying the existence of God. So you have no belief left, 
 and the century is like an old Sultan worn out by debauchery ! 
 Your Byron, in short, sings of crime and its emotions in a 
 final despair of poetry." 
 
 "Don't you know," replied Bianchon, quite drunk by this 
 time, " that a dose of phosphorus more or less makes the man 
 of genius or the scoundrel, a clever man or an idiot, a virtuous 
 person or a criminal ? " 
 
 "Can any one treat of virtue thus?" cried Cursy. 
 " Virtue, the subject of every drama at the theatre, the 
 denoument of every play, the foundation of every court of 
 law." 
 
 " Be quiet, you ass. You are an Achilles for virtue, with- 
 out his heel," said Bixiou. 
 
 "Some drink ! " 
 
 " What will you bet that I will drink a bottle of cham- 
 pagne like a flash, at one pull ? " 
 
 "What a flash of wit ! " 
 
 " Drunk as lords," muttered a young man gravely, trying 
 to give some wine to his waistcoat. 
 
 "Yes, sir; real government is the art of ruling by public 
 opinion." 
 
 " Opinion ? That is the most vicious jade of all. Accord- 
 ing to you moralists and politicians, the laws you set up are 
 always to go before those of nature, and opinion before con- 
 science. You are right and wrong both. Suppose society 
 bestows down pillows on us, that benefit is made up for by 
 the gout; and justice is likewise tempered by red-tape, and 
 colds accompany Cashmere shawls." 
 
 "Wretch ! " Emile broke in upon the misanthrope, "how 
 can you slander civilization here at table, up to the eyes in 
 wines and exquisite dishes? Eat away at that roebuck with 
 gilded horns and feet, and do not carp at your mother."
 
 THE TALISMAN. Oo 
 
 "Is it any fault of mine if Catholicism puts a million deities 
 in a sack of flour, that Republics will end in a Napoleon, that 
 monarchy dwells between the assassination of Henry IV. 
 and the trial of Louis XVI., and Liberalism produces La 
 Fayettes?" 
 
 " Didn't you embrace him in July ? " 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Then hold your tongue, you sceptic." 
 
 " Sceptics are the most conscientious of men." 
 
 "They have no conscience." 
 
 " What are you saying? They have two a piece, at least." 
 
 " So you want to discount heaven, a thoroughly commercial 
 notion. Ancient religions were but the unchecked develop- 
 ment of physical pleasure, but we have developed a soul and 
 expectations; some advance has been made." 
 
 " What can you expect, my friends, of a century filled with 
 politics to repletion?" asked Nathan. " What befell " The 
 History of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles" a 
 most entrancing conception? 
 
 " I say," the would-be critic cried down the whole length 
 of the table, "the phrases might have been drawn at hap- 
 hazard from a hat, 'twas a work written ' down to Charen- 
 ton.' ' 
 
 "You area fool ! " 
 
 " And you are a rogue ! " 
 
 "Oh! oh!" 
 
 "Ah! ah! " 
 
 " They are going to fight." 
 
 " No, they aren't." 
 
 " You will find me to-morrow, sir." 
 
 " This very moment," Nathan answered. 
 
 " Come, come, you pair of fire-eaters." 
 
 " You are another ! " said the prime mover in the quarrel. 
 
 " They can hardly stand on their legs." 
 
 " Ah, I can't stand upright, perhaps," said the pugna-
 
 56 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 cious Nathan, straightening himself up like a stag-beetle 
 about to fly. 
 
 He stared stupidly round the table, then completely ex- 
 hausted by the effort, sank back into his chair, and mutely 
 hung his head. 
 
 " Would it not have been nice," the critic said to his 
 neighbor, " to fight about a book I have neither read nor 
 seen?" 
 
 " Emile, look out for your coat, your neighbor is growing 
 pale," said Bixiou. 
 
 " Kant? Yet another ball flung out for fools to sport with, 
 sir ! Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battle- 
 dores with which charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttle-cock 
 a-going. Suppose that God is everywhere, as Spinoza says, 
 
 or that all things proceed from God, as says St. Paul. 
 
 the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but isn't the move- 
 ment the same ? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the 
 
 egg from the fowl ? Just hand me some duck and 
 
 there, you have all science." 
 
 "Simpleton ! " cried the man of science, ''your problem 
 is settled by fact ! ' ' 
 
 "What fact?" 
 
 "Professors' chairs were not made for philosophy, but 
 philosophy for professors' chairs. Put on a pair of spectacles 
 and read the budget." 
 
 "Thieves ! " 
 
 "Nincompoops! " 
 
 " Knaves! " 
 
 "Gulls!" 
 
 " Where but in Paris will you find such a ready and rapid 
 exchange of thought? " cried Bixiou, in a deep, bass voice. 
 
 " Bixiou ! Act a classical farce for us ! Come, now ! " 
 
 " Would you like me to depict the nineteenth century?" 
 
 "Silence! " 
 
 "Pay attention ! "
 
 THE TALISMAN. 57 
 
 " Clap a muffle on your trumpets ! " 
 
 "Shut up, you Turk! " 
 
 " Give him some wine, and let that fellow keep quiet." 
 
 " Now, then, Bixiou ! " 
 
 The artist buttoned his black coat to the collar, put on 
 yellow gloves, and began to burlesqne the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes by acting a squinting old lady ; but the upi ->ar 
 drowned his voice, and no one heard a word of the satiri;,, 
 Still, if he did not catch the spirit of the century, he repre^i 
 sented the Revue at any rate, for his own intentions were not 
 very clear to him. 
 
 Dessert was served as if by magic. A huge epergne of 
 gilded bronze from Thomire's studio overshadowed the table. 
 Tall statuettes, which a celebrated artist had endued with 
 ideal beauty according to conventional European notions, 
 sustained and carried pyramids of strawberries, pines, fresh 
 dates, golden grapes, clear-skinned peaches, oranges brought 
 from Setubal by steamer, pomegranates, Chinese fruit ; in 
 short, all the surprises of luxury, miracles of confectionery, 
 the most tempting dainties, and choicest delicacies. The 
 coloring of this epicurean work of art was enhanced by the 
 splendors of porcelain, by sparkling outlines of gold, by the 
 chasing of the vases. Poussin's landscapes, copied on Sevres 
 ware, were crowned with graceful fringes of moss, green, 
 translucent and fragile as ocean weeds. 
 
 The revenue of a German prince would not have defrayed 
 the cost of this arrogant display. Silver and mother-of- 
 pearl, gold and crystal, were lavished afresh in new forms; 
 but scarcely a vague idea of this almost Oriental fairyland 
 penetrated eyes now heavy with wine, or crossed the delirium 
 of intoxication. The fire and fragrance of the wines acted 
 like potent philtres and magical fumes, producing a kind of 
 mirage in the brain, binding feet, and weighing down hands. 
 The pyramids of fruit were ransacked, voices grew thicker, 
 the clamor increased. Words were no longer distinct, glasses
 
 58 THE WILD ASS' SfCIA T . 
 
 flew in pieces, senseless peals of laughter broke out. Cursy 
 snatched up a horn and struck up a flourish on it. It acted 
 like a signal given by the devil. Yells, hisses, songs, cries, 
 and groans went up from the maddened crew. You might 
 have smiled to see men, light-hearted by nature, grow tragical 
 as Crebillon's dramas, and pensive as a sailor in a coach. 
 Hard-headed men blabbed secrets to the inquisitive, who were 
 long passed heeding them. Saturnine faces were wreathed in 
 smiles worthy of a pirouetting dancer. Claude Vignon 
 shuffled about like a bear in a cage. Intimate friends began 
 to fight. 
 
 Animal likenesses, so curiously traced by physiologists, in 
 human faces, came out in gestures and behavior. A book lay 
 open for a Bichat if he had repaired thither fasting and col- 
 lected. The master of the house, knowing his condition, did 
 not dare to stir, but encouraged his guests' extravagances 
 with a fixed grimacing smile, meant to be hospitable and 
 appropriate. His large face, turning from blue and red to a 
 purple shade terrible to see, partook of the general commo- 
 tion by movements like the heaving and pitching of a brig. 
 
 " Now, did you murder them?" Emile asked him. 
 
 " Capital punishment is going to be abolished, they say, in 
 favor of the Revolution of July?" answered Taillefer, raising 
 his eyebrows with drunken sagacity. 
 
 "Don't they rise up before you in dreams at times?" 
 Raphael persisted. 
 
 "There's a statute of limitations," said the murderer 
 Croesus. 
 
 " And on his tombstone," Emile began, with a sardonic 
 laugh, "the stonemason will carve, 'Passer-by, accord a 
 tear, in memory of one that's here.' Oh," he continued, 
 " I would cheerfully pay a hundred sous to any mathematician 
 who would prove the existence of hell to me by an algebraical 
 equation." 
 
 He flung up a coin and cried
 
 THE TALISMAN. 59 
 
 " Heads for the existence of God ! " 
 
 " Don't look ! " Raphael cried, pouncing upon it. " Who 
 knows? Suspense is so pleasant." 
 
 "Unluckily," Emile said, with burlesque melancholy, " I 
 can see no halting-place between the unbeliever's arithmetic 
 and the papal Pater noster. Pshaw ! let us drink. Clink 
 glasses was, I believe, the oracular answer of the Epicureans 
 and final conclusion of Pantagruel." 
 
 " We owe our arts and monuments to the Pater noster, and 
 our knowledge, too, perhaps ; and a still greater benefit 
 modern government whereby a vast and teeming society is 
 wondrously represented by some five hundred intellects. It 
 neutralizes opposing forces and gives free play to CIVILIZA- 
 TION, that Titan queen who has succeeded the ancient terrible 
 figure of the KING, that sham Providence, reared by man 
 between himself and heaven. In the face of such achieve- 
 ments atheism seems like a barren skeleton. What do you 
 say?" 
 
 "I am thinking of the seas of blood shed by Catholicism," 
 Emile replied, quite unimpressed. " It has drained our hearts 
 and veins dry to make a mimic deluge. No matter ! Every 
 man who thinks must range himself beneath the banner of 
 Christ, for He alone has consummated the triumph of spirit over 
 matter ; He alone has revealed to us, like a poet, an interme- 
 diate world that separates us from the Deity." 
 
 " Believest thou?" asked Raphael, with an unaccountable 
 drunken smile. " Very good ; we must not commit ourselves; 
 so we will drink the celebrated toast, Diis ignotis /" 
 
 And they drained the chalice filled up with science, car- 
 bonic acid gas, perfumes, poetry, and incredulity. 
 
 " If the gentlemen will go to the drawing-room, coffee is 
 ready for them," said the major-domo. 
 
 There was scarcely one of those present whose mind was 
 not floundering by this time in the delights of chaos, where 
 every spark of intelligence is quenched, and the body, set free
 
 60 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 from its tyranny, gives itself up to the frenetic joys of liberty. 
 Some who had arrived at the apogee of intoxication were 
 dejected, as they painfully tried to arrest a single thought 
 which might assure them of their own existence; others, deep 
 in the heavy morasses of indigestion, denied the possibility of 
 movement. The noisy and the silent were oddly assorted. 
 
 For all that, when new joys were announced to them by the 
 stentorian tones of the servant, who spoke on his master's 
 behalf, they all rose, leaning upon, dragging or carrying one 
 another. But on the threshold of the room the entire crew 
 paused for a moment, motionless, as if fascinated. The intem- 
 perate pleasures of the banquet seemed to fade away at this 
 titillating spectacle, prepared by their amphitryon to appeal 
 to the most sensual of their instincts. 
 
 Beneath the shining wax-lights in a golden chandelier, 
 round about a table inlaid with gilded metal, a group of 
 women, whose eyes shone like diamonds, suddenly met the 
 stupefied stare of the revelers. Their toilettes were splendid, 
 but less magnificent than their beauty, which eclipsed the 
 other marvels of this palace. A light shone from their eyes, 
 bewitching as those of sirens, more brilliant and ardent than 
 the blaze that streamed down upon the snowy marble, the 
 delicately carved surfaces of bronze, and lit up the satin sheen 
 of the tapestry. The contrasts of their attitudes and the 
 slight movements of their heads, each differing in character 
 and nature of attraction, set the heart afire. It was like a 
 thicket, where blossoms mingled with rubies, sapphires, and 
 coral ; a combination of gossamer scarves that flickered like 
 beacon-lights; of black ribbons about snowy throats; of gor- 
 geous turbans and demurely enticing apparel. It was a seraglio 
 that appealed to every eye, and fulfilled every fancy. Each 
 form posed to admiration was scarcely concealed by the folds 
 of cashmere, and half-hidden, half-revealed, by transparent 
 gauze and diaphanous silk. The little slender feet were elo- 
 quent, though the fresh red lips uttered no sound.
 
 THE TALISMAN. 61 
 
 Demure and fragile-looking girls, pictures of maidenly inno- 
 cence, with a semblance of conventual unction about their 
 heads, were there like apparitions that a breath might dissipate. 
 Aristocratic beauties with haughty glances; languid, flexible, 
 slender, and complaisant, bent their heads as though there 
 were royal protectors still in the market. An Englishwoman 
 seemed like a spirit of melancholy some coy, pale, shadowy 
 form among Ossian's mists, or a type of remorse flying from 
 crime. The Parisienne was not wanting in all her beauty 
 that consists in an indescribable charm ; armed with her irre- 
 sistible weakness, vain of her costume and her wit, pliant and 
 hard, a heartless, passionless siren that yet can create factitious 
 treasures of passion and counterfeit emotion. 
 
 Italians shone in the throng, serene and self-possessed in their 
 bliss ; handsome Normans, with splendid figures ; women of the 
 south, with black hair and well-shaped eyes. Lebel might have 
 summoned together all the fair women of Versailles, who since 
 morning had perfected all their wiles and now came like a 
 troop of Oriental women, bidden by the slave merchant to be 
 ready to set out at dawn. They stood disconcerted and con- 
 fused about the table, huddled together in a murmuring group 
 like bees in a hive. The combination of timid embarrass- 
 ment with coquettishness and a sort of expostulation was the 
 result either of calculated effect or spontaneous modesty. 
 Perhaps a sentiment of which women are never utterly divested 
 prescribed to them the cloak of modesty to heighten and en- 
 hance the charms of wantonness. So the venerable Taillefer's 
 designs seemed on the point of collapse; for these unbridled 
 natures were subdued from the very first by the majesty with 
 which woman is invested. There was a murmur of admira- 
 tion, which vibrated like a soft musical note. Wine had not 
 taken love for traveling companion ; instead of violent tumult 
 of passions, the guests thus taken by surprise, in a moment 
 of weakness, gave themselves up to luxurious raptures of 
 delight. 
 5
 
 62 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 Artists obeyed the voice of poetry which constrains them, 
 and studied with pleasure the different delicate tints of these 
 chosen examples of beauty. Sobered by a thought perhaps 
 due to some emanation from a bubble of carbonic acid in the 
 champagne, a philosopher shuddered at the misfortunes which 
 had brought these women, once perhaps worthy of the truest 
 devotion, to this. Each one doubtless could have unfolded 
 a cruel tragedy. Infernal tortures followed in the train of 
 most of them, and they drew after them faithless men, broken 
 vows, and pleasures atoned for in wretchedness. Polite ad- 
 vances were made by the guests, and conversations began, as 
 varied in character as the speakers. They broke up into 
 groups. It might have been a fashionable drawing-room 
 where ladies and young girls offer after dinner the assistance 
 that coffee, liqueurs, and sugar afford to diners who are strug- 
 gling in the toils of a perverse digestion. But in a little 
 while laughter broke out, the murmur grew, and voices were 
 raised. The saturnalia, subdued for a moment, threatened at 
 times to renew itself. The alternations of sound and silence 
 bore a distant resemblance to a symphony of Beethoven's. 
 
 The two friends, seated on a silken divan, were first ap- 
 proached by a tall, well-proportioned girl of stately bearing ; 
 her features were irregular, but her face was striking and vehe- 
 ment in expression, and impressed the mind by the vigor of 
 its contrasts. Her dark hair fell in luxuriant curls, with 
 which some hand seemed to have played havoc already, for 
 the locks fell lightly over the splendid shoulders that thus 
 attracted attention. The long brown curls half hid her 
 queenly throat, though where the light fell upon it, the delicacy 
 of its fine outlines was revealed. Her warm and vivid color- 
 ing was set off by the dead white of her complexion. Bold 
 and ardent glances came from under the long eyelashes ; the 
 damp, red, half-open lips challenged a kiss. Her frame was 
 strong but compliant ; with a bust and arms strongly developed, 
 as in figures drawn by the Caracci, she yet seemed active and
 
 THE TALISMAN. 63 
 
 elastic, with a panther's strength and suppleness, and in the 
 same way the energetic grace of her figure suggested fierce 
 pleasures. 
 
 But though she might romp perhaps and laugh, there was 
 something terrible in her eyes and her smile. Like a python- 
 ess possessed by the demon, she inspired awe rather than 
 pleasure. All changes, one after another, flashed like light- 
 ning over every mobile feature of her face. She might cap- 
 tivate a jaded fancy, but a young man would have feared her. 
 She was like some colossal statue fallen from the height of a 
 Greek temple, so grand when seen afar, too roughly hewn to 
 be seen anear. And yet, in spite of all, her terrible beauty 
 could have stimulated exhaustion ; her voice might charm the 
 deaf; her glances might put life into the bones of the dead ; 
 and therefore Emile was vaguely reminded of one of Shakes- 
 peare's tragedies a wonderful maze, in which joy groans, 
 and there is something wild even about love, and the magic 
 of forgiveness and the warmth of happiness succeed to cruel 
 storms of rage. She was a siren that can both kiss and devour ; 
 laugh like a devil, or weep as angels can. She could con- 
 centrate in one instant all a woman's powers of attraction in 
 a single effort (the sighs of melancholy and the charms of 
 maiden's shyness alone excepted), then in a moment rise in 
 fury like a nation in revolt, and tear herself, her passion, and 
 her lover in pieces. 
 
 Dressed in red velvet, she trampled under her reckless feet 
 the stray flowers fallen from other heads, and held out a salver 
 to the two friends, with careless hands. The white arms stood 
 out in bold relief against the velvet. Proud of her beauty; 
 proud (who knows?) of her corruption, she stood like a queen 
 of pleasure, like an incarnation of enjoyment ; the enjoyment 
 that comes of squandering the accumulations of three genera- 
 tions ; that scoffs at its progenitors, and makes merry over a 
 corpse; that will dissolve pearls and wreck thrones, turn old 
 men into boys, and make young men prematurely old ; enjoy-
 
 G4 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 ment only possible to giants weary of their power, tormented 
 by reflection, or for whom strife has become a plaything. 
 
 " What is your name ? " asked Raphael. 
 
 " Aquilina." 
 
 " Out of Venice Preserved 7" exclaimed Emile. 
 
 " Yes," she answered. " Just as a pope takes a new name 
 when he is exalted above all other men, I, too, took another 
 name when I raised myself above women's level." 
 
 " Then have you, like your patron saint, a terrible and 
 noble lover, a conspirator, who would die for you ?" cried 
 Emile eagerly this gleam of poetry had aroused his interest. 
 
 " Once I had," she answered. " But I had a rival, too, in 
 La Guillotine. I have worn something red about me ever 
 since, lest any happiness should carry me away." 
 
 "Oh, if you are going to get her on to the story of those 
 four lads of La Rochelle, she will never get to the end of it. 
 That's enough, Aquilina. As if every woman could not 
 bewail some lover or other, though not every one has the luck 
 to lose him on the scaffold, as you have done. I would a 
 great deal sooner see a lover of mine in a trench at the back 
 of Clamart than in a rival's arms." 
 
 All this in the gentlest and most melodious accents, and 
 pronounced by the prettiest, gentlest, and most innocent- 
 looking little person that a fairy wand ever drew from an 
 enchanted eggshell. She had come up noiselessly, and they 
 became aware of a slender, dainty figure, charmingly timid 
 blue eyes, and white transparent brows. No ingenue among 
 the naiads, a truant from her river spring, could have been 
 shyer, whiter, more ingenuous than this young girl, seemingly 
 about sixteen years old, ignorant of evil and of the storms of 
 life, and fresh from some church in which she must have 
 prayed the angels to call her to heaven before the time. Only 
 in Paris are such natures as this to be found, concealing 
 depths of depravity behind a fair mask, and the most artificial 
 vires beneath a brow as young and fair as an opening flower.
 
 THE TALISMAN. 65 
 
 At first the angelic promise of those soft lineaments misled 
 the friends. Raphael and Emile took the coffee which she 
 poured into the cups brought by Aquilina, and began to talk 
 with her. In the eyes of the two poets she soon became 
 transformed into some sombre allegory of I know not what 
 aspect of human life. She opposed to the vigorous and 
 ardent expression of her commanding acquaintance a revela- 
 tion of heartless corruption and voluptuous cruelty. Heed- 
 less enough to perpetrate a crime, hardy enough to feel no 
 misgivings; a pitiless demon that wrings larger and kinder 
 natures with torments that it is incapable of knowing, that 
 simpers over a traffic in love, sheds tears over a victim's 
 funeral, and beams with joy over the reading of the will. A 
 poet might have admired the magnificent Aquilina ; but the 
 winning Euphrasia must be repulsive to every one the first 
 was the soul of sin ; the second, sin without a soul in it. 
 
 "I should dearly like to know," Emile remarked to this 
 pleasing being, " if you ever reflect upon your future? " 
 
 "My future!" she answered with a laugh. "What do 
 you mean by my future ? Why should I think about some- 
 thing that does not exist as yet ? I never look before or 
 behind. Isn't one day at a time more than I can concern 
 myself with as it is? And besides, the future, as we know, 
 means the hospital." 
 
 " How can you foresee a future in the hospital, and make 
 no effort to avert it ? " 
 
 "What is there so alarming about the hospital ?" asked 
 the terrific Aquilina. "When we are neither wives nor 
 mothers, when old age draws black stockings over our limbs, 
 sets wrinkles on our brows, withers up the woman in us, and 
 darkens the light in our lover's eyes, what could we need 
 when that comes to pass ? You would look on us then as 
 mere human clay ; we with our habiliments shall be for you 
 like so much mud worthless, lifeless, crumbling to pieces, 
 going about with the rustle of dead leaves. Rags or the
 
 66 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 daintiest finery will be as one to us then ; the ambergris of 
 the boudoir will breathe an odor of death and dry bones ; 
 and suppose there is a heart there in that mud, not one of you 
 but would make mock of it, not so much as a memory will 
 you spare to us. Is not our existence precisely the same 
 whether we live in a fine mansion with lap-dogs to tend, or 
 sort rags in a workhouse ? Does it make much difference 
 whether we shall hide our gray heads beneath lace or a hand- 
 kerchief striped with blue and red ; whether we sweep a 
 crossing with a birch broom, or the steps of the Tuileries 
 with satins ; whether we sit beside a gilded hearth, or cower 
 over the ashes in a red earthen pot ; whether we go to the 
 opera or look on in the Place de Greve ? " 
 
 " Aquilina mia, you have never shown more sense than in 
 this depressing fit of yours," Euphrasia remarked. "Yes, 
 cashmere, point d'Alenc.on, perfumes, gold, silks, luxury, 
 everything that sparkles, everything pleasant, belongs to 
 youth alone. Time alone may show us our folly, but good 
 fortune will acquit us. You are laughing at me," she went 
 on, with a malicious glance at the friends; " but am I not 
 right? I would sooner die of pleasure than of illness. I am 
 not afflicted with a mania for perpetuity, nor have I a great 
 veneration for human nature, such as God has made it. Give 
 me millions, and I would squander them ; I should not keep 
 one centime for the year to come. Live to be charming and 
 have power, that is the decree of my every heart-beat. 
 Society sanctions my life ; does it not pay for my extrava- 
 gances ? Why does Providence pay me every morning my 
 income, which I spend every evening ? Why are hospitals 
 built for us ? And Providence did not put good and evil on 
 either hand for us to select what tires and pains us. I should 
 be very foolish if I did not amuse myself." 
 
 " And how about others? " asked Emile. 
 
 "Others? Oh, well, they must manage for themselves. I
 
 THE TALISMAN. 67 
 
 prefer laughing at their woes to weeping over my own. I 
 defy any man to give me the slightest uneasiness." 
 
 "What have you suffered to make you think like this? " 
 asked Raphael. 
 
 "I myself have been forsaken for an inheritance," she 
 said, striking an attitude that displayed all her charms; and 
 yet I had worked night and day to keep my love ! I am not 
 to be gulled by any smile or vow, and I have set myself to 
 make one long entertainment of my life." 
 
 "But does not happiness come from the soul within?" 
 cried Raphael. 
 
 "It maybe so," Aquilina answered; "but is it nothing 
 to be conscious of admiration, of flattery ; to triumph over 
 other women, even over the most virtuous, humiliating them 
 before our beauty and our splendor? Not only so; one day 
 of our life is worth ten years of middle-class existence, and so 
 it is all summed up." 
 
 "Is not a woman hateful without virtue?" Emile said to 
 Raphael. 
 
 Euphrasia's glance was like a viper's, as she said with an 
 irony in her voice that cannot be rendered 
 
 "Virtue! we leave that to deformity and to ugly women. 
 What would the poor things be without it ? " 
 
 "Hush, be quiet," Emile broke in, "Don't talk about 
 something you have never known." 
 
 "That I have never known ! " Euphrasia answered. "You 
 give yourself for life to some person you abominate ; you 
 must bring up children who will neglect you, who wound 
 your rery heart, and you must say, ' Thank you ! ' for it ; and 
 these are the virtues you prescribe to women. And that is 
 not enough. By way of requiting her self-denial, you must 
 come and add to her sorrows by trying to lead her astray ; 
 and though you are rebuffed, she is compromised. A nice 
 life ! How far better to keep one's freedom, to follow one's 
 inclinations in love, and die young."
 
 68 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 " Have you no fear of the price to be paid some day for 
 all this?" 
 
 " Even then," she said, " instead of mingling pleasures and 
 troubles, my life will consist of two separate parts a youth 
 of happiness is secure, and there may come a hazy, uncertain 
 old age, during which I can suffer at my leisure." 
 
 "She has never loved," came in the deep tones of Aquilina's 
 voice. "She never went a hundred leagues to drink in one 
 look and a denial with untold raptures. She has not hung 
 her own life on a thread, nor tried to stab more than one man 
 to save her sovereign lord, her king, her divinity. Love, for 
 her, meant a fascinating colonel." 
 
 "Here she is with her La Rochelle," Euphrasia made 
 answer. "Love comes like the wind, no one knows whence. 
 And, for that matter, if one of those brutes had once fallen 
 in love with you, you would hold sensible men in horror." 
 
 " Brutes are put out of the question by the Code," said the 
 tall, sarcastic Aquilina. 
 
 "I thought you had more kindness for the army," laughed 
 Euphrasia. 
 
 "How happy they are in their power of dethroning their 
 reason in this way," Raphael exclaimed. 
 
 "Happy!" asked Aquilina, with a 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, with your dead 
 hidden in your heart." 
 
 A moment's consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste 
 of Milton's Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable 
 of drinking were a hideous blue tint, from burning draughts 
 of punch. Mad dances were kept up with wild energy, 
 excited laughter and outcries broke out like the explosion of 
 fireworks. The boudoir and a small adjoining room were 
 strewn like a battlefield with the insensible and incapable. 
 Wine, pleasure, and dispute had heated the atmosphere. 
 Wine and love, delirium and unconsciousness possessed them,
 
 THE TALISMAN. 69 
 
 and were written upon all faces, upon the furniture ; were 
 expressed by the surrounding disorder, and brought light 
 films over the vision of those assembled, so that the air seemed 
 full of intoxicating vapor. A glittering dust arose, as in the 
 luminous paths made by a ray of sunlight, the most bizarre 
 forms flitted through it, grotesque struggles were seen athwart 
 it. Groups of interlaced figures blended with the white 
 marbles, the noble masterpieces of sculpture that adorned the 
 rooms. 
 
 Though the two friends yet preserved a sort of fallacious 
 clearness in their ideas and voices, a feeble appearance and 
 faint thrill of animation, it was yet almost impossible to dis- 
 tinguish what was real among the fantastic absurdities before 
 them, or what foundation there was for the impossible pictures 
 that passed unceasingly before their weary eyes. The 
 strangest phenomena of dreams beset them, the lowering 
 heavens, the fervid sweetness caught by faces in our visions, 
 and unheard-of agility under a load of chains, all these so 
 vividly, that they took the pranks of the orgy about them for 
 the freaks of some nightmare in which all movement is silent, 
 and cries never reach the ear. The valet de chambre suc- 
 ceeded just then, after some little difficulty, in drawing his 
 master into the ante-chamber to whisper to him 
 
 "The neighbors'are all at their windows, complaining of 
 the racket, sir." 
 
 "If noise alarms them, why don't they lay down straw 
 before their doors? " was Taillefer's rejoinder. 
 
 Raphael's sudden burst of laughter was so unseasonable and 
 abrupt, that his friend demanded the reason of his unseemly 
 hilarity. 
 
 "You will hardly understand me," he replied. " In the 
 first place, I must admit that you stopped me on the Quai 
 Voltaire just as I was about to throw myself into the Seine, 
 and you would like to know, no doubt, my motives for dying. 
 And when I proceed to tell you that by an almost miraculous
 
 70 THE WILD .-ISS' SKIN. 
 
 chance the most poetic memorials of the material world had 
 but just then been summed up for me as a symbolical inter- 
 pretation of human wisdom ; whilst at this minute the remains 
 of all the intellectual treasures ravaged by us at table are com- 
 prised in these two women, the living and authentic types of 
 folly, would you be any the wiser? Our profound apathy 
 towards men and things supplied the half-tones in a crudely 
 contrasted picture of two theories of life so diametrically 
 opposed. If you were not drunk, you might perhaps catch a 
 gleam of philosophy in this." 
 
 " And if you had not both feet on that fascinating Aquilina, 
 whose heavy breathing suggests an analogy with the sounds 
 of a storm about to burst," replied Emile, absently engaged 
 in the harmless amusement of winding and unwinding Eu- 
 phrasia's hair, " you would be ashamed of your inebriated 
 garrulity. Both your systems can be packed in a phrase, and 
 reduced to a single idea. The mere routine of living brings 
 a stupid kind of wisdom with it, by blunting our intelligence 
 with work; and on the other hand, a life passed in the limbo 
 of the abstract or in the abysses of the moral world, produces 
 a sort of wisdom run mad. The conditions may be summed 
 up in brief; we may extinguish emotion, and so live to old 
 age, or we may choose to die young as martyrs to contending 
 passions. And yet this decree is at variance with the tem- 
 peraments with which we were endowed by the bitter jester 
 who modeled all creatures." 
 
 "Idiot!" Raphael burst in. "Go on epitomizing your- 
 self after that fashion, and you will fill volumes. If I at- 
 tempted to formulate those two ideas clearly, I might as well 
 say that man is corrupted by the exercise of his wits, and 
 purified by ignorance. You are calling the whole fabric of 
 society to account. But whether we live with the wise or 
 perish with the fool, isn't the result the same sooner or later? 
 And have not the prime constituents of the quintessence of
 
 THE TALISMAN. 71 
 
 both systems been before expressed in a couple of words 
 Carymary, earymara" 
 
 " You make me doubt the existence of a God, for your 
 stupidity is greater than His power," said Emile. "Our 
 beloved Rabelais summed it all up in a shorter word than 
 your Carymary, carymara ; from his 'Perhaps' Montaigne 
 derived his own ' What do I know? ' After all, this last word 
 of moral science is scarcely more than the cry of Pyrrhus set 
 betwixt good and evil, or Buridan's ass between the two 
 measures of oats. But let this everlasting question alone, 
 resolved to-day by a 'Yes* and a 'No.' What experience 
 did you look to find by a jump into the Seine ? Were you 
 jealous of the hydraulic machine on the Pont Notre Dame? " 
 
 "Ah, if you but knew my history." 
 
 "Pooh," said Emile ; " I did not think you could be so 
 commonplace; that remark is hackneyed. Don't you know 
 that every one of us claims to have suffered as no other 
 ever did?" 
 
 "Ah! " Raphael sighed. 
 
 "What a mountebank art thou with thy 'Ah!' Look 
 here, now ! Does some disease of mind or body, by con- 
 tracting your muscles, bring back of a morning the wild 
 horses that tear you in pieces at night, as with Damiens once 
 upon a time? Were you driven to sup off your own dog in 
 a garret, uncooked and without salt ? Have your children 
 ever cried, ' I am hungry ? ' Have you sold your mistress' 
 hair to hazard the money at play? Have you ever drawn a 
 sham bill of exchange on a fictitious uncle at a sham address, 
 and feared lest you should not be in time to take it up? 
 Come now, I am attending ! If you were going to drown 
 yourself for some woman, or by way of a protest, or out of 
 sheer dulness, I disown you. Make your confession, and no 
 lies ! I don't at all want a historical memoir. And, above 
 all things, be as concise as your clouded intellect permits ; I
 
 72 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 am as critical as a professor, and as sleepy as a woman at her 
 vespers." 
 
 "You silly fool ! " said Raphael. "When has not suffer- 
 ing been keener for a more susceptible nature? Some day 
 when science has attained to a pitch that enables us to study 
 the natural history of hearts, when they are named and class- 
 ified in genera, sub-genera, and families ; into crustacese, 
 fossils, saurians, infusoria, or whatever it is, then, my dear 
 fellow, it will be ascertained that there are natures as tender 
 and fragile as flowers, that are broken by the slight bruises 
 that some stony hearts do not even feel ." 
 
 " For pity's sake, spare me thy exordium," said Emile, as, 
 half plaintive, half amused, he took Raphael's hand.
 
 II. 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 
 
 AFTER a moment's silence, Raphael said with a careless 
 gesture 
 
 " Perhaps it is an effect of the fumes of punch I really 
 cannot tell this clearness of mind that enables me to com- 
 prise my whole life in a single picture, where figures and hues, 
 lights, shades, and half-tones are faithfully rendered. I 
 should not have been so surprised at this poetical play of 
 imagination if it were not accompanied with a sort of scorn 
 for my past joys and sorrows. Seen from afar, my life 
 appears to contract by some mental process. That long, slow 
 agony of ten years' duration can be brought to memory to- 
 day in some few phrases, in which pain is resolved into a 
 mere idea, and pleasure becomes a philosophical reflection. 
 Instead of feeling things, I weigh and consider them " 
 
 "You are as tiresome as the explanation of an amend- 
 ment," cried Emile. 
 
 " Very likely," said Raphael submissively. " I spare you 
 the first seventeen years of my life for fear of abusing a lis- 
 tener's patience. Till that time, like you and thousands of 
 others, I had lived my life at school or the Lyceum, with its 
 imaginary troubles and genuine happinesses, which are so 
 pleasant to look back upon. Our jaded palates still crave 
 that Lenten fare, so long as we have not tried it afresh. It 
 was a pleasant life, with the tasks that we thought so contempt- 
 ible, but which taught us application for all that." 
 
 "Let the drama begin," said Emile, half-plaintively, half- 
 comically. 
 
 " When I left school," Raphael went on, with a gesture 
 that claimed the right of speaking, " my father submitted me 
 
 (73)
 
 74 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 to a strict discipline ; he installed me in a room near his own 
 study, and I had to rise at five in the morning and be in bed 
 by nine at night. He meant me to take my law studies seri- 
 ously. I attended the schools, and read with an advocate as 
 well ; but my lectures and work were so narrowly circum- 
 scribed by the laws of time and space, and my father required 
 such a strict account of my doings, at dinner, that " 
 
 "What is this to me?" asked Emile. 
 
 " The devil take you ! " said Raphael. " How are you to 
 enter into my feelings if I do not relate the facts that insensi- 
 bly shaped my character, made me timid, and prolonged the 
 period of youthful simplicity? In this manner I cowered 
 under as strict a despotism as a monarch's till I came of age. 
 To depict the tedium of my life, it will be perhaps enough to 
 portray my father for you. He was tall, thin, and slight, 
 with a hatchet face, and pale complexion ; a man of few 
 words, fidgety as an old maid, exacting as a senior clerk. 
 His paternal solicitude hovered over my merriment and gleeful 
 thoughts, and seemed to cover them with a leaden pall. Any 
 effusive demonstration on my part was received by him as a 
 childish absurdity. I was far more afraid of him than I had 
 been of any of our masters at school. 
 
 "I seem to see him before me at this moment. In his 
 chestnut-brown frock-coat he looked like a red herring 
 wrapped up in the cover of a pamphlet, and he held him- 
 self as erect as an Easter candle. But I was fond of my father, 
 and at heart he was right enough. Perhaps we never hate 
 severity when it has its source in greatness of character and 
 pure morals, and is skilfully tempered with kindness. My 
 father, it is true, never left me a moment to myself, and only 
 when I was twenty years old gave me so much as ten francs 
 of my own, ten knavish prodigals of francs, such a hoard as 
 I had long vainly desired, which set me a-dreaming of unutter- 
 able felicity; yet, for all that, he sought to procure relaxations 
 for me. When he had promised me a treat months before-
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 75 
 
 hand, he would take me to Les Bouffons, or to a concert or 
 ball, where I hoped to find a mistress. A mistress ! that 
 meant independence. But bashful and timid as I was, knowing 
 nobody, and ignorant of the dialect of drawing-rooms, I 
 always came back as awkward as ever, and swelling with 
 unsatisfied desires, to be put in harness like a troop horse 
 next day by my father, and to return with morning to my 
 advocate, the Palais de Justice, and the law. To have 
 swerved from the straight course which my father had mapped 
 out for me would have drawn down his wrath upon me ; 
 at my first delinquency, he threatened to ship me off as a 
 cabin-boy to the Antilles. A dreadful shiver ran through 
 me if I had ventured to spend a couple of hours in some 
 pleasure party. 
 
 " Imagine the most wandering imagination and passionate 
 temperament, the tenderest soul and most artistic nature, 
 dwelling continually in the presence of the most flint-hearted, 
 atrabilious, and frigid man on earth ; think of me as a young 
 girl married to a skeleton, and you will understand the life 
 whose curious scenes can only be a hearsay tale to you ; the 
 plans for running away that perished at the sight of my father, 
 the despair soothed by slumber, the dark broodings charmed 
 away by music. I breathed my sorrows forth in melodies. 
 Beethoven or Mozart would keep my confidences sacred. 
 Nowadays, I smile at recollections of the scruples which bur- 
 dened my conscience at that epoch of innocence and virtue. 
 
 " If I set foot in a restaurant, I gave myself up for lost; 
 my fancy led me to look on a cafe as a disreputable haunt, 
 where men lost their characters and embarrassed their fortunes ; 
 as for engaging in play, I had not the money to risk. Oh, if 
 I needed to send you to sleep, I would tell you about one of 
 the most frightful pleasures of my life, one of those pleasures 
 with fangs that bury themselves in the heart, as the branding- 
 iron enters the convict's shoulder. I was at a ball at the 
 house of the Due de Navarreins, my father's cousin. But to
 
 76 THE WILD ASS' SKIM 
 
 make my position the more perfectly clear, you must know 
 that I wore a threadbare coat, ill-fitting shoes, a tie fit for a 
 stableman, and a soiled pair of gloves. I shrank into a corner 
 to eat ices and watch the pretty faces at my leisure. My 
 father noticed me. Actuated by some motive that I did not 
 fathom, so dumbfounded was I by this act of confidence, he 
 handed me his keys and purse to keep. Ten paces away some 
 men were gambling. I heard the rattling of gold ; I was 
 twenty years old ; I longed to be steeped for one whole day 
 in the follies of my time of life. It was a license of the im- 
 agination that would find a parallel neither in the freaks of 
 courtesans, nor in the dreams of young girls. For a year 
 past I had beheld myself well dressed, in a carriage, with a 
 pretty woman by my side, playing the great lord, dining at 
 Very's, deciding not to go back home till the morrow ; but 
 was prepared for my father with a plot more intricate than 
 the Marriage of Figaro, which he could not possibly have 
 unraveled. All this bliss would cost, I estimated, fifty crowns. 
 Was it not the artless idea of playing truant that still had 
 charms for me ? 
 
 " I went into a small adjoining room, and when alone 
 counted my father's money with smarting eyes and trembling 
 fingers a hundred crowns ! The joys of my escapade rose 
 before me at the thought of the amount ; joys that flitted 
 about me like Macbeth's witches around their caldron ; joys 
 how alluring ! how thrilling ! how delicious ! I became a 
 deliberate rascal. I heeded neither my tingling ears nor 
 the violent beating of my heart, but took out two twenty-franc 
 pieces that I seem to see yet. The dates had been erased, 
 and Bonaparte's head simpered upon them. After I had 
 put back the purse in my pocket, I returned to a gaming-table 
 with the two pieces of gold in the palms of my damp hands, 
 prowling about the players like a sparrow-hawk round a coop 
 of chickens. Tormented by inexpressible terror, I flung a 
 sudden clairvoyant glance round me, and feeling quite sure
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 77 
 
 that I was seen by none of my acquaintances, betted on a 
 stout, jovial little man, heaping upon his head more prayers 
 and vows than are put up during two or three storms at sea. 
 Then with an intuitive scoundrelism, or Machiavelism, sur- 
 prising in one of my age, I went and stood in the door, and 
 looked about me in the rooms, though I saw nothing ; for 
 both mind and eyes hovered about that fateful green cloth. 
 
 " That evening fixes the date of a first observation of a 
 physiological kind ; to it I owe a kind of insight into certain 
 mysteries of our double nature that I have since been enabled 
 to penetrate. I had my back turned on the table where my 
 future felicity lay at stake, a felicity but so much the more in- 
 tense that it was criminal. Between me and the players stood a 
 wall of onlookers some five deep, who were chatting ; the mur- 
 mur of voices drowned the clinking of gold, which mingled 
 in the sounds sent up by this orchestra ; yet, despite all 
 obstacles, I distinctly heard the words of the two players by 
 a gift accorded to the passions, which enables them to annihi- 
 late time and space. I saw the points they made ; I knew 
 which of the two turned up the king as well as if I had actu- 
 ally seen the cards ; at a distance of ten paces, in short, the 
 fortunes of play blanched my face. 
 
 " My father suddenly went by, and then I knew what the 
 Scripture meant by 'The Spirit of God passed before his face.' 
 I had won. I slipped through the crowd of men who had 
 gathered about the players with the quickness of an eel escap- 
 ing through a broken mesh in a net. My nerves thrilled with 
 joy instead of anguish. I felt like some criminal on the way 
 to torture released by a chance meeting with the king. It 
 happened that a man with a decoration found himself short 
 by forty francs. Uneasy eyes suspected me ; I turned pale, 
 and drops of perspiration stood on my forehead. I was well 
 punished, I thought, for having robbed my father. Then the 
 kind little stout man said, in a voice like an angel's surely, 
 'All these gentlemen have paid their stakes,' and put down 
 6
 
 78 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 the forty francs himself. I raised my head in triumph upon 
 the players. After I had returned the money I had taken 
 from it to my father's purse, I left my winnings with that 
 honest and worthy gentleman, who continued to win. As 
 soon as 1 found myself possessed of a hundred and sixty 
 francs, I wrapped them up in my handkerchief, so that they 
 could neither move nor rattle on the way back ; and I played 
 no more. 
 
 " ' What were you doing at the card-table?' said my father 
 as we stepped into the carriage. 
 
 " ' I was looking on,' I answered, trembling. 
 
 " ' But it would have been nothing out of the common if 
 you had been prompted by self-love to put some money down 
 on the table. In the eyes of men of the world you are quite 
 old enough to assume the right to commit such follies. So I 
 should have pardoned you, Raphael, if you had made use of 
 my purse.' 
 
 "I did not answer. When we reached home, I returned 
 the keys and the money to my father. As he entered his 
 study, he emptied out his purse on the mantelpiece, counted 
 the money, and turned to me with a kindly look, saying, 
 with more or less long and significant pauses between each 
 phrase 
 
 " ' My boy, you are very nearly twenty now. I am satis- 
 fied with you. You ought to have an allowance, if only to 
 teach you how to lay it out, and to gain some acquaintance 
 with everyday business. Henceforward I shall let you have 
 a hundred francs each month. Here is your first quarter's 
 income for this year,' he added, fingering a pile of gold, as if 
 to make sure that the amount was correct. ' Do what you 
 please with it." 
 
 "I confess that I was ready to fling myself at his feet, to 
 tell him that I was a thief, a scoundrel, and, worse than all, a 
 liar ! But a feeling of shame held me back. I went up to 
 him for an embrace, but he gently pushed me away.
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 79 
 
 " 'You are a man now, my child,' lie said. ' What I have 
 just done was a very proper and simple thing, for which there 
 is no need to thank me. If I have any claim to your grati- 
 tude, Raphael,' he went on in a kind but dignified way, 'it 
 is because I have preserved your youth from the evils that 
 destroy young men in Paris. We will be two friends hence- 
 forth. In a year's time you will be a doctor of law. Not 
 without some hardship and privation you have acquired the 
 sound knowledge and the love of, and application to, work 
 that is indispensable to public men. You must learn to know 
 me, Raphael. I do not want to make either an advocate or 
 a notary of you, but a statesman, who shall be the pride of 
 our humble house. Good-night,' he added. 
 
 " From that day my father took me fully into confidence. 
 I was an only son ; and, ten years before, I had lost my 
 mother. In time past my father, the head of a historic family 
 remembered even now in Auvergne, had come to Paris to 
 fight against his evil star, dissatisfied at the prospect of tilling 
 the soil, with his useless sword by his side. He was endowed 
 with the shrewdness that gives the men of the south of France 
 a certain ascendancy when energy goes with it. Almost 
 unaided, he made a position for himself near the fountain of 
 power. The Revolution brought a reverse of fortune, but he 
 had managed to marry an heiress of good family, and, in the 
 time of the Empire, appeared to be on the point of restoring 
 to our house its ancient splendor. 
 
 " The Restoration, while it brought back considerable prop- 
 erty to my mother, was my father's ruin. He had formerly 
 purchased several estates abroad, conferred by the Emperor 
 on his generals ; and now for ten years he struggled with 
 liquidators, diplomatists, and Prussian and Bavarian courts 
 of law, over the disputed possession of these unfortunate 
 endowments. My father plunged me into the intricate 
 labyrinths of law proceedings on which our future depended. 
 We might be compelled to return the rents, as well as the
 
 80 77/7? WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 proceeds arising from sales of timber made during the years 
 1814 to 1817; in that case my mother's property would 
 have barely saved our credit. So it fell out that the day 
 on which my father in a fashion emancipated me, brought 
 me under a most galling yoke. I entered on a conflict like 
 a battlefield; I must work day and night; seek interviews 
 with statesmen, surprise their convictions, try to interest them 
 in our affairs, and gain them over, with their wives and ser- 
 vants, and their very clogs ; and all this abominable business 
 had to take the form of pretty speeches and polite attentions. 
 Then I knew the mortifications that had left their blighting 
 traces on my father's face. For about a year I led outwardly 
 the life of a man of the world, but enormous labors lay 
 beneath the surface of gadding about, and eager efforts to 
 attach myself to influential kinsmen, or to people likely to be 
 useful to us. My relaxations were lawsuits, and memorials 
 still furnished the staple of my conversation. Hitherto my 
 life had been blameless, from the sheer impossibility of in- 
 dulging the desires of youth ; but now I became my own 
 master, and in dread of involving us both in ruin by some 
 piece of negligence, I did not dare to allow myself any 
 pleasure or expenditure. 
 
 " While we are young, and before the world has rubbed 
 off the delicate bloom from our sentiments, the freshness of 
 our impressions, the noble purity of conscience which will 
 never allow us to palter with evil, the sense of duty is very 
 strong within us, the voice of honor clamors within us, and 
 we are. open and straightforward. At that time I was all 
 these things. I wished to justify my father's confidence in 
 me. But lately I would have stolen a paltry sum from 
 him, with secret delight ; but now that I shared the burden 
 of his affairs, of his name and of his house, I would secretly 
 have given up my fortune and my hopes for him, as I was 
 sacrificing my pleasures, and even have been glad of the 
 sacrifice ! So when Mde. Villele exhumed, for our special
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 81 
 
 benefit, an imperial decree concerning forfeitures, and had 
 ruined us, I authorized the sale of my property, only retain- 
 ing an island in the middle of the Loire, where my mother was 
 buried. Perhaps arguments and evasions, philosophical, 
 philanthropic, and political considerations would not fail me 
 now, to hinder the perpetration of what my solicitor termed a 
 folly ; but at one-and-twenty, I repeat, we are all aglow with 
 generosity and affection. The tears that stood in my father's 
 eyes were to me the most splendid of fortunes, and the thought 
 of those tears has often soothed my sorrow. Ten months after 
 he had paid his creditors, my father died of grief; I was 
 his idol, and he had ruined me ! The thought killed him. 
 Towards the end of the autumn of 1826, at the age of twenty- 
 two, I was the sole mourner at his graveside the grave of 
 my father and my earliest friend. Not many young men have 
 found themselves alone with their thoughts as they followed 
 a hearse, or have seen themselves lost in crowded Paris, 
 and without money or prospects. Orphans rescued by public 
 charity have at any rate the future of the battlefield before 
 them, and find a shelter in some institution and a father in 
 the government or in the agent of the King. I had nothing. 
 
 " Three months later, an agent made over to me eleven 
 hundred and twelve francs, the net proceeds of the winding 
 up of my father's affairs. Our creditors had driven us to sell 
 our furniture. From my childhood I had been used to set a 
 high value on the articles of luxury about us, and I could not 
 help showing my astonishment at the sight of this meagre 
 balance. 
 
 " ' Oh, rococo, all of it ! ' said the auctioneer. A terrible 
 word that fell like a blight on the sacred memories of 
 my childhood, and dispelled my earliest illusions, the 
 dearest of all. My entire fortune was comprised in this 
 account rendered, my future lay in a linen bag with eleven 
 hundred and twelve francs in it, human society stood be- 
 fore me in the person of an auctioneer's clerk, who kept
 
 82 THE WILD ASS^ SKIN. 
 
 his hat on while he spoke. Jonathan, an old servant who 
 was much attached to me, and whom my mother had form- 
 erly pensioned with an annuity of four hundred francs, 
 spoke to me as I was leaving the house that I had so often 
 gaily left for a drive in my childhood. 
 
 " ' Be very economical, Monsieur Raphael ! ' 
 
 The good fellow was crying. 
 
 " Such were the events, dear Emile, that ruled my desti- 
 nies, moulded my character, and set me, while still young, in 
 an utterly false social position," said Raphael after a pause. 
 " Family ties, weak ones, it is true, bound me to a few 
 wealthy houses, but my own pride would have kept me aloof 
 from them if contempt and indifference had not shut their 
 doors to me in the first place. I was related to people who 
 were very influential, and who lavished their patronage on 
 strangers ; but I found neither relations nor patrons in them. 
 Continually circumscribed in my affections, they recoiled 
 upon me. Unreserved and simple by nature, I must have 
 appeared frigid and sophisticated. My father's discipline 
 had destroyed all confidence in myself. I was shy and 
 awkward ; I could not believe that my opinion carried any 
 weight whatever; I took no pleasure in myself; I thought 
 myself ugly, and was ashamed to meet my own eyes. In 
 spite of the inward voice that must be the stay of a man with 
 anything in him, in all his struggles, the voice that cries, 
 ' Courage ! Go forward ! ' in spite of sudden revelations of 
 my own strength in my solitude ; in spite of the hopes that 
 thrilled me as I compared new works, that the public admired 
 so much, with the schemes that hovered in my brain, in 
 spite of all this, I had a childish mistrust of myself. 
 
 " An overweening ambition preyed upon me; I believed 
 that I was meant for great things, and yet I felt myself to 
 be nothing. I had need of other men, and I was friendless. 
 I found I must make my way in the world, where I was 
 quite alone, and bashful, rather than afraid.
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. S:j 
 
 " All through the year in which, by my father's wish, I 
 threw myself into the whirlpool of fashionable society, I 
 came away with an inexperienced heart, and fresh in mind. 
 Like every grown child, I sighed in secret for a love affair. 
 I met, among young men of my own age, a set of swag- 
 gerers who held their heads high, and talked about trifles 
 as they seated themselves without a tremor beside women who 
 inspired awe in me. They chattered nonsense, sucked the 
 heads of their canes, gave themselves affected airs, appro- 
 priated the fairest women, and laid, or pretended that they 
 had laid their heads on every pillow. Pleasure, seemingly, 
 was at their beck and call ; they looked on the most virtuous 
 and prudish as an easy prey, ready to surrender at a word, 
 at the slightest impudent gesture or insolent look. I declare, 
 on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or 
 of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory 
 than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of 
 high degree. 
 
 " So I found the tumult of my heart, my feelings, and my 
 creeds all at variance with the axioms of society. I had 
 plenty of audacity in my character, but none in my manner. 
 Later, I found out that women did not like to be implored. 
 I have from afar adored many a one to whom I devoted a 
 soul proof against all tests, a heart to break, energy that 
 shrank from no sacrifice and from no torture ; they accepted 
 fools whom I would not have engaged as hall porters. How 
 often, mute and motionless, have I not admired the lady of 
 my dreams, swaying in the dance ; given up my life in 
 thought to one eternal caress, expressed all my hopes in a 
 look, and laid before her, in my rapture, a young man's love, 
 which should outstrip all fables. At some moments I was 
 ready to barter my whole life for one single night. Well, as 
 I could never find a listener for my impassioned proposals, 
 eyes to rest my own upon, a heart made for my heart, I lived 
 on in all the sufferings of impotent force that consumes
 
 84 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 itself; lacking either opportunity or courage or experience. 
 I despaired, maybe, of making myself understood, or I feared 
 to be understood but too well ; and yet the storm within me 
 was ready to burst at every chance courteous look. In spite 
 of my readiness to take the semblance of interest in look or 
 word for a tenderer solicitude, I dared neither to speak nor to 
 be silent seasonably. My words grew insignificant, and my 
 silence stupid, by sheer stress of emotion. I was too ingen- 
 uous, no doubt, for that artificial life, led by candle-light, 
 where every thought is expressed in conventional phrases, or 
 by words that fashion dictates ; and not only so, I had not 
 learned how to employ speech that says nothing, and silence 
 that says a great deal. In short, I concealed the fires that 
 consumed me, and with such a soul as women wish to find, 
 with all the elevation of soul that they long for, and a mettle 
 that fools plume themselves upon, all women have been 
 cruelly treacherous to me. 
 
 " So in my simplicity I admired the heroes of this set when 
 they bragged about their conquests, and never suspected them 
 of lying. No doubt it was a mistake to wish for a love that 
 springs for a word's sake ; to expect to find in the heart of a 
 vain, frivolous woman, greedy for luxury and intoxicated with 
 vanity, the great sea of passion that surged tempestuously 
 in my own breast. Oh ! to feel that you were born to love, 
 to make some woman's happiness, and yet to find not one, 
 not even a noble and courageous Marceline, not so much as 
 an old marquise ! Oh ! to carry a treasure in your wallet, 
 and not find even some child, or inquisitive young girl, to 
 admire it ! In my despair I often wished to kill myself." 
 
 " Finely tragical to-night! " cried Emile. 
 
 "Let me pass sentence on my life," Raphael answered. 
 " If your friendship is not strong enough to bear with my 
 elegy, if you cannot put up with half an hour's tedium for 
 my sake, go to sleep ! But, then, never ask again for the 
 reason of the suicide that hangs over me, that comes nearer
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 85 
 
 and calls to me, that I bow myself before. If you are to 
 judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and 
 feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man's life 
 would only serve to make a chronological table a fool's 
 notion of history." 
 
 Emile was so much struck with the bitter tones in which 
 these words were spoken, that he began to pay close attention 
 to Raphael, whom he watched with a bewildered expression. 
 
 "Now," continued the speaker, "all these things that be- 
 fell me appear in a new light. The sequence of events that 
 I once thought so unfortunate created the splendid powers of 
 which, later, I became so proud. If I may believe you, I 
 possess the power of readily expressing my thoughts, and I 
 could take a forward place in the great field of knowledge ; 
 and is not this the result of scientific curiosity, of excessive 
 application, and a love of reading which possessed me from 
 the age of seven till my entry on life? The very neglect in 
 which I was left, and the consequent habits of self-repression 
 and self-concentration ; did not these things teach me how to 
 consider and reflect? Nothing in me was squandered in 
 obedience to the exactions of the world, which humble the 
 proudest soul and reduce it to a mere husk; and was it not 
 this very fact that refined the emotional part of my nature 
 till it became the perfected instrument of a loftier purpose 
 than passionate desires ? I remember watching the women 
 who mistook me with all the insight of contemned love. 
 
 " I can see now that my natural sincerity must have been 
 displeasing to them ; women, perhaps, even require a little 
 hypocrisy. And I, who in the same hour's space am alter- 
 nately a man and a child, frivolous and thoughtful, free from 
 bias and brimful of superstition, and oftentimes myself as 
 much a woman as an-y of them ; how should they do other- 
 wise than take my simplicity for cynicism, my innocent can- 
 dor for impudence ? They found my knowledge tiresome ; 
 my feminine languor, weakness. I was held to be listless and
 
 86 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 incapable of love or of steady purpose ; a too active imagina- 
 tion, that curse of poets, was no doubt the cause. My silence 
 was idiotic ; and as I dare say I alarmed them by my efforts 
 to please, women one and all have condemned me. With 
 tears and mortification, I bowed before the decision of the 
 world; but my distress was not barren. I determined to re- 
 venge myself on society ; I would dominate the feminine 
 intellect, and so have the feminine soul at my mercy ; all eyes 
 should be fixed upon me, when the servant at the door 
 announced my name. I had determined from my childhood 
 that I would be a great man ; I said with Andre Chenier, as 
 I struck my forehead, ' There is something underneath that ! ' 
 I felt, I believed, the thought within me that I must express, 
 the system I must establish, the knowledge I must interpret. 
 "Let me pour out my follies, dear Emile; to-day I am 
 barely twenty-six years old, certain of dying unrecognized, 
 and I have never been the lover of the woman I dreamed of 
 possessing. Have we not all of us, more or less, believed in 
 the reality of a thing because we wished it ? I would never 
 have a young man for my friend who did not place himself 
 in dreams upon a pedestal, weave crowns for his head, and 
 have complaisant mistresses. I myself would often be a gen- 
 eral, nay, emperor ; I have been a Byron, and then a nobody. 
 After this sport on these pinnacles of human achievement, I 
 became aware that all the difficulties and steeps of life were 
 yet to face. My exuberant self-esteem came to my aid ; I had 
 that intense belief in my destiny, which perhaps amounts to 
 genius in those who will not permit themselves to be distracted 
 by contact with the world, as sheep that leave their wool on 
 the briars of every thicket they pass by. I meant to cover 
 myself with glory, and to work in silence for the mistress I 
 hoped to have one day. Woman for me was resolved into a 
 single type, and this woman I hoped to meet in the first that 
 met my eyes ; but in each and all I saw. a queen, and as queens 
 must make the first advances to their lovers, they must draw
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 87 
 
 near to me to me, so sickly, shy, and poor. For her, who 
 should take pity on me, my heart held in store such gratitude 
 over and beyond love, that I had worshipped her her whole 
 life long. Later, my observations have taught me bitter 
 truths. 
 
 " In this way, dear Emile, I ran the risk of remaining com- 
 panionless for good. The incomprehensible bent of women's 
 minds appears to lead them to see nothing but the weak points 
 in a clever man, and the strong points of a fool. They feel the 
 liveliest sympathy with the fool's good qualities, which per- 
 petually flatter their own defects ; while they find the man of 
 talent hardly agreeable enough to compensate for his short- 
 comings. All capacity is a sort of intermittent fever, and no 
 woman is anxious to share in its discomforts only ; they look 
 to find in their lovers the wherewithal to gratify their own 
 vanity. It is themselves that they love in us ! But the artist, 
 poor and proud, along with his endowment of creative power, 
 is furnished with an aggressive egotism ! Everything about 
 him is involved in I know not what whirlpool of his ideas, 
 and even his mistress must gyrate along with them. How is 
 a woman, spoilt with praise, to believe in the love of a man 
 like that? Will she go to seek him out ? That sort of a lover 
 has not the leisure to sit beside a sofa and give himself up to 
 the sentimental simperings that women are so fond of, and on 
 which the false and unfeeling pride themselves. He cannot 
 spare the time from his work, and how can he afford to 
 humble himself and go a masquerading? I was ready to give 
 my life once and for all, but I could not degrade it in detail. 
 Besides, there is something indescribably paltry in a stock- 
 broker's tactics, who runs on errands for some insipid affected 
 woman ; all this disgusts an artist. Love in the abstract is 
 not enough for a great man in poverty; he has need of its 
 utmost devotion. The frivolous creatures who spend their 
 lives in trying on cashmeres, or make themselves into clothes- 
 pegs to hang the fashions from, exact the devotion which is
 
 88 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 not theirs to give ; for them, love means the pleasure of ruling 
 and not of obeying. She who is really a wife, one in heart, 
 flesh, and bone, must follow wherever he leads, in whom her 
 life, her strength, her pride, and happiness are centred. Am- 
 bitious men need those Oriental women whose whole thought 
 is given to the study of their requirements; for unhappiness 
 means for them the incompatibility of their means with their 
 desires. But I, who took myself for a man of genius, must 
 needs feel attracted by these very she-coxcombs. So, as I 
 cherished ideas so different from those generally received ; as 
 I wished to scale the heavens without a ladder, was possessed 
 of wealth that could not circulate, and of knowledge so wide 
 and so imperfectly arranged and digested that it overtaxed 
 my memory ; as I had neither relations nor friends in the midst 
 of this lonely and ghastly desert, a desert of paving stones, 
 full of animation, life, and thought, wherein every one is 
 worse than inimical, indifferent to wit, I made a very natural, 
 if foolish, resolve, which required such unknown impossibili- 
 ties, that my spirits rose. It was as if I had laid a wager with 
 myself, for I was at once the player and the cards. 
 
 " This was my plan. The eleven hundred francs must keep 
 life in me for three years the time I allowed myself in which 
 to bring to light a work which should draw attention to me, 
 and make me either a name or a fortune. I exulted at the 
 thought of living on bread and milk, like a hermit in the 
 Thebaid, while I plunged into the world of books and ideas, 
 and so reached a lofty sphere beyond the tumult of Paris, a 
 sphere of silent labor where I would entomb myself like a 
 chrysalis to await a brilliant and splendid new birth. I im- 
 periled my life in order to live. By reducing my require- 
 ments to real needs and the barest necessaries, I found that 
 three hundred and sixty-five francs sufficed for a year of 
 penury ; and, in fact, I managed to exist on that slender sum, 
 so long as I submitted to my own claustral discipline." 
 
 "Impossible!" cried Emile.
 
 / CANNOT RECOLLECT PAYING FOR WATER; I WENT OUT 
 TO FETCH IT EVERY MORNING.
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 89 
 
 "I lived for nearly three years in that way," Raphael 
 answered, with a kind of pride. "Let us reckon it out. 
 Three sous for bread, two for milk, and three for cold meat, 
 kept me from dying of hunger, and my mind in a state of 
 peculiar lucidity. I have observed, as you know, the wonder- 
 ful effects produced by diet upon the imagination. My lodg- 
 ings cost me three sous daily; I burnt three sous more in oil 
 at night ; I did my own housework, and wore flannel shirts so 
 as to reduce the laundress' bill to two sons per day. The 
 money I spent yearly in coal, if divided up, never cost more 
 than two sous for each day. I had three years' supply of 
 clothing, and I only dressed when going out to some library 
 or public lecture. These expenses, all told, only amounted to 
 eighteen sous, so two were left over for emergencies. I cannot 
 recollect, during that long period of toil, either crossing the 
 Pont des Arts, or paying for water; I went out to fetch it every 
 morning from the fountain in the Place Saint Michel, at the 
 corner of the Rue de Gres. Oh, I wore my poverty proudly. 
 A man urged on towards a fair future walks through life like 
 an innocent person to his death ; he feels no shame about it. 
 
 "I would not think of illness. Like Aquilina, I faced the 
 hospital without terror. I had not a moment's doubt of rny 
 health, and besides, the poor can only take to their beds to 
 die. I cut my own hair till the day when an angel of love 
 and kindness But I do not want to anticipate the state of 
 things that I shall reach later. You must simply know that I 
 lived with one grand thought for a mistress, a dream, an illusion 
 which deceives us all more or less at first. To-day I laugh at 
 myself, at that self, holy perhaps and heroic, which is now no 
 more. I have since had a closer view of society and the 
 world, of our manners and customs, and see the dangers of 
 my innocent credulity and the superfluous nature of my fervent 
 toil. Stores of that sort are quite useless to aspirants for 
 fame. Light should be the baggage of seekers after fortune ! 
 "Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves
 
 90 THE WILD ASS' SKTN. 
 
 worthy of patronage ; it is their great mistake. While the 
 foolish creatures are laying in stores of knowledge and energy, 
 so that they shall not sink under the weight of responsible 
 posts that recede from them, schemers come and go who are 
 wealthy in words and destitute of ideas, astonish the ignorant, 
 and creep into the confidence of those who have a little 
 knowledge. While the first kind study, the second march 
 ahead ; the one sort is modest, and the other impudent ; the 
 man of genius is silent about his own merit, but these schemers 
 make a flourish of theirs, and they are bound to get on. It 
 is so strongly to the interest of men in office to believe in 
 ready-made capacity, and in brazen-faced merit, that it is 
 downright childish of the learned to expect material rewards. 
 I do not seek to paraphrase the commonplace moral, the song 
 of songs that obscure genius is forever singing; I want to come, 
 in a logical manner, by the reason of the frequent successes 
 of mediocrity. Alas ! study shows us such a mother's kind- 
 ness that it would be a sin perhaps to ask any other reward of 
 her than the pure and delightful pleasures with which she sus- 
 tains her children. 
 
 " Often I remember soaking my bread in milk, as I sat by 
 the window to take the fresh air, while my eyes wandered 
 over a view of roofs brown, gray, or red, slated or tiled, and 
 covered with yellow or green mosses. At first the prospect 
 may have seemed monotonous, but I very soon found peculiar 
 beauties in it. Sometimes at night, streams of light through 
 half-closed shutters would light up and color the dark abysses 
 of this strange landscape. Sometimes the feeble lights of the 
 street lamps sent up yellow gleams through the fog, and in 
 each street dimly outlined the undulations of a crowd of roofs, 
 like billows in a motionless sea. Very occasionally, too, a 
 face appeared in this gloomy waste ; above the flowers in some 
 skyey garden I caught a glimpse of an old woman's crooked 
 angular profile as she watered her nasturtiums ; or, in a crazy 
 attic window, a young girl, fancying herself quite alone as
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 91 
 
 she dressed herself a view of nothing more than a fair fore- 
 head and long tresses held above her by a pretty white arm. 
 
 " I liked to see the short-lived plant-life in the gutters poor 
 weeds that a storm soon washed away. I studied the mosses, 
 with their colors revived by showers, or transformed by the 
 sun into a brown velvet that fitfully caught the light. Such 
 things as these formed my recreations the passing poetic 
 moods of daylight, the melancholy mists, sudden gleams of 
 sunlight, the silence and the magic of night, the mysteries of 
 dawn, the smoke wreaths from each chimney ; every chance 
 event, in fact, in my curious world became familiar to me. I 
 came to love this prison of my own choosing. This level 
 Parisian prairie of roofs, beneath which lay populous abysses, 
 suited my humor, and harmonized with my thoughts. 
 
 " Sudden descents into the world from the divine height 
 of scientific meditation are very exhausting ; and, besides, I 
 had apprehended perfectly the bare life of the cloister. When 
 I made up my mind to carry out this new plan of life, I looked 
 for quarters in the most out-of-the-way parts of Paris. One 
 evening, as I returned home to the Rue des Cordiers from the 
 Place de 1'Estrapade, I saw a girl of fourteen playing with a 
 battledore at the corner of the Rue de Cluny ; her winsome 
 ways and laughter amused the neighbors. September was not 
 yet over ; it was warm and fine, so that women sat chatting 
 before their doors as if it were a fete-day in some country 
 town. At first I watched the charming expression of the 
 girl's face and her graceful attitudes, her pose fit for a painter. 
 It was a pretty sight. I looked about me, seeking to under- 
 stand this blithe simplicity in the midst of Paris, and saw that 
 the street was a blind alley and but little frequented. I re- 
 membered that Jean Jacques had once lived here, and looked 
 up the Hotel Saint-Quentin. Its dilapidated condition 
 awakened hopes of a cheap lodging, and I determined to enter. 
 
 " I found myself in a room with a low ceiling ; the candles, 
 in classic-looking copper candlesticks, were set in a row under
 
 92 THE WILD ASS* SKIN. 
 
 each key. The predominating cleanliness of the room made 
 a striking contrast to the usual state of such places. This one 
 was as neat as a bit of genre ; there was a charming trimness 
 about the blue coverlet, the cooking pots and furniture. The 
 mistress of the house rose and came to me. She seemed to be 
 about forty years of age ; sorrows had left their traces on her 
 features, and weeping had dimmed her eyes. I deferentially 
 mentioned the amount I could pay ; it seemed to cause her 
 no surprise ; she sought out a key from the row, went up to 
 the attics with me, and showed me a room that looked out on 
 the neighboring roofs and courts ; long poles with linen dry- 
 ing on them hung out of the window. 
 
 " Nothing could be uglier than this garret, awaiting its 
 scholar, with its dingy yellow walls and odor of poverty. 
 The roofing fell in a deep slope, and the sky was visible 
 through chinks in the tiles. There was room for a bed, a 
 table, and a few chairs, and beneath the highest point of the 
 roof my piano could stand. Not being rich enough to fur- 
 nish this cage (that might have been one of the Piombi of 
 Venice), the poor woman had never been able to let it; and 
 as I had saved from the recent sale the furniture that was in 
 a fashion peculiarly mine, I very soon came to terms with my 
 landlady, and moved in on the following day. 
 
 " For three years I lived in this airy sepulchre, and worked 
 unflaggingly day and night ; and so great was the pleasure, 
 that study seemed to me the fairest theme and the happiest 
 solution of life. The tranquillity and peace that a scholar 
 needs is something as sweet and exhilarating as love. Un- 
 speakable joys are showered on us by the exertion of our 
 mental faculties; the quest of ideas, and the tranquil contem- 
 plation of knowledge ; delights indescribable, because purely 
 intellectual and impalpable to our senses. So we are obliged 
 to use material terms to express the mysteries of the soul. 
 The pleasure of striking out in some lonely lake of clear 
 water, with forests, rocks, and flowers around, and the soft
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 93 
 
 stirring of the warm breeze, all this would give to those 
 who knew them not a very faint idea of the exultation with 
 which my soul bathed itself in the beams of an unknown light, 
 hearkened to the awful and uncertain voice of inspiration, as 
 vision upon vision poured from some unknown source through 
 my throbbing brain. 
 
 " No earthly pleasure can compare with the divine delight 
 of watching the dawn of an idea in the space of abstractions, 
 as it rises like the morning sun ; an idea that, better still, 
 attains gradually like a child to puberty and man's estate. 
 Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings. 
 The wretched desk covered with brown leather at which I 
 wrote, my piano, bed, and arm-chair, the old wall-paper and 
 furniture, seemed to have for me a kind of life in them, and 
 to be humble friends of mine and mute partakers of my 
 destiny. How often have I confided my soul to them in a 
 glance ! A warped bit of beading often met my eyes, and 
 suggested new developments, a striking proof of my system, 
 or a felicitous word by which to render my all but inexpress- 
 ible thought. By sheer contemplation of the things about me 
 I discerned an expression and a character in each. If the 
 setting sun happened to steal in through my narrow window, 
 they would take new colors, fade or shine, grow dull or gay, 
 and always amaze me with some new effect. These trifling 
 incidents of a solitary life, which escape those preoccupied 
 with outward affairs, make the solace of prisoners. And what 
 was I but the captive of an idea, imprisoned in my system, 
 but sustained also by the prospect of a brilliant future? At 
 each obstacle that I overcame, I seemed to kiss the soft hands 
 of a woman with a fair face, a wealthy, well-dressed woman, 
 who should some day say softly, while she caressed my hair 
 
 " ' Poor angel, how thou hast suffered ! ' 
 
 " I had undertaken two great works one a comedy that in 
 a very short time must bring me wealth and fame, and an 
 entry into those circles whither I wished to return, to exercise 
 7
 
 94 THE WILD ASS 1 SKIN. 
 
 the royal privilege of a man of genius. You all saw nothing 
 in that masterpiece but the blunder of a young man fresh from 
 college, a babyish fiasco. Your jokes clipped the wings of a 
 throng of illusions, which have never stirred since within me. 
 You, dear Emile, alone brought soothing to the deep wounds 
 that others had made in my heart. You alone will admire 
 my ' Theory of the Will.' I devoted most of my time to that 
 long work, for which I studied Oriental languages, physiology 
 and anatomy. If I do not deceive myself, my labors will 
 complete the task begun by Mesmer, Lavater, Gale, and 
 Bichat, and open up new paths in science. 
 
 "There ends that fair life of mine, the daily sacrifice, the 
 unrecognized silkworm's toil, that is, perhaps, its own sole 
 recompense. Since attaining years of discretion, until the 
 day when I finished my ' Theory/ 1 observed, learned, wrote, 
 and read unintermittingly ; my life was one long imposition, 
 as schoolboys say. Though by nature effeminately attached 
 to Oriental indolence, sensual in tastes, and a wooer of 
 dreams, I worked incessantly, and refused to taste any of the 
 enjoyments of Parisian life. Though a glutton, I became 
 abstemious; and loving exercise and sea voyages as I did, 
 and haunted by the wish to visit many countries, still child 
 enough to play at ducks and drakes with pebbles over a pond, 
 I led a sedentary life with a pen in my fingers. I liked talk- 
 ing, but I went to sit and mutely listen to professors who 
 gave public lectures at the Library or the museum. I 
 slept upon my solitary pallet like a Benedictine brother, 
 though woman was my one chimera, a chimera that fled from 
 me as I wooed it ! In short, my life has been a cruel contra- 
 diction, a perpetual cheat. After that, judge a man ! 
 
 " Sometimes my natural propensities broke out like a fire 
 long smothered. I was debarred from the women whose so- 
 ciety I desired, stripped of everything and lodged in an 
 artist's garret, and by a sort of mirage or calenture I was sur- 
 rounded by captivating mistresses. I drove through the
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 95 
 
 streets of Paris, lolling on the soft cushions of a fine equi- 
 page. I plunged into dissipation, into corroding vice, I 
 desired and possessed everything, for fasting had made me 
 light-headed like the tempted St. Anthony. Slumber, hap- 
 pily, would put an end at last to these devastating trances ; 
 and on the morrow science would beckon me, smiling, and I 
 was faithful to her. I imagine that women reputed virtuous 
 must often fall a prey to these insane tempests of desire and 
 passion, which rise in us in spite of ourselves. Such dreams 
 have a charm of their own ; they are something akin to 
 evening gossip round the winter fire, when one sets out for 
 some voyage in China. But what becomes of virtue during 
 these delicious excursions, when fancy overleaps all diffi- 
 culties? 
 
 " During the first ten months of seclusion I led the life of 
 poverty and solitude that I have described to you ; I used to 
 steal out unobserved every morning to buy my own provi- 
 sions for the day ; I tidied my room ; I was at once master 
 and servant, and played the Diogenes with incredible spirit. 
 But afterwards, while my hostess and her daughter watched 
 my ways and behavior, scrutinized my appearance and divined 
 my poverty, there could not but be some bonds between us ; 
 perhaps because they were themselves so very poor. Pauline, 
 the charming child, whose latent and unconscious grace had, 
 in a manner, brought me there, did me many services that I 
 could not well refuse. All women fallen on evil days are 
 sisters ; they speak a common language ; they have the same 
 generosity the generosity that possesses nothing, and so is 
 lavish of its affection, of its time, and of its very self. 
 
 " Imperceptibly Pauline took me under her protection, and 
 would do things for me. No kind of objection was made by 
 her mother, whom I even surprised mending my linen ; she 
 blushed for the charitable occupation. In spite of myself, 
 they took charge of me, and I accepted their services. 
 
 " In order to understand the peculiar condition of my
 
 96 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 mind, my preoccupation with work must be remembered, the 
 tyranny of ideas, and the instinctive repugnance that a man 
 who leads an intellectual life must ever feel for the material 
 details of existence. Could I well repulse the delicate atten- 
 tions of Pauline, who would noiselessly bring me my frugal 
 repast, when she noticed that I had taken nothing for seven 
 or eight hours ? She had the tact of a woman and the inven- 
 tiveness of a child ; she would smile as she would make sign 
 to me that I must not see her. Ariel glided under my roof 
 in the form of a sylph who foresaw every want of mine. 
 
 " One evening Pauline told me her story with touching 
 simplicity. Her father had been a major in the horse grena- 
 diers of the imperial guard. He had been taken prisoner by 
 the Cossacks, at the passage of the Beresina; and when 
 Napoleon later on proposed an exchange, the Russian authori- 
 ties made search for him in Siberia in vain ; he had escaped 
 with a view of reaching India, and since then Mme. Gaudin, 
 my landlady, could hear no news of her husband. Then 
 came the disasters of 1814 and 1815 ; and, left alone and 
 without resource, she had decided to let furnished lodgings in 
 order to keep herself and her daughter. 
 
 " She always hoped to see her husband again. Her great- 
 est trouble was about her daughter's education ; the Princess 
 Borghese was her Pauline's godmother ; and Pauline must not 
 be unworthy of the fair future promised by her imperial pro- 
 tectress. When Mme. Gaudin confided to me this heavy 
 trouble that preyed upon her, she said with sharp pain in her 
 voice, ' I would give up the property and the scrap of paper 
 that makes Gaudin a baron of the empire, and all our rights 
 to the endowment of Wistchnau, if only Pauline could be 
 brought up at Saint-Denis 1 ' Her words struck me ; now I 
 could show my gratitude for the kindnesses expended on me 
 by the two women ; all at once the idea of offering to finish 
 Pauline's education occurred to me ; and the offer was made 
 and accepted in the most perfect simplicity. In this way I
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEAR7\ 97 
 
 came to have some hours of recreation. Pauline had natural 
 aptitude ; she learned so quickly that she soon surpassed me 
 at the piano. As she became accustomed to think aloud m 
 my presence, she unfolded all the sweet refinements of a heart 
 that was opening itself out to life, as some flower-cup opens 
 slowly to the sun. She listened to me, pleased and thought- 
 ful, letting her dark velvet eyes rest upon me with a half- 
 smile in them ; she repeated her lessons in soft and gentle 
 tones, and showed childish glee when I was satisfied with her. 
 Her mother grew more and more anxious every day to shield 
 the young girl from every danger (for all the beauty promised 
 in early life was developing in the crescent moon), and was 
 glad to see her spend whole days indoors in study. My piano 
 was the only one she could use, and while I was out she prac- 
 tised on it. When I came home, Pauline would be in my 
 room, in her shabby dress, but her slightest movement revealed 
 her slender figure in its attractive grace, in spite of the coarse 
 materials that she wore. As with the heroine of the fable of 
 ' Peau d'Ane,' a dainty foot peeped out of the clumsy shoes. 
 But all her wealth of girlish beauty was as lost upon me. I 
 had laid commands upon myself to see a sister only in Pauline. 
 I dreaded lest I should betray her mother's faith in me. I 
 admired the lovely girl as if she had been a picture, or as the 
 portrait of a dead mistress ; she was at once my child and my 
 statue. For me, another Pygmalion, the maiden with the 
 hues of life and the living voice was to become a form of in- 
 animate marble. I was very strict with her, but the more I 
 made her feel my pedagogue's severity, the more gentle and 
 submissive she grew. 
 
 " If a generous feeling strengthened me in my reserve and 
 self-restraint, prudent considerations were not lacking beside. 
 Integrity of purpose cannot, I think, fail to accompany integ- 
 rity in money matters. To my mind, to become insolvent or 
 to betray a woman is the same sort of thing. If you love a 
 young girl, or allow yourself to be beloved by her, a contract
 
 98 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 is implied, and its conditions should be thoroughly under- 
 stood. We are free to break with the woman who sells her- 
 self, but not with the young girl who has given herself to us 
 and does not know the extent of her sacrifice. I must have 
 married Pauline, and that would have been madness. Would 
 it not have given over that sweet girlish heart to terrible mis- 
 fortunes? My poverty made its selfish voice heard, and set 
 an iron barrier between that gentle nature and mine. Besides, 
 I am ashamed to say, that I cannot imagine love in the midst 
 of poverty. Perhaps this is a vitiation due to that malady 
 of mankind called civilization; but a woman in squalid pov- 
 erty would exert no fascination over me, were she attractive 
 as Homer's Galatea, the fair Helen. 
 
 "Ah, vive T amour.' But let it be in silk and cashmere, 
 surrounded with the luxury which so marvelously embellishes 
 it ; for is it not perhaps itself a luxury ? I enjoy making 
 havoc with an elaborate erection of scented hair ; I like to 
 crush flowers, to disarrange and crease a smart toilette at will. 
 A bizarre attraction lies for me in burning eyes that blaze 
 through a lace veil, like flame through cannon smoke. My 
 way of love would be to mount by a silken ladder, in the 
 silence of a winter night. And what bliss to reach, all pow- 
 dered with snow, a perfumed room, with hangings of painted 
 silk, to find a woman there, who likewise shakes away the 
 snow from her ; for what other name can be found for the 
 white muslin wrappings that vaguely define her, like some 
 angel form issuing from a cloud ! And then I wish for furtive 
 joys, for the security of audacity. I want to see once more 
 that woman of mystery, but let it be in the throng, dazzling, 
 unapproachable, adored on all sides, dressed in laces and 
 ablaze with diamonds, laying her commands upon every one; 
 so exalted above us that she inspires awe, and none dares to 
 pay his homage to her. 
 
 "She gives me a stolen glance, amid her court, a look that 
 exposes the unreality of all this ; that resigns for me the
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 99 
 
 world and all men in it ! Truly I have scorned myself for a 
 passion for a few yards of lace, velvet, and fine lawn, and 
 the hairdresser's feats of skill ; a love of wax-lights, a carriage 
 and a title, a heraldic coronet painted on window panes, or 
 engraved by a jeweler; in short, a liking for all that is adven- 
 titious and least womanly in woman. I have scorned and 
 reasoned with myself, but all in vain. 
 
 " A woman of rank with her subtle smile, her high-born 
 air, and self-esteem captivates me. The barriers she erects 
 between herself and the world awaken my vanity, a good 
 half of love. There would be more relish for me in bliss 
 that all others envied. If my mistress does nothing that 
 other women do, and neither lives nor conducts herself like 
 them, wears a cloak that they cannot attain, breathes a per- 
 fume of her own, then she seems to rise far above me. The 
 further she rises from earth, even in the earthlier aspects of 
 love, the fairer she becomes for me. 
 
 " Luckily for me we have had no queen in France these 
 twenty years, for I should have fallen in love with her. A 
 woman must be wealthy to acquire the manners of a princess. 
 What place had Pauline among these far-fetched imaginings? 
 Could she bring me the love that is death, that brings every 
 faculty into play, the nights that are paid for by life ? We 
 hardly die, I think, for an insignificant girl who gives her. 
 self to us; and I could never extinguish these feelings and 
 poet's dreams within me. I was born for an inaccessible 
 love, and fortune has overtopped my desire. 
 
 " How often have I set satin shoes on Pauline's tiny feet, 
 confined her form, slender as a young poplar, in a robe of 
 gauze, and thrown a loose scarf about her as I saw her tread 
 the carpets in her mansion and led her out to her splendid 
 carriage ! In such guise I should have adored her. I endowed 
 her with all the pride she lacked, stripped her of her virtues, 
 her natural simple charm, and frank smile, in order to plunge 
 her heart in our Styx of depravity and make it invulnerable,
 
 100 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 load her with our crimes, make of her the fantastical doll of 
 our drawing-rooms, the frail being who lies a-bed in the 
 morning and comes to life again at night with the dawn of 
 tapers. Pauline was fresh-hearted and affectionate I would 
 have had her cold and formal. 
 
 " In the last days of my frantic folly, memory brought 
 Pauline before me, as it brings the scene of our childhood, 
 and made me pause to muse over past delicious moments that 
 softened my heart. I sometimes saw her, the adorable girl 
 who sat quietly sewing at my table, wrapped in her medita- 
 tions ; the faint light from my window fell upon her and was 
 reflected back in silvery rays from her thick black hair ; some- 
 times I heard her young laughter, or the rich tones of her 
 young voice singing some canzonet that she composed without 
 effort. And often my Pauline seemed to grow greater, as 
 music flowed from her, and her face bore a striking resem- 
 blance to the noble one that Carlo Dolci chose for the type of 
 Italy. My cruel memory brought her back athwart the dissi- 
 pations of my existence, like a remorse, or a symbol of purity. 
 But let us leave the poor child to her own fate. Whatever 
 her troubles may have been, at any rate I protected her from 
 menacing tempest I did not drag her down into my hell. 
 
 "Until last winter lied the uneventful studious life of 
 which I have given you some faint picture. In the earliest 
 days of December, 1829, I came across Rastignac, who, in 
 spite of the shabby condition of my wardrobe, linked his arm 
 in mine, and inquired into my affairs with a quite brotherly 
 interest. Caught by his engaging manner, I gave him a 
 brief account of my life and hopes ; he began to laugh, and 
 treated me as a mixture, of a man of genius and a fool. His 
 Gascon accent and knowledge of the world, the easy life his 
 clever management procured for him, all produced an irresist- 
 ible effect upon me. I should die an unrecognized failure in 
 a hospital, Rastignac said, and be buried in a pauper's grave. 
 He talked of charlatanism. Every man of genius was a
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 101 
 
 charlatan, he plainly showed me in that pleasant way of his 
 that makes him so fascinating. He insisted that I must be 
 out of my senses, and would be my own death, if I lived on 
 alone in the Rue des Cordiers. According to him I ought to 
 go into society, to accustom people to the sound of my name, 
 and to rid myself of the simple title of 'Monsieur' which 
 sits but ill on a great man in his lifetime. 
 
 " 'Those who know no better,' he cried, 'call this sort 
 of business scheming, and moral people condemn it for a 
 "dissipated life." We need not stop to look at what people 
 think, but see the results. You work, you say ? Very good, 
 but nothing will ever come of that. Now, I am ready for 
 anything and fit for nothing. As lazy as a lobster very likely : 
 but I succeed everywhere. I go out into society, I push 
 myself forward, the others make way before me ; I brag and 
 am believed ; I incur debts which somebody else pays ! Dis- 
 sipation, dear boy, is a methodical policy. The life of a man 
 who deliberately runs through his fortune often becomes a 
 business speculation ; his friends, his pleasures, patrons, and 
 acquaintances are his capital. Suppose a merchant runs a risk 
 of a million for twenty years, he can neither sleep, eat, nor 
 amuse himself; he is brooding over his million ; it makes 
 him run about all over Europe ; he worries himself, goes to 
 the devil in every way that man has invented. Then comes 
 a liquidation, such as I have seen myself, which very often 
 leaves him penniless and without a reputation or a friend. 
 The spendthrift, on the other hand, takes life as a serious 
 game, and sees his horses run. He loses his capital, perhaps, 
 but he stands a chance of being nominated Receiver-General, 
 of making a wealthy marriage, or of an appointment as 
 attache' to a minister or an ambassador; and he has his friends 
 left and his name, and he never wants money. He knows the 
 standing of everybody, and uses every one for his own ben- 
 efit. Is this logical, or am I a madman after all? Haven't 
 you there all the moral of the comedy that goes on every day
 
 102 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 .in this world? Your work is completed/ he went on after a 
 pause ; ' you are immensely clever ! Well, you have only 
 arrived at my starting-point. Now, you had better look after 
 its success yourself; it is the surest way. You will make allies 
 in every clique, and secure applause beforehand. I mean to 
 go halves in your glory myself; I shall be the jeweler who 
 set the diamonds in your crown. Come here to-morrow 
 evening, by way of a beginning. I will introduce you to a 
 house where all Paris goes, all our Paris, that is the Paris of 
 exquisites, millionaires, celebrities, all the folk who talk gold 
 like Chrysostom. When they have taken up a book, that 
 book becomes the fashion ; and if it is something really good 
 for once, they will have declared it to be a work of genius 
 without knowing it. If you have any sense, my dear fellow, 
 you will insure the success of your "Theory," by a better 
 understanding of the theory of success. To-morrow evening 
 you shall go to see that queen of the moment the beautiful 
 Countess Foedora.' 
 
 " ' I have never heard of her.' . . . 
 
 " ' You Hottentot ! ' laughed Rastignac ; t you do not know 
 Foedora? A great match with an income of nearly eighty 
 thousand livres, who has taken a fancy to nobody, or else no 
 one has taken a fancy to her. A sort of feminine enigma, a 
 half-Russian Parisienne, or a half-Parisian Russian. All the 
 romantic productions that never get published are brought out 
 at her house ; she is the handsomest woman in Paris, and the 
 most gracious ! You are not even a Hottentot ; you are 
 something between the Hottentot and the beast. Good-bye 
 till to-morrow.' 
 
 " He swung round on his heel and made off without wait- 
 ing for any answer. It never occurred to him that a reason- 
 ing being could refuse an introduction to Fcedora. How can 
 the fascination of a name be explained ? FCEDORA haunted 
 me like some evil thought, with which you seek to come to 
 terms. A voice said in me, ' You are going to see Fcedora ! '
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 103 
 
 In vain I reasoned with that voice, saying that it lied to me ; 
 all my arguments were defeated by the name 'Fcedora.' 
 Was not the name, and even the woman herself, the symbol 
 of all my desires, and the object of my life? 
 
 "The name called up recollections of the conventional 
 glitter of the world, the upper world of Paris with its brilliant 
 fetes and the tinsel of its vanities. The woman brought be- 
 fore me all the problems of passion on which my mind con- 
 tinually ran. Perhaps it was neither the woman nor the name, 
 but my own propensities, that sprang up within me and 
 tempted me afresh. Here was the Countess Fcedora, rich 
 and loveless, proof against the temptations of Paris ; was not 
 this woman the very incarnation of my hopes and visions? 
 I fashioned her for myself, drew her in fancy, and dreamed 
 of her. I could not sleep that night ; I became her lover ; I 
 overbrimmed a few hours with a whole lifetime a lover's 
 lifetime; the experience of its prolific delights burned me. 
 
 "The next day I could not bear the tortures of delay; I 
 borrowed a novel, and spent the whole day over it, so that I 
 could not possibly think nor keep account of the time till 
 night. Fcedora's name echoed through me even as I read, 
 but only as a distant sound : though it could be heard, it was 
 not troublesome. Fortunately, I owned a fairly creditable 
 black coat and a white waistcoat ; of all my fortune there now 
 remained about thirty francs, which I had distributed about 
 among my clothes and in my drawers, so as to erect between my 
 whims and the spending of a five-franc piece a thorny barrier 
 of search, and an adventurous peregrination round my room. 
 While I was dressing, I dived about for my money in an 
 ocean of papers. This scarcity of specie will give you some 
 idea of the value of that squandered upon gloves and cab-hire ; 
 a month's bread disappeared at one fell swoop. Alas ! money 
 is always forthcoming for our caprices ; we only grudge the 
 cost of things that are useful or necessary. We recklessly 
 fling gold to an opera-dancer, and haggle with a tradesman
 
 104 THE WILD ASS* SKIN. 
 
 whose hungry family must wait for the settlement of our bill. 
 How many men are there that wear a coat that costs a hundred 
 francs, carry a diamond in the head of their cane, and dine 
 for twenty-five sous for all that ! It seems as though we could 
 never pay enough for the pleasures of vanity. 
 
 " Rastignac, punctual to his appointment, smiled at the 
 transformation, and joked about it. On the way he gave me 
 benevolent advice as to my conduct with the countess ; he 
 described her as mean, vain, and suspicious ; but though 
 mean, she was ostentatious, her vanity was transparent, and 
 her mistrust good-humored. 
 
 " ' You know I am pledged,' he said, 'and what I should 
 lose, too, if I tried a change in love. So my observation of 
 Fcedora has been quite cool and disinterested, and my re- 
 marks must have some truth in them. I was looking to your 
 future when I thought of introducing you to her ; so mind 
 very carefully what I am about to say. She has a terrible 
 memory. She is clever enough to drive a diplomatist wild ; 
 she would know it at once if he spoke the truth. Between 
 ourselves, I fancy that her marriage was not recognized by 
 the Emperor, for the Russian ambassador began to smile when 
 I spoke of her ; he does not receive her either, and only bows 
 very coolly if he meets her in the Bois. For all that, she 
 is in Madame de Serizy's set, and visits Mesdames de Nucin- 
 gen and de Restaud. There is no cloud over her here in 
 France ; the Duchesse de Carigliano, the most strait-laced 
 marechale in the whole Bonapartist coterie, often goes to 
 spend the summer with her at her country house. Plenty of 
 young fops, sons of peers of France, have offered her a title in 
 exchange for her fortune, and she has politely declined them 
 all. Her susceptibilities, may be, are not to be touched by 
 anything less than a count. Aren't you a marquis? Go 
 ahead if you fancy her. This is what you may call " receiving 
 your instructions.' ' 
 
 " His raillery made me think that Rastignac wished to
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 105 
 
 joke and excite my curiosity, so that I was in a paroxysm of 
 my extemporized passion by the time that we stopped before 
 a peristyle full of flowers. My heart beat and my color rose 
 as we went up the great carpeted staircase, and I noticed 
 about me all the studied refinements of English comfort ; I 
 was infatuatedly bourgeois; I forgot my origin and all my 
 personal and family pride. Alas ! I had just left a garret, 
 after three years of poverty, and I could not just then set the 
 treasures there acquired above such trifles as these. Nor could 
 I rightly estimate the worth of the vast intellectual capital 
 which turns to riches at the moment when opportunity comes 
 within our reach, opportunity that does not overwhelm, 
 because study has prepared us for the struggles of public 
 life. 
 
 " I found a woman of about twenty-two years of age ; she 
 was of average height, was dressed in white, and held a feather 
 fire-screen in her hand ; a group of men stood around her. 
 She rose at the sight of Rastignac, and came towards us with 
 a gracious smile and a musically-uttered compliment, prepared 
 no doubt beforehand, for me. Our friend had spoken of me 
 as a rising man, and his clever way of making the most of me 
 had procured me this flattering reception. I was confused by 
 the attention which every one paid to me ; but Rastignac had 
 luckily mentioned my modesty. I was brought in contact 
 with scholars, men of letters, ex-ministers, and peers of 
 France. The conversation, interrupted awhile by my coming, 
 was resumed. I took courage, feeling that I had a reputation 
 to maintain, and, without abusing my privilege, I spoke when 
 it fell to me to speak, trying to state the questions at issue in 
 words more or less profound, witty or trenchant, and I made 
 a certain sensation. Rastignac was a prophet for the thou- 
 sandth time in his life. As soon as the gathering was large 
 enough to restore freedom to individuals, he took my arm, 
 and we went round the rooms. 
 
 " ' Don't look as if you were too much struck by the prin-
 
 106 THE WILD ASS' SKIX. 
 
 cess,' he said, 'or she will guess your object in coming to 
 visit her.' 
 
 "The rooms were furnished in excellent taste. Each 
 apartment had a character of its own, as in wealthy English 
 houses; and the silken hangings, the style of the furniture, 
 and the ornaments, even the most trifling, were all subordi- 
 nated to the original idea. In a gothic boudoir the doors 
 were concealed by tapestried curtains, and the paneling by 
 hangings ; the clock and the pattern of the carpet were made 
 to harmonize with the gothic surroundings. The ceiling, 
 with its carved cross-beams of brown wood, was full of charm 
 and originality; the panels were beautifully wrought ; nothing 
 disturbed the general harmony of the scheme of decoration, 
 not even the windows with their rich colored glass. I was 
 surprised by the extensive knowledge of decoration that some 
 artist had brought to bear on a little modern room, it was so 
 pleasant and fresh, and not heavy, but subdued with its dead 
 gold hues. It had all the vague sentiment of a German 
 ballad; it was a retreat fit for some romance of 1827, per- 
 fumed by the exotic flowers set in their stands. Another 
 apartment in the suite was a gilded reproduction of the Louis 
 Quatorze period, with modern paintings on the walls in odd 
 but pleasant contrast. 
 
 " ' You would not be so badly lodged,' was Rastignac's 
 slightly sarcastic comment. ' It is captivating, isn't it?' he 
 added, smiling as he sat down. Then suddenly he rose, and 
 led me by the hand into a bedroom, where the softened light 
 fell upon the bed under its canopy of muslin and white 
 watered silk a couch for a young fairy betrothed to one of 
 the genii. 
 
 " ' Isn't it wantonly bad taste, insolent and unbounded 
 coquetry,' he said, lowering his voice, 'that allows us to see 
 this throne of love? She gives herself to no one, and any- 
 body may leave his card here. If I were not committed, I 
 should like to see her at my feet all tears and submission.'
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 107 
 
 " ' Are you so certain of her virtue? ' 
 
 " 'The boldest and even the cleverest adventurers among 
 us acknowledge themselves defeated, and continue to be her 
 lovers and devoted friends. Isn't that woman a puzzle?' 
 
 " His words seemed to intoxicate me; I had jealous fears 
 already of the past. I leaped for joy, and hurried back to the 
 Countess, whom I had seen in the gothic boudoir. She 
 stopped me by a smile, made me sit beside her, and talked 
 about my work, seeming to take the greatest interest in it, 
 and all the more when I set forth my theories amusingly, in- 
 stead of adopting the formal language of a professor for their 
 explanation. It seemed to divert her to be told that the hu- 
 man will was a material force like steam ; that in the moral 
 world nothing could resist its power if a man taught himself 
 to concentrate it, to economize it, and to project continually 
 its fluid mass in given directions upon other souls. Such a 
 man, I said, could modify all things relatively to man, even 
 the peremptory laws of nature. The questions Foedora raised 
 showed a certain keenness of intellect. I took a pleasure in 
 deciding some of them in her favor, in order to flatter her ; 
 then I confuted her feminine reasoning with a word, and 
 roused her curiosity by drawing her attention to an every-day 
 matter to sleep, a thing so apparently commonplace that in 
 reality it is an insoluble problem for science. The Countess 
 sat in silence for a moment when I told her that our ideas 
 were complete organic beings, existing in an invisible world, 
 and influencing our destinies ; and for witnesses I cited the 
 opinions of Descartes, Diderot, and Napoleon, who had 
 directed, and still directed, all the currents of the age. 
 
 "So I had the honor of amusing this woman; she asked 
 me to come to see her when she left me, giving me lesgrandes 
 entrees, in the language of the court. Whether it was by 
 dint of substituting polite formulas for genuine expressions of 
 feeling, a commendable habit of mine, or because Fcedora 
 hailed in me a coming celebrity, an addition to her learned
 
 108 THE WILD ASS* SKIN. 
 
 menagerie; for some reason I thought I had pleased her. I 
 called all my previous physiological studies and knowledge of 
 woman to my aid, and minutely scrutinized this singular 
 person and her ways all the evening. I concealed myself 
 in the embrasure of a window, and sought to discover her 
 thoughts from her bearing. I studied the tactics of the 
 mistress of the house, as she came and went, sat and chatted, 
 beckoned to this one or that, asked questions, listened to 
 the answers, as she leaned against the frame of the door ; 
 I detected a languid charm in her movements, a grace in 
 the flutterings of her dress, remarked the nature of the feel- 
 ings she so powerfully excited, and became very incredulous 
 as to her virtue. If Foedora would none of love to-day, she 
 had had strong passions at some time ; past experience of 
 pleasure showed itself in the attitudes she chose in conversa- 
 tion, in her coquettish way of leaning against the panel be- 
 hind her, she seemed scarcely able to stand alone, and yet 
 ready for flight from too bold a glance. There was a kind of 
 eloquence about her lightly folded arms, which, even for 
 benevolent eyes, breathed sentiment. Her fresh red lips 
 sharply contrasted with her brilliantly pale complexion. Her 
 brown hair brought out all the golden color in her eyes, in 
 which blue streaks mingled as in Florentine marble ; their ex- 
 pression seemed to increase the significance of her words. 
 A studied grace lay in the charms of her bodice. Perhaps a 
 rival might have found the lines of the thick eyebrows, which 
 almost met, a little hard ; or found a fault in the almost in- 
 visible down that covered her features. I saw the signs of 
 passion everywhere, written on those Italian eyelids, on the 
 splendid shoulders worthy of the Venus of Milo, on her 
 features, in the darker shade of down above a somewhat thick 
 under-lip. She was not merely a woman, but a romance. 
 The whole blended harmony of lines, the feminine luxuriance 
 of her frame, and its passionate promise, were subdued by a 
 constant inexplicable reserve and modesty at variance with
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 109 
 
 everything else about her. It needed an observation as keen 
 as my own to detect such signs as these in her character. To 
 explain myself more clearly, there were two women in Fcedora, 
 divided perhaps by the line between head and body ; the one, 
 the head alone, seemed to be susceptible, and the other 
 phlegmatic. She prepared her glance before she looked at 
 you, something unspeakably mysterious, some inward con- 
 vulsion seemed revealed by her glittering eyes. 
 
 " So, to be brief, either my imperfect moral science had 
 left me a good deal to learn in the moral world, or a lofty soul 
 dwelt in the Countess, lent to her face those charms that fas- 
 cinated and subdued us, and gave her an ascendancy only the 
 more complete because it comprehended a sympathy of desire. 
 
 "I went away completely enraptured with this woman, 
 dazzled by the luxury around her, gratified in every faculty 
 of my soul noble and base, good and evil. When I felt 
 myself so excited, eager, and elated, I thought I understood 
 the attraction that drew thither those artists, diplomatists, 
 men in office, those stock-jobbers encased in triple brass. 
 They came, no doubt, to find in her society the delirious emo- 
 tion that now thrilled through every fibre in me, throbbing 
 through my brain, setting the blood a-tingle in every vein, 
 fretting even the tiniest nerve. And she had given herself to 
 none, so as to keep them all. A woman is a coquette so long 
 as she knows not love. 
 
 " 'Well,' I said to Rastignac, ' they married her, or sold 
 her, perhaps, to some old man, and recollections of her first 
 marriage have caused her aversion for love.' 
 
 "I walked home from the Faubourg St. Honor6, where 
 Foedora lived. Almost all the breadth of Paris lies between 
 her mansion and the Rue des Cordiers, but the distance 
 seemed short, in spite of the cold. And I was to lay siege 
 to Fcedora's heart, in winter, and a bitter winter, with only 
 thirty francs in my possession, and such a distance as that lay 
 between us ! Only a poor man knows what such a passion
 
 110 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 costs in cab-hire, gloves, linen, tailor's bills, and the like. 
 If the Platonic stage lasts a little too long, the affair grows 
 ruinous. As a matter of fact, there is many a Lauzun among 
 students of law, who find it impossible to approach a lady- 
 love living on a first floor. And I, sickly, thin, poorly 
 dressed, wan and pale as any artist convalescent after a work, 
 how could I compete with other young men, curled, hand- 
 some, smart, outcravating Croatia; wealthy men, equipped 
 with tilburys, and armed with assurance ? 
 
 " ' Bah, death or Foedora ! ' I cried, as I went round by a 
 bridge ; ' my fortune lies in Foedora.' 
 
 " That gothic boudoir and Louis Quatorze salon came be- 
 fore my eyes. I saw the Countess again in her white dress 
 with its large graceful sleeves, and all the fascinations of her 
 form and movements. These pictures of Foedora and her 
 luxurious surroundings haunted me even in my bare, cold 
 garret, when at last I reached it, as disheveled as any natural- 
 ist's wig. The contrast suggested evil counsel ; in such a 
 way crimes are conceived. I cursed my honest, self-respect- 
 ing poverty, my garret where such teeming fancies had stirred 
 within me. I trembled with fury, I reproached God, the 
 devil, social conditions, my own father, the whole universe, 
 indeed, with my fate and my misfortunes. I went hungry to 
 bed, muttering ludicrous imprecations, but fully determined 
 to win Fcedora. Her heart was my last ticket in the lottery, 
 my fortune depended upon it. 
 
 " I spare you the history of my earlier visits, to reach the 
 drama the sooner. In my efforts to appeal to her, I essayed 
 to engage her intellect and her vanity on my side; in order 
 to secure her love, I gave her any quantity of reasons for 
 increasing her self-esteem ; I never left her in a state of indif- 
 ference ; women like emotions at any cost, I gave them to 
 her in plenty ; I would rather have had her angry with me 
 than indifferent. 
 
 " At first, urged by a strong will and a desire for her love, I
 
 A WO MAX WITHOUT A HEART. Ill 
 
 assumed a little authority, but my own feelings grew stronger 
 and mastered me ; I relapsed into truth, I lost my head, and 
 fell desperately in love. 
 
 " I am not very sure what we mean by the word love in our 
 poetry and talk, but I know that I have never found in all the 
 ready rhetorical phrases of Jean Jacques Rousseau, in whose 
 room perhaps I was lodging; nor among the feeble inventions 
 of two centuries of our literature, nor in any picture that 
 Italy has produced, a representation of the feelings that ex- 
 panded all at once in my double nature. The view of the 
 lake of Bienne, some music of Rossini's, the Madonna of 
 Murillo now in the possession of General Soult, Lescombat's 
 letters, a few sayings scattered through collections of anec- 
 dotes; but most of all the prayers of religious ecstatics, and 
 passages in our fables these things alone have power to 
 carry me back to the divine heights of my first love. 
 
 " Nothing expressed in human language, no thought repro- 
 ducible in color, marble, sound, or articulate speech, could 
 ever render the force, the truth, the completeness, the sudden- 
 ness with which love awoke in me. To speak of art is to 
 speak of illusion. Love passes through endless transforma- 
 tions before it passes forever into our existence and makes it 
 glow with its own color of flame. The process is imperceptible, 
 and baffles the artist's analysis. Its moans and complaints 
 are tedious to an uninterested spectator. One would need to 
 be very much in love to share the furious transports of Love- 
 lace, as one reads ' Clarissa Harlowe.' Love is like some 
 fresh spring, that leaves its cresses, its gravel bed and flowers, 
 to become first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect 
 and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless 
 ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, and where 
 great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation. 
 
 " How can I dare to describe the hues of fleeting emotions, 
 the nothings beyond all price, the spoken accents that beggar 
 language, the looks that hold more than all the wealth of
 
 112 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 poetry? Not one of the mysterious scenes that draw us in- 
 sensibly nearer and nearer to a woman, but has depths in it 
 which can swallow up all the poetry that ever was written. 
 How can the inner life and mystery that stirs in our souls 
 penetrate through our glozes, when we have not even words to 
 describe the visible and outward mysteries of beauty ? What 
 enchantment steeped me for how many hours in unspeakable 
 rapture, filled with the sight of her ! What made me happy? 
 I know not. That face of hers overflowed with light at such 
 times ; it seemed in some way to glow with it ; the outlines 
 of her face, with the scarcely perceptible down on its delicate 
 surface, shone with a beauty belonging to the far-distant horizon 
 that melts into the sunlight. The light of day seemed to 
 caress her as she mingled in it; rather it seemed that the light of 
 her eyes was brighter than the daylight itself; or some shadow 
 passing over that fair face made a kind of change there, alter- 
 ing its hues and its expression. Some thought would often 
 seem to glow on her white brows ; her eyes appeared to dilate, 
 and her eyelids trembled ; a smile rippled over her features : 
 the living coral of her lips grew full of meaning as they closed 
 and unclosed ; an indistinguishable something in her hair made 
 brown shadows on her fair temples : in each new phase Fcedora 
 spoke. Every slight variation in her beauty made a new 
 pleasure for my eyes, disclosed charms my heart had never 
 known before ; I tried to read a separate emotion or a hope 
 in every change that passed over her face. This mute con- 
 verse passed between soul and soul, like sound and answering 
 echo; and the short-lived delights then showered upon me 
 have left indelible impressions behind. Her voice would 
 cause a frenzy in me that I could hardly understand. I could 
 have copied the example of some prince of Lorraine, and 
 held a live coal in the hollow of my hand, if her fingers 
 passed caressingly through my hair the while. I felt no longer 
 mere admiration and desire : I was under the spell ; I had 
 met my destiny. When back again under my own roof, I
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 113 
 
 still vaguely saw Fcedora in her own home, and had some 
 indefinable share in her life ; if she felt ill, I suffered too. 
 The next day I used to say to her 
 
 " 'You were not well yesterday.' 
 
 "How often has she not stood before me, called by the 
 power of ecstasy, in the silence of the night ! Sometimes 
 she would break in upon me like a ray of light, make me drop 
 my pen, and put science and study to flight in grief and alarm, 
 as she compelled my admiration by the alluring pose I had 
 seen but a short time before. Sometimes I went to seek her 
 in the spirit world, and would bow down to her as to a hope, 
 entreating her to let me hear the silvery sounds of her voice, 
 and I would wake at length in tears. 
 
 " Once, when she had promised to go to the theatre with 
 me, she took it suddenly into her head to refuse to go out, 
 and begged me to leave her alone. I was in such despair 
 over the perversity which cost me a day's work, and (if I 
 must confess it) my last shilling as well, that I went alone 
 where she was to have been, desiring to see the play she had 
 wished to see. I had scarcely seated myself when an electric 
 shock went through me. A voice told me, ' She is here ! ' I 
 looked round, and saw the Countess hidden in the shadow at 
 the back of her box in the first tier. My look did not waver; 
 my eyes saw her at once with incredible clearness ; my soul 
 hovered about her life like an insect above its flower. How 
 had my senses received this warning? There is something in 
 these inward tremors that shallow people find astonishing, but 
 t'le phenomena of our inner consciousness are produced as 
 simply as those of external vision ; so I was not surprised, but 
 much vexed. My studies of our mental faculties, so little 
 understood, helped me at any rate to find in my own excite- 
 ment some living proofs of my theories. There was some- 
 thing exceedingly odd in this combination of lover and man 
 of science, of downright idolatry of a woman with the love 
 of knowledge. The causes of the lover's despair were highly
 
 114 7'ffE WILD ASS* SKIN. 
 
 interesting to the man of science ; and the exultant lover, on the 
 other hand, put science far away from him in his joy. Foedora 
 saw me, and grew grave : I annoyed her. I went to her box 
 during the first interval, and, finding her alone, I stayed there. 
 Although we had not spoken of love, I foresaw an explanation. 
 I had not told her my secret, still there was a kind of under- 
 standing between us. She used to tell me her plans for amuse- 
 ment, and on the previous evening had asked with friendly 
 eagerness if I meant to call next day. After any witticism of 
 hers, she would give me an inquiring glance, as if she had 
 sought to please me alone by it. She would soothe me if I was 
 vexed : and if she pouted, I had in some sort a right to ask 
 an explanation. Before she would pardon any blunder, she 
 would keep me a suppliant for v long. All these things that- we 
 so relished were so many lovers' quarrels. What arch grace 
 she threw into it all ! and what happiness it was to me ! 
 
 "But now we stood before each other as strangers, with 
 the close relation between us both suspended. The Countess 
 was glacial : a presentiment of trouble filled me. 
 
 " ' Will you come home with me ? ' she said, when the play 
 was over. 
 
 "There had been a sudden change in the weather, and 
 sleet was falling in showers as we went out. Foedora's carriage 
 was unable to reach the doorway of the theatre. At the sight 
 of a well-dressed woman about to cross the street, a commis- 
 sionaire held an umbrella above us, and stood waiting at the 
 carriage-door for his tip. I would have given ten years of 
 life just then for a couple of halfpence, but I had not a penny. 
 All the man in me and all my vainest susceptibilities were 
 wrung with an infernal pain. The words, ' I haven't a penny 
 about me, my good fellow ! ' came from me in the hard voice 
 of thwarted passion ; and yet I was that man's brother in 
 misfortunes, as I knew too well ; and once I had so lightly 
 paid away seven hundred thousand francs ! The footman 
 pushed the man aside, and the horses sprang forward ! As
 
 A WOMAN WITHOU'I A HEART. 115 
 
 we returned, Foedora, in real or feigned abstraction, answered 
 all my questions curtly and by monosyllables, I said no 
 more ; it was a hateful moment. When we reached her house, 
 we seated ourselves by the hearth, and when the servant had 
 stirred the fire and left us alone, the Countess turned to me 
 with an inexplicable expression, and spoke. Her manner was 
 almost solemn. 
 
 " ' Since my return to France, more than one young man, 
 tempted by my money, has made proposals to me which 
 would have satisfied my pride. I have come across men, 
 too, whose attachment was so deep and sincere that they 
 might have married me even if they had found me the 
 penniless girl I used to be. Besides these, Monsieur de Val- 
 entin, you must know that new titles and newly-acquired 
 wealth have been also offered to me, and that I have never 
 received again any of those who were so ill-advised as to 
 mention love to me. If my regard for you was but slight, 
 I would not give you this warning, which is dictated by 
 friendship rather than by pride. A woman lays herself open to 
 a rebuff of some kind, if she imagines herself to be loved, 
 and declines, before it is uttered, to listen to language which 
 in its nature implies a compliment. I am well acquainted 
 with the parts played by Arsinoe and Araminta, and with 
 the sort of answer I might look for under such circum- 
 stances ; but I hope to-day that I shall not find myself mis- 
 construed by a man of no ordinary character, because I have 
 frankly spoken my mind.' 
 
 " She spoke with the cool self-possession of some attorney 
 or solicitor explaining the nature of a contract or the con- 
 duct of a lawsuit to a client. There was not the least sign of 
 feeling in the clear soft tones of her voice. Her steady face 
 and dignified bearing seemed to me now full of diplomatic 
 reserve and coldness. She had planned this scene, no doubt, 
 and carefully chosen her words beforehand. Oh, my friend, 
 there are women who take pleasure in piercing hearts, and
 
 116 THE H'/f.D ASS' SKIX. 
 
 deliberately plunge the dagger back again into the wound ; 
 such women as these cannot but be worshipped, for such women 
 either love or would fain be loved. A day comes when 
 they make amends for all the pain they gave us; they 
 repay us for the pangs, the keenness of which they recog- 
 nize, in joys a hundredfold, even as God, they tell us, recom- 
 penses our good works. Does not their perversity spring 
 from the strength of their feelings ? But to be so tortured 
 by a woman, who slaughters you with indifference ! was not 
 the suffering intolerable ? 
 
 " Fcedora did not know it, but in that minute she trampled 
 all my hopes beneath her feet ; she maimed my life and she 
 blighted my future with the cool indifference and unconscious 
 barbarity of an inquisitive child who plucks its wings from a 
 butterfly. 
 
 "'Later on,' resumed Fcedora, 'you will learn, I hope, 
 the stability of the affection that I keep for my friends. You 
 will always find that I have devotion and kindness for them. 
 I would give my life to serve my friends ; but you could only 
 despise me, if I allowed them to make love to me without 
 return. That is enough. You are the only man to whom I 
 have spoken such words as these last. ' 
 
 " At first I could not speak, or master the tempest that 
 arose within me; but I soon repressed my emotions in the 
 depths of my soul, and began to smile. 
 
 " ' If I own that I love you,' I said, 'you will banish me at 
 once ; if I plead guilty to indifference you will make me 
 suffer for it. Women, magistrates, and priests never quite lay 
 the gown aside. Silence is non-committal ; be pleased then, 
 madame, to approve my silence. You must have feared, in 
 some degree, to lose me, or I should not have received this 
 friendly admonition ; and with that thought my pride ought 
 to be satisfied. Let us banish all personal considerations. 
 You are perhaps the only woman with whom I could discuss 
 rationally a resolution so contrary to the laws of nature. Con-
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 117 
 
 sidered with regard to your species, you are a prodigy. Now 
 let us investigate, in good faith, the causes of this psycholog- 
 ical anomaly. Does there exist in you, as in many women, a 
 certain pride in self, a love of your own loveliness, a refine- 
 ment of egotism which makes you shudder at the idea of 
 belonging to another; is it the thought of resigning your 
 own will and submitting to a superiority, though only of con- 
 vention, which displeases you? You would seem to me a 
 thousand times the fairer for it. Can love formerly have 
 brought you suffering ? You probably set some value on your 
 dainty figure and graceful appearance, and may perhaps wish 
 to avoid the disfigurements of maternity. Is not this one of 
 your strongest reasons for refusing a too importunate love ? 
 Some natural defect perhaps makes you insusceptible in spite 
 of yourself? Do not be angry ; my study, my inquiry is 
 absolutely dispassionate. Some are born blind, and nature 
 may easily have formed women who in like manner are 
 blind, deaf, and dumb to love. You are really an interesting 
 subject for medical investigation. You do not know your 
 value. You feel perhaps a very legitimate distaste for man- 
 kind ; in that I quite concur to me they all seem ugly and 
 detestable. And you are right,' I added, feeling my heart 
 swell within me; ' how can you do otherwise than despise us? 
 There is not a man living who is worthy of you.' 
 
 "I will not repeat all the biting words with which I ridi- 
 culed her. In vain ; my bitterest sarcasms and keenest irony 
 never made her wince nor elicited a sign of vexation. She 
 heard me, with the customary smile upon her lips and in her 
 eyes, the smile that she wore as a part of her clothing, and 
 that never varied for friends, for mere acquaintances, or for 
 strangers. 
 
 "'Isn't it very nice of me to allow you to dissect me 
 like this ? ' she said at last, as I came to a temporary stand- 
 still, and looked at her in silence. 'You see,' she went on, 
 laughing, ' that I have no foolish over-sensitiveness about
 
 118 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 my friendship. Many a woman would shut her door on 
 you by way of punishing you for your impertinence.' 
 
 " 'You could banish me without needing to give me the 
 reasons for your harshness.' As I spoke I felt that I could 
 kill her if she dismissed me. 
 
 "'You are mad,' she said, smiling still. 
 
 " 'Did you never think,' I went on, 'of the effects of 
 passionate love ? A desperate man has often murdered his 
 mistress. 
 
 " ' It is better to die than to live in misery,' she said 
 coolly. ' Such a man as that would run through his wife's 
 money, desert her, and leave her at last in utter wretch- 
 edness.' 
 
 "This calm calculation dumbfounded me. The gulf 
 between us was made plain ; we could never understand each 
 other. 
 
 " ' Good-bye,' I said proudly. 
 
 "'Good-bye, till to-morrow,' she answered, with a little 
 friendly bow. 
 
 "For a moment's space I hurled at her in a glance all the 
 love I must forego ; she stood there with that banal smile of 
 hers, the detestable chill smile of a marble statue, with none 
 of the warmth in it that it seemed to express. Can you form 
 any idea, my friend, of the pain that overcame me on the 
 way home through rain and snow, across a league of icy- 
 sheeted quays, without a hope left? Oh, to think that she 
 not only had not guessed my poverty, but believed me to be 
 as wealthy as she was, and likewise borne as softly over the 
 rough ways of life ! What failure and deceit ! It was no 
 mere question of money now, but of the fate of all that lay 
 within me. 
 
 " I went at haphazard, going over the words of our strange 
 conversation with myself. I got so thoroughly lost in my 
 reflections that I ended by doubts as to the actual value of 
 words and ideas. But I loved her all the same ; I loved this
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 119 
 
 woman with the untouched heart that might surrender at any 
 moment a woman who daily disappointed the expectations 
 of the previous evening, by appearing as a new mistress on 
 the morrow. 
 
 " As I passed under the gateway of the Institute, a fevered 
 thrill ran through me. I remembered that I was fasting, and 
 that I had not a penny. To complete the measure of my 
 misfortune, my hat was spoiled by the rain. How was I to 
 appear in the drawing-room of a woman of fashion with an 
 unpresentable hat ! I had always cursed the inane and stupid 
 custom that compels us to exhibit the lining of our hats, and 
 to keep them always in our hands, but with anxious care I had 
 so far kept mine in a precarious state of efficiency. It had 
 been neither strikingly new, nor utterly shabby, neither nap- 
 less nor over-glossy, and might have passed for the hat of a 
 frugally given owner; but its artificially prolonged existence 
 had now reached the final stage, it was crumpled, forlorn, and 
 completely ruined, a downright rag, a fitting emblem of its 
 master. My painfully preserved elegance must collapse for 
 want of thirty sous. 
 
 " What unrecognized sacrifices I had made in the past three 
 months for Fcedora ! How often I had given the price of a 
 week's sustenance to see her for a moment ! To leave my 
 work and go without food was the least of it ! I must traverse 
 the streets of Paris without getting splashed, run to escape 
 showers, and reach her rooms at last, as neat and spruce as 
 any of the coxcombs about her. For a poet and a distracted 
 wooer the difficulties of this task were endless. My happiness, 
 the course of my love, might be affected by a speck of mud 
 upon my only white waistcoat ! Oh, to miss the sight of her 
 because I was wet through and bedraggled, and had not so 
 much as five sous to give to a shoeblack for removing the least 
 little spot of mud from my boot ! The petty pangs of the^e 
 nameless torments, which an irritable man finds so great, only 
 strengthened my passion.
 
 120 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 "The unfortunate must make sacrifices which they may not 
 mention to women who lead refined and luxurious lives. Such 
 women see things through a prism that gilds all men and their 
 surroundings. Egoism leads them to take cheerful views, and 
 fashion makes them cruel ; they do not wish to reflect, lest 
 they lose their happiness, and the absorbing nature of their 
 pleasures absolves their indifference to the misfortunes of 
 others. A penny never means millions to them ; millions, on 
 the contrary, seem a mere trifle. Perhaps love must plead 
 his cause by great sacrifices, but a veil must be lightly drawn 
 across them, they must go down into silence. So when wealthy 
 men pour out their devotion, their fortunes, and their lives, 
 they gain somewhat by these commonly entertained opinions, 
 an additional lustre hangs about their lovers' follies ; their 
 silence is eloquent ; there is a grace about the drawn veil ; 
 but my terrible distress bound me over to suffer fearfully ere 
 I might speak of my love or of dying for her sake. 
 
 " Was it a sacrifice after all? Was I not richly rewarded 
 by the joy I took in sacrificing everything to her? There was 
 no ordinary event of my daily life to which the Countess had 
 not given importance, had not overfilled with happiness. I had 
 been hitherto careless of my clothes, now I respected my coat 
 as if it had been a second self. I should not have hesitated 
 between bodily harm and a tear in that garment. You must 
 enter wholly into my circumstances to understand the stormy 
 thoughts, the gathering frenzy, that shook me as I went, and 
 which, perhaps, were increased by my walk. I gloated in an 
 infernal fashion which I cannot describe over the absolute 
 completeness of my wretchedness. I would have drawn from 
 it an augury of my future, but there is no limit to the possi- 
 bilities of misfortune. The door of my lodging-house stood 
 ajar. A light streamed from the heart-shaped opening cut in 
 the shutters. Pauline and her mother were sitting up for me 
 and talking. I heard my name spoken and listened. 
 
 "'Raphael is much nicer-looking than the student in num-
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 121 
 
 ber seven,' said Pauline; ' his fair hair is such a pretty color. 
 Don't you think there is something in his voice, too, I don't 
 know what it is, that gives you a sort of thrill? And, then, 
 though he may be a little proud, he is very kind, and he has 
 such fine manners ; I am sure that all the ladies must be quite 
 wild about him.' 
 
 " 'You might be fond of him yourself, to hear you talk,' 
 was Madame Gaudin's comment. 
 
 " ' He is just as dear to me as a brother,' she laughingly 
 replied. ' 1 should be finely ungrateful if I felt no friendship 
 for him. Didn't he teach me music and drawing and gram- 
 mar, and everything I know in fact? You don't much notice 
 how I get on, dear mother; but I shall know enough, after a 
 while, to give lessons myself, and then we can keep a servant.' 
 
 " I stole away softly, made some noise outside, and went 
 into their room to take the lamp, that Pauline tried to light 
 for me. The dear child had just poured soothing balm into 
 my wounds. Her outspoken admiration had given me fresh 
 courage. I so needed to believe in myself and to come by 
 a just estimate of my advantages. This revival of hope in 
 me perhaps colored my surroundings. Perhaps, also, I had 
 never before really looked at the picture that so often met my 
 eyes, of the two women in their room ; it was a scene such as 
 Flemish painters have reproduced so faithfully for us, that I 
 admired it in its delightful reality. The mother, with the 
 kind smile upon her lips, sat knitting stockings by the dying 
 fire ; Pauline was painting hand-screens, her brushes and 
 paints, strewn over the tiny table, made bright spots of color 
 for the eye to dwell on. When she had left her seat and stood 
 lighting my lamp, one must have been under the yoke of a 
 terrible passion, indeed, not to admire her faintly flushed trans- 
 parent hands, the girlish charm of her attitude, the ideal grace 
 of her head, as the lamplight fell full on her pale face. Night 
 and silence added to the charms of this industrious vigil and 
 peaceful interior. The light-heartedness that sustained such
 
 122 THE WILD ASS' SKIA T . 
 
 continuous toil could only spring from devout submission and 
 the lofty feelings that it brings. 
 
 " There was an indescribable harmony between them and 
 their possessions. The splendor of Foedora's home did not 
 satisfy; it called out all my worst instincts; something in this 
 lowly poverty and unfeigned goodness revived me. It may 
 have been that luxury abased me in my own eyes, while here 
 my self-respect was restored to me, as I sought to extend the 
 protection that a man is so eager to make felt, over these two 
 women, who in the bare simplicity of the existence in their 
 brown room seemed to live wholly in the feelings of their 
 hearts. As I came up to Pauline, she looked at me in an 
 almost motherly way ; her hands shook a little as she held the 
 lamp, so that the light fell on me, and cried 
 
 '"Dieu! how pale you are! and you are wet through! 
 My mother will try to wipe you dry. Monsieur Raphael,' she 
 went on, after a little pause, ' you are so very fond of milk, 
 and to-night we happen to have some cream. Here, will you 
 not take some ? ' 
 
 " She pounced like a kitten, on a china bowl full of milk. 
 She did it so quickly, and put it before me so prettily, that I 
 hesitated. 
 
 " 'You are going to refuse me?' she said, and her tones 
 changed. 
 
 "The pride in each felt for the other's pride. It was 
 Pauline's poverty that seemed to humiliate her, and to re- 
 proach me with want of consideration, and I melted at once, 
 and accepted the cream that might have been meant for her 
 morning's breakfast. The poor child tried not to show her 
 joy, but her eyes sparkled. 
 
 " ' I needed it badly,' I said as I sat down. (An anxious 
 look passed over her face.) 'Do you remember that pass- 
 age, Pauline, where Bossuet tells how God gives more abun- 
 dant reward for a cup of cold water than for a vic- 
 tory?'
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 12;} 
 
 " ' Yes,' she said, her heart beating like some wild bird's in 
 a child's hands. 
 
 " ' Well, as we shall part very soon, now,' I went on in an 
 unsteady voice, ' you must let me show my gratitude to you 
 and to your mother for all the care you have taken of me.' 
 
 " ' Oh, don't let us cast accounts,' she said, laughing. 
 But her laughter covered an agitation that gave me pain. I 
 went on without appearing to hear her words 
 
 " ' My piano is one of Erard's best instruments; and you 
 must take it. Pray accept it without hesitation ; I really 
 could not take it with me on the journey I am about to make.' 
 
 " Perhaps the melancholy tones in which I spoke enlight- 
 ened the two women, for they seemed to understand, and 
 eyed me with curiosity and alarm. Here was the affection 
 that I had looked for in the glacial regions of the great world, 
 true affection, unostentatious but tender, and possibly lasting. 
 
 " ' Don't take it to heart so,' the mother said ; ' stay on 
 here. My husband is on his way towards us even now,' she 
 went on. ' I looked into the Gospel of St. John this evening 
 while Pauline hung our door-key in a Bible from her fingers. 
 The key turned ; that means that Gaudin is in health and 
 doing well. Pauline began again for you and for the young 
 man in number seven it turned for you, but not for him. 
 We are all going to be rich. Gaudin will come back a mil- 
 lionaire. I dreamed once that I saw him in a ship full of 
 serpents ; luckily the water was rough, and that means gold 
 or precious stones from over-sea.' 
 
 " The silly, friendly words were like the crooning lullaby 
 with which a mother soothes her sick child ; they in a manner 
 calmed me. There was a pleasant heaftiness in the worthy 
 woman's looks and tones, which, if it could not remove 
 trouble, at any rate soothed and quieted it, and deadened the 
 pain. Pauline, keener-sighted than her mother, studied me 
 uneasily; her quick eyes seemed to read my life and my 
 future. I thanked the mother and daughter by an inclination
 
 124 THE WILD ASS' SJCJN. 
 
 of the head, and turned away ; I was afraid I should break 
 down. 
 
 "I found myself alone under my roof, and laid myself 
 down in my misery. My unhappy imagination suggested 
 numberless baseless projects, and prescribed impossible resolu- 
 tions. When a man is struggling in the wreck of his fortunes, 
 he is not quite without resources, but I was engulfed. Ah, 
 my dear fellow, we are too ready to blame the wretched. Let 
 us be less harsh on the results of the most powerful of all 
 social solvents. Where poverty is absolute there exist no such 
 things as shame or crime, or virtue or intelligence. I knew 
 not what to do ; I was as defenceless as a maiden on her knees 
 before a beast of prey. A penniless man who has no ties to 
 bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless 
 wretch who is in love no longer belongs to himself, and may 
 not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our 
 own eyes ; it is the life of another that we revere within us 
 then ; and so begins for us the cruellest trouble of all the 
 misery with a hope in it, a hope for which we must even bear 
 our torments. I thought I would go to Rastignac on the 
 morrow to confide Foedora's strange resolution to him, and 
 with that I slept. 
 
 " ' Ah, ha ! ' cried Rastignac, as he saw me enter his lodg- 
 ing at nine o'clock in the morning. ' I know what brings 
 you here. Foedora has dismissed you. Some kind souls, who 
 were jealous of your ascendency over the Countess, gave out 
 that you were going to be married. Heaven only knows 
 what follies your rivals have equipped you with, and what 
 slanders have been directed at you.' 
 
 " ' That explains everything ! ' I exclaimed. I remembered 
 all my presumptuous speeches, and gave the Countess credit 
 for no little magnanimity. It pleased me to think that I was 
 a miscreant who had not been punished nearly enough, and I 
 saw nothing in her indulgence but the long-suffering charity 
 of love.
 
 A WO MAX WITHOUT A HEART. 125 
 
 " ' Not quite so fast,' urged the prudent Gascon ; ' Fcedora 
 has all the sagacity natural to a profoundly selfish woman ; 
 perhaps she may have taken your measure while you still 
 coveted only her money and her splendor ; in spite of all 
 your care, she could have read you through and through. She 
 can dissemble far too well to let any dissimulation pass unde- 
 tected. I fear,' he went on, ' that I have brought you into a 
 bad way. In spite of her cleverness and her tact, she seems 
 to me a domineering sort of person, like every woman who 
 can only feel pleasure through her brain. Happiness for her 
 lies entirely in a comfortable life and in social pleasures ; her 
 sentiment is only assumed ; she will make you miserable ; 
 you will be her head footman.' 
 
 " He spoke to the deaf. I broke in upon him, disclosing, 
 with an affectation of light-heartedness, the state of my 
 finances. 
 
 " 'Yesterday evening,' he rejoined, Muck ran against me, 
 and that carried off all my available cash. But for that 
 trivial mishap, I would gladly have shared my purse with you. 
 But let us go and breakfast at the restaurant ; perhaps there 
 is good counsel in oysters.' 
 
 " He dressed, and had his tilbury brought round. We 
 went to the Cafe de Paris like a couple of millionaires, armed 
 with all the audacious impertinence of the speculator whose 
 capital is imaginary. That devil of a Gascon quite discon- 
 certed me by the coolness of his manners and his absolute 
 self-possession. While we were taking coffee after an excel- 
 lent and well-ordered repast, a young dandy entered, who 
 did not escape Rastignac. He had been nodding here and 
 there among the crowd to this or that young man, distin- 
 guished both by personal attractions and elegant attire, and 
 now he said to me 
 
 " ' Here's your man,' as he beckoned to this gentleman 
 with a wonderful cravat, who seemed to be looking for a table 
 that suited his ideas. . 
 9
 
 126 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 " 'That rogue has been decorated for bringing out books 
 that he doesn't understand a word of,' whispered Rastignac ; 
 'he is a chemist, a historian, a novelist, and a political writer ; 
 he has gone halves, thirds, or quarters in the authorship of I 
 don't know how many plays, and he is as ignorant as Dom 
 Miguel's mule. He is not a man so much as a name, a label 
 that the public is familiar with. So he would do well to avoid 
 shops inscribed with the motto, " IciT onpeutteriresoi-m&me"* 
 He is acute enough to deceive an entire congress of diplo- 
 matists. In a couple of words, he is a moral half-caste, not 
 quite a fraud, nor entirely genuine. But, hush ! he has suc- 
 ceeded already ; nobody asks anything further, and every one 
 calls him an illustrious man.' 
 
 "'Well, my esteemed and excellent friend, and how may 
 your intelligence be ? ' So Rastignac addressed the stranger 
 as he sat down at a neighboring table. 
 
 " ' Neither well nor ill ; I am overwhelmed with work. I 
 have all the necessary materials for some very curious historical 
 memoirs in my hands, and I cannot find any one to whom I 
 can ascribe them. It worries me, for I shall have to be quick 
 about it. Memoirs are falling out of fashion.' 
 
 " ' What are the memoirs contemporaneous, ancient, or 
 memoirs of the court, or what ? ' 
 
 " ' They relate to the Necklace affair.' 
 
 " ' Now, isn't that a coincidence? ' said Rastignac, turning 
 to me and laughing. He looked again to the literary specu- 
 lator, and said, indicating me 
 
 " ' This is M. de Valentin, one of my friends, whom I must 
 introduce to you as one of our future literary celebrities. He 
 had formerly an aunt, a marquise, much in favor once at court, 
 and for about two years he has been writing a Royalist history 
 of the Revolution.' 
 
 "Then, bending over this singular man of business, he 
 went on 
 
 * " Here one may compose himself."
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 127 
 
 " ' He is a man of talent, and a simpleton that will do your 
 memoirs for you, in his aunt's name, for a hundred crowns a 
 volume. 1 
 
 " ' It's a bargain,' said the other, adjusting his cravat. 
 ' Waiter, my oysters. ' 
 
 " ' Yes, but you must give me twenty-five louis as commis- 
 sion, and you will pay him in advance for each volume,' said 
 Rastignac. 
 
 " ' No, no. He shall only have fifty crowns on account, 
 
 and then I shall be sure of having my manuscript punctually.' 
 
 " Rastignac repeated this business conversation to me in 
 
 low tones; and then, without giving me any voice in the 
 
 matter, he replied 
 
 "'We agree to your proposal. When can we call upon 
 you to arrange the affair? ' 
 
 "'Oh, well! Come and dine here to-morrow at seven 
 o'clock.' 
 
 "We rose. Rastignac flung some money to the waiter, put 
 the bill in his pocket, and we went out. I was quite stupefied 
 by the flippancy and ease with which he had sold my vener- 
 able aunt, la Marquise de Montbauron. 
 
 " * I would sooner take ship for the Brazils, and give the 
 Indians lessons in algebra, though I don't know a word of it, 
 than tarnish my family name.' 
 " Rastignac burst out laughing. 
 
 " ' How dense you are! Take the fifty crowns in the first 
 instance, and write the memoirs. When you have finished 
 them, you will decline to publish them in your aunt's name, 
 imbecile ! Madame de Montbauron, with her hooped petti- 
 coat, her rank and beauty, rouge and slippers, and her death 
 upon the scaffold, is worth a great deal more than six hundred 
 francs. And then, if the trade will not give your aunt her 
 due, some old adventurer, or some shady countess or other, 
 will be found to put her name to the memoirs.' 
 
 " ' Oh,' I groaned ; ' why did I quit the blameless life in
 
 128 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 my garret ? This world has aspects that are very vilely dis- 
 honorable.' 
 
 " ' Yes,' said Rastignac, " that is all very poetical, but this 
 is a matter of business. What a child you are ! Now, listen 
 to me. As to your work, the public will decide upon it ; and 
 as for my literary middle-man, hasn't he devoted eight v years 
 of his life to obtaining a footing in the book-trade, and paid 
 heavily for his experience ? You divide the money and the 
 labor of the book with him very unequally, but isn't yours the 
 better part ? Twenty-five louis means as much to you as a 
 thousand francs does to him. Come, you can write historical 
 memoirs, a work of art such as never was, since Diderot once 
 wrote six sermons for a hundred crowns ? ' 
 
 " 'After all,' I said, in agitation, 'I cannot choose but do 
 it. So, my dear friend, my thanks are due to you. I shall 
 be quite rich with twenty-five louis.' 
 
 " ' Richer than you think,' he laughed. ' If I have my com- 
 mission from Finot in this matter, it goes to you, can't you 
 see? Now let us go to the Bois de Boulogne,' he said; 'we 
 shall see your Countess there, and I will show you the pretty 
 little widow that I am to marry a charming woman, an 
 Alsacienne, rather plump. She reads Kant, Schiller, Jean 
 Paul, and a host of lachrymose books. She has a mania for 
 continually asking my opinion, and I have to look as if I 
 entered into all this German sensibility, and to know a pack 
 of ballads drugs, all of them, that my doctor absolutely 
 prohibits. As yet I have not been able to wean her from her 
 literary enthusiasms ; she sheds torrents of tears as she reads 
 Goethe, and I have to weep a little myself to please her, for 
 she has an income of fifty thousand livres, my dear boy, and 
 the prettiest little hand and foot in the world. Oh, if she 
 would only say my angel and grumbler instead of my flute 
 and my fumbler, she would be perfection ! ' 
 
 "We saw the Countess, radiant amid the splendors of her 
 equipage. The coquette bowed very graciously to us both,
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 129 
 
 and the smile she gave me seemed to me to be divine and full 
 of love. I was very happy ; I fancied myself beloved ; I had 
 money, a wealth of love in my heart, and my troubles were 
 over. I was light-hearted, blithe, and content. I found my 
 friend's lady-love charming. Earth and air and heaven all 
 nature seemed to reflect Fcedora's smile for me. 
 
 "As we returned through the Champs-Elysees, we paid a 
 visit to Rastignac's hatter and tailor. Thanks to the ' Neck- 
 lace,' my insignificant peace-footing was to end, and I made 
 formidable preparations for a campaign. Henceforward I 
 need not shrink from a contest with the spruce and fashionable 
 young men who made Fcedora's circle. I went home, locked 
 myself in, and stood by my dormer window, outwardly calm 
 enough, but in reality I bade a last good-bye to the roofs 
 without. I began to live in the future, rehearsed my life 
 drama, and discounted love and its happiness. Ah, how 
 stormy life can grow to be within the four walls of a garret ! 
 The soul within us is like a fairy ; she turns straw into dia- 
 monds for us ; and for us, at a touch of her wand, enchanted 
 palaces arise, as flowers in the meadows spring up towards the 
 sun. 
 
 " Towards noon, next day, Pauline knocked gently at my 
 door, and brought me who could guess it ? a note from 
 Fcedora. The Countess asked me to take her to the Luxem- 
 bourg, and to go thence to see with her the Museum and 
 Jardin des Plantes. 
 
 " ' The man is waiting for an answer,' said Pauline, after 
 quietly waiting for a moment. 
 
 " I hastily scrawled my acknowledgments, and Pauline 
 took the note. I changed my dress. When my toilette was 
 ended, and I looked at myself with some complaisance, an 
 icy shiver ran through me as I thought 
 
 " 'Will Fcedora walk or drive? Will it rain or shine? 
 No matter, though,' I said to myself; ' whichever it is, can 
 one ever reckon with feminine caprice ! She will have no
 
 130 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 money about her, and will want to give a dozen francs to some 
 little Savoyard because his rags are picturesque.' 
 
 "I had not a brass farthing, and should have no money till 
 the evening came. How dearly a poet pays for the intellec- 
 tual prowess that method and toil have brought him, at such 
 crises of our youth ! Innumerable painfully vivid thoughts 
 pierced me like barbs. I looked out of my window ; the 
 weather was very unsettled. If things fell out badly, I might 
 easily have a cab for the day ; but would not the fear lie on 
 me every moment that I might not meet Finot in the evening? 
 I felt too weak to endure such fears in the midst of my felicity. 
 Though I felt sure that I should find nothing, I began a grand 
 search through my room ; I looked for imaginary coins in the 
 recesses of my mattress; I hunted about everywhere I even 
 shook out my old boots. A nervous fever seized me ; I 
 looked with wild eyes at the furniture when I had ransacked 
 it all. Will you understand, I wonder, the excitement that 
 possessed me when, plunged deep in the listlessness of de- 
 spair, I opened my writing-table drawer, and found a fair and 
 splendid ten-franc piece that shone like a rising star, new and 
 sparkling, and slily hiding in a cranny between two boards? 
 I did not try to account for its previous reserve and the cruelty 
 of which it had been guilty in thus lying hidden ; I kissed it 
 for a friend faithful in adversity, and hailed it with a cry that 
 found an echo, and made me turn sharply, to find Pauline 
 with a face grown white. 
 
 " ' I thought,' she faltered, ' that you had hurt yourself ! 
 
 The man who brought the letter ' (she broke off as if 
 
 something smothered her voice). ' But mother has paid him,' 
 she added, and flitted away like a wayward, capricious child. 
 Poor little one ! I wanted her to share my happiness. I 
 seemed to have all the happiness in the world within me just 
 then ; and I would fain have returned to the unhappy, all that 
 I felt as if I had stolen from them. 
 
 " The intuitive perception of adversity is sound for the
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 131 
 
 most part ; the Countess had sent away her carriage. One 
 of those freaks that pretty women can scarcely explain to 
 themselves had determined her to go on foot, by way of the 
 boulevards, to the Jardin des Plantes. 
 
 " ' It will rain,' I told her, and it pleased her to contra- 
 dict me. 
 
 "As it fell out, the weather was fine while we went through 
 the Luxembourg ; when we came out, some drops fell from a 
 great cloud, whose progress I had watched uneasily, and we 
 took a cab. At the Museum I was about to dismiss the vehi- 
 cle, and Foedora (what agonies !) asked me not to do so. But 
 it was like a dream in broad daylight for me, to chat with 
 her, to wander in the Jardin des Plantes, to stray down the 
 shady alleys, to feel her hand upon my arm ; the secret trans- 
 ports repressed in me were reduced, no doubt, to a fixed and 
 foolish smile upon my lips ; there was something unreal about 
 it all. Yet in all her movements, however alluring, whether we 
 stood or whether we walked, there was nothing either tender 
 or lover-like. When I tried to share in a measure the action 
 of movement prompted by her life, I became aware of a 
 check, or of something strange in her that I cannot explain, 
 of an inner activity concealed in her nature. There is no 
 suavity about the movements of women who have no soul 
 in them. Our wills were opposed, and we did not keep step 
 together. Words are wanting to describe this outward dis- 
 sonance between two beings ; we are not accustomed to read 
 a thought in a movement. We instinctively feel this phe- 
 nomenon of our nature, but it cannot be expressed. 
 
 "I did not dissect my sensations during those violent 
 seizures of passion," Raphael went on, after a moment of 
 silence, as if he were replying to an objection raised by him- 
 self. " I did not analyze my pleasures nor count my heart- 
 beats then, as a miser scrutinizes and weighs his gold-pieces. 
 No ; experience sheds its melancholy light over the events of 
 the past to-day, and memory brings these pictures back, as
 
 132 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 the sea- waves in fair weather cast up fragment after fragment 
 of the debris of a wrecked vessel upon the strand. 
 
 " ' It is in your power to render me a rather important 
 service,' said the Countess, looking at me in an embarrassed 
 way. ' After confiding to you my aversion for lovers, I feel 
 myself more at liberty to entreat your good offices in the 
 name of friendship. Will there not be very much more merit 
 in obliging me to-day ? ' she asked, laughing. 
 
 " I looked at her in anguish. Her manner was coaxing, 
 but in no wise affectionate ; she felt nothing for me ; she 
 seemed to be playing a part, and I thought her a consummate 
 actress. Then all at once my hopes awoke once more, at a 
 single look and word. Yet if reviving love expressed itself 
 in my eyes, she bore its light without any change in the clear- 
 ness of her own ; they seemed, like a tiger's eyes, to have a 
 sheet of metal behind them. I used to hate her in such 
 moments. 
 
 "'The influence of the Due de Navarreins would be 
 very useful to me, with an all-powerful person in Russia,' 
 she went on, persuasion in every modulation of her voice, 
 ' whose intervention I need in order to have justice done me 
 in a matter that concerns both my fortune and my posi- 
 tion in the world, that is to say, the recognition of my 
 marriage by the Emperor. Is not the Due de Navarreins a 
 cousin of yours ? A letter from him would settle everything. 
 
 " ' I am yours,' I answered ; 'command me.' 
 
 " ' You are very nice,' she said, pressing my hand. ' Come 
 and have dinner with me, and I will tell you everything, as if 
 you were my confessor.' 
 
 "So this discreet, suspicious woman, who had never been 
 heard to speak a word about her affairs to any one, was going 
 to consult me. 
 
 " ' Oh, how dear to me is this silence that you have imposed 
 on me ! ' I cried, ' but I would rather have had some sharper 
 ordeal still.' And she smiled upon the intoxication in my
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 133 
 
 eyes ; she did not reject my admiration in any way ; surely 
 she loved me ! 
 
 " Fortunately, my purse held just enough to satisfy the 
 cabman. The day spent in her house, alone with her, was 
 delicious; it was the first time that I had seen her in this way. 
 Hitherto we had always been kept apart by the presence 
 of others, and by her formal politeness and reserved manners, 
 even during her magnificent dinners; but now it was as if 
 I lived beneath her own roof I had her all to myself, so to 
 speak. My wandering fancy broke down barriers, arranged 
 the events of life to my liking, and steeped me in happiness 
 and love. I seemed to myself her husband, I liked to watch 
 her busied with little details ; it was a pleasure to me even 
 to see her take off her bonnet and shawl. She left me alone 
 for a while, and came back, charming, with her hair newly 
 arranged ; and this dainty change of toilette had been made 
 for me ! 
 
 " During the dinner she lavished attention upon me, and 
 put charm without end into those numberless trifles to all 
 seeming, that make up half of our existence nevertheless. 
 As we sat together before a crackling fire, on silken cushions, 
 surrounded by the most desirable creations of Oriental 
 luxury ; as I saw this woman whose famous beauty made 
 every heart beat, so close to me ; an unapproachable woman 
 who was talking and bringing all her powers of coquetry to 
 bear upon me ; then my blissful pleasure rose almost to the 
 point of suffering. To my vexation, I recollected the impor- 
 tant business to be concluded ; I determined to go to keep the 
 appointment made for me for this evening. 
 
 "'So soon ? ' she said, seeing me take my hat. 
 
 " She loved me, then ! or I thought so at least, from the 
 bland tones in which those two words were uttered. I would 
 then have bartered a couple of years of life for every hour she 
 chose to grant me, and so prolong my ecstasy. My happi- 
 ness was increased by the extent of the money I sacrificed. It
 
 134 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 was midnight before she dismissed me. But on the morrow, 
 for all that, my heroism cost me a good many remorseful 
 pangs ; I was afraid the affair of the memoirs, now of such 
 importance for me, might have fallen through, and rushed off 
 to Rastignac. We found the nominal author of my future 
 labors just getting up. 
 
 "Finot read over a brief agreement to me, in which noth- 
 ing whatever was said about my aunt, and when it had 
 been signed he paid me down fifty crowns, and the three 
 of us breakfasted together. I had only thirty francs left 
 over, when I had paid for my new hat, for sixty tickets at 
 thirty sous each, and settled my debts ; but for some days 
 to come the difficulties of living were removed. If I had 
 but listened to Rastignac, I might have had abundance by 
 frankly adopting the ' English system.' He really wanted to 
 establish my credit by setting me to raise loans, on the theory 
 that borrowing is the basis of credit. To hear him talk, the 
 future was the largest and most secure kind of capital in the 
 world. My future luck was hypothecated for the benefit of 
 my creditors, and he gave my custom to his tailor, an artist, 
 and a young man's tailor, who was to leave me in peace until 
 I married. 
 
 "The monastic life of study that I had led for three years 
 past ended on this day. I frequented Foedora's house very 
 diligently, and tried to outshine the heroes or the swaggerers to 
 be found in her circle. When I believed that I had left 
 poverty forever behind me, I regained my freedom of mind, 
 humiliated my rivals, and was looked upon as a very attrac- 
 tive, dazzling, and irresistible sort of man. But acute folks 
 used to say with regard to me, 'A fellow as clever as that will 
 keep all his enthusiasms in his brain,' and charitably extolled 
 my faculties at the expense of my feelings. ' Isn't he lucky not 
 to be in love !' they exclaimed. 'If he were could he be so 
 light-hearted and animated !' Yet in Fcedora's presence I 
 was as dull as love could make me. When I was alone with
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 135 
 
 her I had not a word to say, or if I did speak I renounced 
 love; and I affected gaiety but ill, like a courtier who has a 
 a bitter mortification to hide. I tried in every way to make 
 myself indispensable in her life, and necessary to her vanity 
 and to her comfort ; I was a plaything at her pleasure, a slave 
 always at her side. And when I had frittered away the day 
 in this way, I went back to my work at night, securing merely 
 two or three hours' sleep in the early morning. 
 
 "But I had not, like Rastignac, the 'English system' at 
 my finger-ends, and I very soon saw myself without a penny. 
 I fell at once into that precarious way of life which industri- 
 ously hides cold and miserable depths beneath an elusive sur- 
 face of luxury; I was a coxcomb without conquests, a penni- 
 less fop, a nameless gallant. The old sufferings were renewed, 
 but less sharply ; no doubt I was growing used to the painful 
 crises. Very often my sole diet consisted of the scanty pro- 
 vision of cakes and tea that is offered in drawing-rooms, or 
 one of the Countess' great dinners must sustain me for two 
 whole days. I used all my time, and exerted every effort and 
 all my powers of observation, to penetrate the imperturbable 
 character of Fcedora. Alternate hope and despair had swayed 
 my opinions; for me she was sometimes the tenderest, some- 
 times the most unfeeling of women. But these transitions 
 from joy to sadness became unendurable ; I sought to end the 
 horrible conflict within me by extinguishing love. By the 
 light of warning gleams my soul sometimes recognized the 
 gulfs that lay between us. The Countess confinmed all my fears ; 
 I had never yet detected any tear in her eyes ; an affecting 
 scene in a play left her smiling and unmoved. All her instincts 
 were selfish ; she could not divine another's joy or sorrow. 
 She had made a fool of me, in fact. 
 
 " I had rejoiced over a sacrifice to make for her, and almost 
 humiliated myself in seeking out my kinsman, the Due de 
 Navarreins, a selfish man who was ashamed of my poverty, 
 and had injured me too deeply not to hate me. He received
 
 136 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 me with the polite coldness that makes every word and gesture 
 seem an insult ; he looked so ill at ease that I pitied him. I 
 blushed for this pettiness amid grandeur, and penuriousness 
 surrounded by luxury. He began to talk to me of his heavy 
 losses in the three per cents., and then I told him the object 
 of my visit. The change in his manners, hitherto glacial, 
 which now gradually became affectionate, disgusted me. 
 
 " Well, he called upon the Countess, and completely eclipsed 
 me with her. 
 
 "On him Fcedora exercised spells and witcheries unheard 
 of; she drew him into her power, and arranged her whole 
 mysterious business with him ; I was left out, I heard not a 
 word of it ; she had made a tool of me ! She did not seem 
 to be aware of my existence while my cousin was present ; 
 she received me less cordially perhaps than when I was first 
 presented to her. One evening she chose to mortify me before 
 the Duke by a look, a gesture, that it is useless to try to ex- 
 press in words. I went away with tears in my eyes, planning 
 terrible and outrageous schemes of vengeance without end. 
 
 " I often used to go with her to the theatre. Love utterly 
 absorbed me as I sat beside her ; as I looked at her I used to 
 give myself up to the pleasure of listening to the music, put- 
 ting all my soul into the double joy of love and of hearing 
 every emotion of my heart translated into musical cadences. 
 It was my passion that filled the air and the stage, that was 
 triumphant everywhere, but with my mistress. Then I would 
 take Fcedora's hand. I used to scan her features and her 
 eyes, imploring of them some indication that one blended 
 feeling possessed us both, seeking for the sudden harmony 
 awakened by the power of music, which makes our souls vibrate 
 in unison ; but her hand was passive, her eyes said nothing. 
 
 "When the fire that burned in me glowed too fiercely from 
 the face I turned upon her, she met it with that studied smile 
 of hers, the conventional expression that sits on the lips of 
 every portrait in every exhibition. She was not listening to
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 137 
 
 the music. The divine pages of Rossini, Cimarosa, or Zingarelli 
 called up no emotion, gave no voice to any poetry in her life ; 
 her soul was a desert. 
 
 " Fcedora presented herself as a drama before a drama. 
 Her lorgnette traveled restlessly over the boxes ; she was rest- 
 less too beneath the apparent calm ; fashion tyrannized over 
 her; her box, her bonnet, her carriage, her own personality 
 absorbed her entirely. My merciless knowledge thoroughly 
 tore away all my illusions. If good breeding consists in self-for- 
 getfulness and consideration for others, in constantly showing 
 gentleness in voice and bearing, in pleasing others, and in 
 making them content in themselves, all traces of her plebeian 
 origin were not yet obliterated in Fredora, in spite of her 
 cleverness. Her self-forgetfulness was a sham, her manners 
 were not innate but painfully acquired, her politeness was 
 rather subservient. And yet for those she singled out, her 
 honeyed words expressed natural kindness, her pretentious ex- 
 aggeration was exalted enthusiasm. I alone had scrutinized 
 her grimacings, and stripped away the thin rind that sufficed to 
 conceal her real nature from the world ; her trickery no longer 
 deceived me ; I had sounded the depths of that feline nature. 
 I blushed for her when some donkey or other flattered and 
 complimented her. And yet I loved her through it all ! I 
 hoped that her snows would melt with the warmth of a poet's 
 love. If I could only have made her heart capable of a 
 woman's tenderness, if I could have made her feel all the 
 greatness that lies in devotion, then I should have seen her 
 perfected, she would have been an angel. I loved her as a man, 
 a lover, and an artist ; if it had been necessary not to love 
 her so that I might win her, some cool-headed coxcomb, some 
 self-possessed calculator would perhaps have had the advantage 
 over me. She was so vain and sophisticated, that the language 
 of vanity would appeal to her; she would have allowed her- 
 self to be taken in the toils of an intrigue ; a hard, cold nature 
 would have gained a complete ascendency over her. Keen
 
 138 THE WILD ASV SKIN. 
 
 grief had pierced me to my very soul, as she unconsciously 
 revealed her absolute love of self. I seemed to see her as she 
 one day would be, alone in the world, with no one to whom 
 she could stretch her hand, with no friendly eyes for her own 
 to meet and rest upon. I was bold enough to set this before 
 her one evening ; I painted in vivid colors her lonely, sad, 
 deserted old age. Her comment on this prospect of so ter- 
 rible a revenge of thwarted nature was horrible. 
 
 " ' I shall always have money," she said ; ' and with money 
 we can always inspire such sentiments as are necessary for our 
 comfort in those about us.' 
 
 " I went away confounded by the arguments of luxury, by 
 the reasoning of this woman, of the world in which she lived; 
 and blamed myself for my infatuated idolatry. I myself had 
 not loved Pauline because she was poor ; and had not the 
 wealthy Foedora aright to repulse Raphael? Conscience is our 
 unerring judge until we finally stifle it. A specious voice said 
 within me, ' Fcedora is neither attracted to nor repulses any 
 one ; she has her liberty, but once upon a time she sold her- 
 self to the Russian count, her husband or her lover, for gold. 
 But temptation is certain to enter into her life. Wait till that 
 moment comes ! ' She lived remote from humanity, in a 
 sphere apart, in a hell or a heaven of her own ; she was 
 neither frail nor virtuous. This feminine enigma in embroid- 
 eries and cashmeres had brought into play every emotion of 
 the human heart in me pride, ambition, love, curiosity. 
 
 " There was a craze just then for praising a play at a little 
 Boulevard theatre, prompted perhaps by a wish to appear 
 original that besets us all, or due to some freak of fashion. 
 The Countess showed some signs of a wish to see the floured 
 face of tke actor who had so delighted several people of taste, 
 and I obtained the honor of taking her to a first representa- 
 tion of some wretched farce or other. A box scarcely cost 
 five francs, but I had not a brass farthing. I was but half- 
 way through the volume of memoirs; I dared not beg for
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 139 
 
 assistance of Finot, and Rastignac, my providence, was away. 
 These constant perplexities were the bane of my life. 
 
 " We had once come out of the theatre when it was raining 
 heavily ; Fcedora had called a cab for me before I could 
 escape from her show of concern ; she would not admit any 
 of my excuses my liking for wet weather, and my wish to go 
 to the gaming-table. She did not read my poverty in my em- 
 barrassed attitude, nor in my forced jests. My eyes would 
 redden, but she did not understand a look. A young man's 
 life is at the mercy of the strangest whims ! At every 
 revolution of the wheels during the journey, thoughts that 
 burned stirred in my heart. I tried to pull up a plank from 
 the bottom of the vehicle, hoping to slip through the hole 
 into the street ; but finding insuperable obstacles I burst 
 into a fit of laughter, and then sat stupefied in calm dejec- 
 tion, like a man in the pillory. When I reached my lodg- 
 ing, Pauline broke in through my first stammering words 
 with 
 
 " ' If you haven't any money ? ' 
 
 "Ah, the music of Rossini was as nothing compared with 
 those words. But to return to the performance at the 
 Funambules. 
 
 " I thought of pawning the circlet of gold round my 
 mother's portrait in order to escort the Countess. Although 
 the pawnbroker loomed in my thoughts as one of the doors 
 of a convinct's prison, I would rather myself have carried my 
 bed thither than have begged for alms. There is something 
 so painful in the expression of a man who asks money of you ! 
 There are loans that mulct us of our self-respect, just as some 
 rebuffs from a friend's lips sweep away our last illusion. 
 
 "Pauline was working ; her mother had gone to bed. I 
 flung a stealthy glance over the bed ; the curtains were drawn 
 back a little ; Madame Gaudin was in a deep sleep, I thought, 
 when I saw her quiet, sallow profile outlined against the 
 pillow.
 
 140 THE WILD ASS' SKfN. 
 
 "'You are in trouble?' Pauline said, dipping her brush 
 into the coloring. 
 
 " 'It is in your power to do me a great service, my dear 
 child,' I answered. 
 
 "The gladness in her eyes frightened me. 
 
 " ' Is it possible that she loves me ? ' I thought. ' Pauline,' 
 I began. I went and sat near to her, so as to study her. My 
 tones had been so searching that she read my thought ; her 
 eyes fell, and I scrutinized her face. It was so pure and 
 frank that I fancied I could see as clearly into her heart as 
 into my own. 
 
 " ' Do you love me ? ' I asked. 
 
 " ' A little, passionately not a bit,' she cried. 
 
 "Then she did not love me. Her jesting tones, and a 
 little gleeful movement that escaped her, expressed nothing 
 beyond a girlish, blithe goodwill. I told her about my dis- 
 tress and the predicament in which I found myself, and asked 
 her to help me. 
 
 " ' You do not wish to go to the pawnbroker's yourself, M. 
 Raphael,' she answered, ' and yet you would send me ! ' 
 
 " I blushed in confusion at the child's reasoning. She took 
 my hand in hers as if she wanted to compensate for this home- 
 truth by her light touch upon it. 
 
 " ' Oh, I would willingly go,' she said, ' but it is not neces- 
 sary. I found two five-franc pieces at the back of the piano, 
 that had slipped without your knowledge between the frame 
 and the keyboard, and I laid them on your table.' 
 
 " 'You will soon be coming into some money, M. Raphael,' 
 said the kind mother, showing her face between the curtains, 
 * and I can easily lend you a few crowns meanwhile.' 
 
 " ' Oh, Pauline ! ' I cried, as I pressed her hand, ' how I 
 wish that I were rich ! ' 
 
 " ' Bah ! why should you ? ' she said petulantly. Her 
 hand shook in mine with the throbbing of her pulse; she 
 snatched it away, and looked at both of mine.
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 141 
 
 " ' You will marry a rich wife,' she said, ' but she will give 
 you a great deal of trouble. Ah, Dieu ! she will be your 
 death, I am sure of it.' 
 
 " In her exclamation there was something like belief in her 
 mother's absurd superstitions. 
 
 " ' You are very credulous, Pauline ! ' 
 
 " ' The woman whom you will love is going to kill you 
 there is no doubt of it,' she said, looking at me with alarm. 
 
 " She took up her brush again and dipped it in the color; 
 her great agitation was evident ; she looked at me no longer. 
 I was ready to give credence just then to superstitious fancies ; 
 no man is utterly wretched so long as he is superstitious ; 
 a belief of that kind is often in reality a hope. 
 
 " I found that those two magnificent five-franc pieces were 
 lying, in fact, upon my table when I reached my room. 
 During the first confused thoughts of early slumber, I tried to 
 audi f my accounts so as to explain this unhoped-for windfall ; 
 but I lost myself in useless calculations, and slept. Just as I 
 was leaving my room to engage a box the next morning, 
 Pauline came to see me. 
 
 " ' Perhaps your ten francs is not enough,' said the amiable, 
 kind-hearted girl ; ' my mother told me to offer you this 
 money. Take it, please, take it ! ' 
 
 " She laid three crowns upon the table, and tried to escape, 
 but I would not let her go. Admiration dried the tears that 
 sprang to my eyes. 
 
 " ' You are an angel, Pauline,' I said. ' It is not the loan 
 that touches me so much as the delicacy with which it is 
 offered. I used to wish for a rich wife, a fashionable woman 
 of rank ; and now, alas ! I would rather possess millions, and 
 find some girl, as poor as you are, with a generous nature like 
 your own ; and I would renounce a fatal passion which will 
 kill me. Perhaps what you told me will come true.' 
 
 "'That is enough,' she said, and fled away; the fresh 
 trills of her bird -like voice rang up the staircase.' 
 10
 
 142 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 '' ' She is very happy in not yet knowing love,' I said to 
 myself, thinking of the torments I had endured for many 
 months past. 
 
 " Pauline's fifteen francs were invaluable to me. Foedora, 
 thinking of the stifling odor of the crowded place where 
 we were to spend several hours, was sorry that she had not 
 brought a bouquet ; I went in search of flowers for her, as 
 I had laid already my life and my fate at her feet. With a 
 pleasure in which compunction mingled, I gave her a bouquet. 
 I learned from its 'price the extravagance of superficial gal- 
 lantry in the world. But very soon she complained of the 
 heavy scent of a Mexican jessamine. The interior of the 
 theatre, the bare bench on which she was to sit, filled her 
 with intolerable disgust ; she upbraided me for bringing her 
 there. Although she sat beside me, she wished to go, 
 and she went. I had spent sleepless nights, and squandered 
 two months of my life for her, and I could not please her. 
 Never had that tormenting spirit been more unfeeling or more 
 fascinating. 
 
 "I sat beside her in the cramped back seat of the vehicle ; 
 all the way I could feel her breath on me and the contact of 
 her perfumed glove ; I saw distinctly all her exceeding beauty ; 
 I inhaled a vague scent of orris-root ; so wholly a woman she 
 was, with no touch of womanhood. Just then a sudden 
 gleam of light lit up the depths of this mysterious life for me. 
 I thought all at once of a book just published by a poet, a 
 genuine conception of the artist, in the shape of the statue of 
 Polycletus. 
 
 " I seemed to see that monstrous creation, at one time an 
 officer, breaking in a spirited horse; at another, a girl, who 
 gives herself up to her toilette and breaks her lovers' hearts; 
 or, again, a false lover driving a timid and gentle maid to 
 despair. Unable to analyze Fcedora by any other process, I 
 told her this fanciful story; but no hint of her resemblance 
 to this poetry of the impossible crossed her it simply diverted
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 143 
 
 her ; she was like a child over a story from the ' Arabian 
 Nights.' 
 
 " ' Fcedora must be shielded by some talisman,' I thought 
 to myself as I went back, 'or she could not resist the love ot 
 a man of my age, the infectious fever of that splendid malady 
 of the soul. Is Foedora, like Lady Delacour, a prey to a 
 cancer? Her life is certainly an unnatural one.' 
 
 " I shuddered at the thought. Then I decided on a plan, 
 at once the wildest and the most rational that lover ever 
 dreamed of. I would study this woman from a physical 
 point of view, as I had already studied her intellectually, and 
 to this end I made up my mind to spend a night in her room 
 without her knowledge. This project preyed upon me as a 
 thirst for revenge gnaws at the heart of a Corsican monk. 
 This is how I carried it out. On the days when Fcedora re- 
 ceived, her rooms were far too crowded for the hall-porter to 
 keep the balance even between goers and comers ; I could 
 remain in the house, I felt sure, without causing a scandal in 
 it, and I waited the Countess' coming soiree with impatience. 
 As I dressed I put a little English penknife into my waistcoat 
 pocket, instead of a poniard. That literary implement, if 
 found upon me, could awaken no suspicion, but I knew not 
 whither my romantic resolution might lead, and I wished to 
 be prepared. 
 
 " As soon as the rooms began to fill, I entered the bedroom 
 and examined the arrangements. The inner and outer shut- 
 ters were closed ; this was a good beginning ; and as the 
 waiting-maid might come to draw back the curtains that hung 
 over the windows, I pulled them together. I was running 
 great risks in venturing to manoeuvre beforehand in this way, 
 but I had accepted the situation, and had deliberately reck- 
 oned with its dangers. 
 
 "About midnight I hid myself in the embrasure of the 
 window. I tried to scramble on to a ledge of the wainscot- 
 ing, hanging on by the fastening of the shutters with my
 
 144 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 back against the wall, in such a position that my feet could 
 not be visible. When I had carefully considered my points 
 of support, and the space between me and the curtains, I had 
 become sufficiently acquainted with all the difficulties of my 
 position to stay in it without fear of detection if undisturbed 
 by cramp, coughs, or sneezings. To avoid useless fatigue, I 
 remained standing until the critical moment, when I must 
 hang suspended like a spider in its web. The white-watered 
 silk and muslin of the curtains spread before me in great 
 pleats like organ-pipes. With my penknife I cut loop-holes 
 in them through which I could see. 
 
 " I heard vague murmurs from the salons, the laughter and 
 the louder tones of the speakers. The smothered commotion 
 and vague uproar lessened by slow degrees. One man and 
 another came for his hat from the Countess' chest of drawers, 
 close to where I stood. I shivered, if the curtains were dis- 
 turbed, at the thought of the mischances consequent on the 
 confused and hasty investigations made by the men in a hurry 
 to depart, who were rummaging everywhere. When I experi- 
 enced no misfortunes of this kind, I argued well of my enter- 
 prise. An old wooer of Fcedora's came for the last hat ; he 
 thought himself quite alone, looked at the bed, and heaved a 
 great sigh, accompanied by some inaudible exclamation, into 
 which he threw sufficient energy. In the boudoir close by, 
 the Countess, finding only some five or six intimate acquaint- 
 ances about her, proposed tea. The scandals for which exist- 
 ing society has reserved the little faculty of belief that it 
 retains, mingled with epigrams and trenchant witticisms, and 
 the clatter of cups and spoons. Rastignac drew roars of 
 laughter by his merciless sarcasms at the expense of my 
 rivals. 
 
 " ' M. de Rastignac is a man with whom it is better not to 
 quarrel,' said the Countess, laughing. 
 
 " 'I am quite of that opinion,' was his candid reply. 'I 
 have always been right about my aversions and my friendships
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 145 
 
 as well,' he added. ' Perhaps my enemies are quite as useful 
 to me as my friends. I have made a particular study of 
 modern phraseology, and of the natural craft that is used in 
 all attack or defence. Official eloquence is one of our perfect 
 social products. 
 
 " ' One of your friends is not clever, so you speak of his 
 integrity and his candor. Another's work is heavy ; you intro- 
 duce it as a piece of conscientious labor ; and if the book is 
 ill written, you extol the ideas it contains. Such an one is 
 treacherous and fickle, slips through your fingers every moment ; 
 bah ! he is attractive, bewitching, he is delightful ! Suppose 
 they are enemies, you fling every one, dead or alive, in 
 their teeth. You reverse your phraseology for their benefit, 
 and you are as keen in detecting their faults as you were 
 before adroit in bringing out the virtues of your friends. 
 This way of using the mental lorgnette is the secret of con- 
 versation nowadays, and the whole art of the complete courtier. 
 If you neglect it, you might as well go out as an unarmed 
 knight-banneret to fight against men in armor. And I make 
 use of it, and even abuse it at times. So we are respected 
 I, my friends, and, moreover, my sword is quite as sharp as 
 my tongue.' 
 
 "One of Fcedora's most fervid worshippers, whose pre- 
 sumption was notorious, and who even made it contribute to 
 his success, took up the glove thrown down so scornfully by 
 Rastignac. He began an unmeasured eulogy of me, my per- 
 formances, and my character. Rastignac had overlooked 
 this method of detraction. His sarcastic encomiums misled 
 the Countess, who sacrificed without mercy ; she betrayed my 
 secrets, and derided my pretentions and my hopes, to divert 
 her friends. 
 
 "'There is a future before him,' said Rastignac. 'Some 
 day he may be in a position to take a cruel revenge ; his talents 
 are at least equal to his courage ; and I should consider those 
 who attack him very rash, for he has a good memory '
 
 146 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 "'And writes memoirs,' put in the Countess, who seemed 
 to object to the deep silence that prevailed. 
 
 "'Memoirs of a sham countess, madame,' replied Rastig- 
 nac. 'Another sort of courage is needed to write that sort 
 of thing.' 
 
 " ' I give him credit for plenty of courage/ she answered; 
 'he is faithful to me.' 
 
 "I was greatly tempted to show myself suddenly among 
 the railers, like the shade of Banquo in Macbeth. I should 
 have lost the Countess ; but I had a friend. But love inspired 
 me all at once with one of those treacherous and fallacious 
 subtleties that it can use to soothe all our pangs. 
 
 "If Fcedora loved me, I thought, she would be sure to dis- 
 guise her feelings by some mocking jest. How often the 
 heart protests against a lie on the lips ! 
 
 " Well, very soon my audacious rival, left alone with the 
 Countess, rose to go. 
 
 " ' What ! already ? ' asked she in a coaxing voice that set rny 
 heart beating. ' Will you not give me a few more minutes ? 
 Have you nothing more to say to me ? will you never sacrifice 
 any of your pleasures for me ? ' 
 
 " He went away. 
 
 " ' Ah ! ' she yawned ; ' how very tiresome they all are ! ' 
 
 " She pulled a cord energetically till the sound of a bell 
 rang through the place ; then, humming a few notes of " Pria 
 che spunti," the Countess entered her room. No one had ever 
 heard her sing ; her muteness had called forth the wildest 
 explanations. She had promised her first lover, so it was 
 said, who had been held captive by her talent, and whose 
 jealousy over her stretched beyond his grave, that she would 
 never allow others to experience a happiness that he wished to 
 be his and his alone. 
 
 " I exerted every power of my soul to catch the sounds. 
 Higher and higher rose the notes ; Fcedora's life seemed to 
 dilate within her ; her throat poured forth all its richest tones;
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 147 
 
 something well-nigh divine entered into the melody. There 
 was a bright purity and clearness of tone in the Countess* 
 voice, a thrilling harmony which reached the heart and stirred 
 its pulses. Musicians are seldom unemotional ; a woman who 
 could sing like that must know how to love indeed. Her 
 beautiful voice made one more puzzle in a woman mysterious 
 enough before. I beheld her then as plainly as I see you at 
 this moment. She seemed to listen to herself, to experience 
 a secret rapture of her own ; she felt, as it were, an ecstacy 
 like that of love. 
 
 "She stood before the hearth during the execution of the 
 principal theme of the rondo ; and when she ceased her face 
 changed. She looked tired ; her features seemed to alter. 
 She had laid the mask aside ; her part as an actress was over. 
 Yet the faded look that came over her beautiful face, a result 
 either of this performance or of the evening's fatigues, had its 
 charms, too. 
 
 " ' This is her real self,' I thought. 
 
 " She set her foot on a bronze bar of the fender as if to 
 warm it, took off her gloves, and drew over her head the gold 
 chain from which her bejeweled scent-bottle hung. It gave 
 me a quite indescribable pleasure to watch the feline grace of 
 every movement ; the supple grace a cat displays as it adjusts 
 its toilette in the sun. She looked at herself in the mirror 
 and said aloud ill-humoredly ' I did not look well this even- 
 ing; my complexion is going with alarming rapidity; perhaps 
 I ought to keep earlier hours, and give up this life of dissipa- 
 tion. Does Justine mean to trifle with me ? ' She rang 
 again ; her maid hurried in. Where she had been I cannot 
 tell ; she came in by a secret staircase. I was anxious to 
 make a study of her. I had lodged accusations, in my roman- 
 tic imaginings, against this invisible waiting-woman, a tall, 
 well-made brunette. 
 
 " ' Did madame ring ? ' exclaimed the waiting-maid as she 
 hurriedly entered the room.
 
 148 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 '"Yes, twice,' answered Fcedora; 'are you really growing 
 deaf nowadays ? ' 
 
 " ' I was preparing madame's milk of almonds.' 
 
 " Justine knelt down before her, unlaced her sandals and 
 drew them off, while her mistress lay carelessly back on her 
 cushioned armchair beside the fire, yawned, and scratched 
 her head. Every movement was perfectly natural ; there was 
 nothing whatever to indicate the secret sufferings or emotions 
 with which I had credited her. 
 
 " ' George must be in love ! ' she remarked. ' I shall dis- 
 miss him. He has drawn the curtains again to-night ! What 
 does he mean by it ? ' 
 
 "All the blood in my veins rushed to my heart at this 
 observation, but no more was said about curtains. 
 
 " ' Life is very empty,' the Countess went on. ' Ah ! be 
 careful not to scratch me as you did yesterday. Just look 
 here, I still have the marks of your nails about me,' and she 
 held out a little silken knee. She thrust her bare feet into 
 velvet slippers bound with swan's-down, and unfastened her 
 dress, while Justine prepared to comb her hair.' 
 
 " 'You ought to marry, madame, and have children.' 
 
 " ' Children ! ' she cried ; ' it wants no more than that to 
 finish me at once ; and a husband ! What man is there to 
 whom I could ? Was my hair well arranged to-night?' 
 
 " ' Not particularly.' 
 
 " ' You are a fool ! ' 
 
 " ' That way of crimping your hair too much is the least 
 becoming way possible for you. Large, smooth curls suit you 
 a great deal better.' 
 
 "'Really?' 
 
 " 'Yes, really, madame; that wavy style only looks nice in 
 fair hair.' 
 
 "'Marriage? never, never! Marriage is a commercial 
 arrangement, for which I was never made.' 
 
 " What a disheartening scene for a lover ! Here was a
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 149 
 
 lonely woman, without friends or kin, without the religion 
 of love, without faith in any affection. Yet however slightly 
 she might feel the need to pour out her heart, a craving that 
 every human being feels, it could only be satisfied by gossip- 
 ing with her maid, by trivial and indifferent talk. 1 
 
 grieved for her. 
 
 " Justine unlaced her. I watched her carefully when she 
 was at last unveiled. Her maidenly form, in its rose-tinged 
 whiteness, was visible through her shift in the taper light, as 
 dazzling as some silver statue behind its gauze covering. 
 No, there was no defect that need shrink from the stolen 
 glances of love. Alas, a fair form will overcome the stoutest 
 resolutions ! 
 
 " The maid lighted the taper in the alabaster sconce that 
 hung before the bed, while her mistress sat thoughtful and 
 silent before the fire. Justine went for a warming-pan, turned 
 down the bed, and helped to lay her mistress in it ; then, 
 after some further time spent in punctiliously rendering vari- 
 ous services that showed how seriously Fcedora respected 
 herself, her maid left her. The Countess turned to and fro 
 several times, and sighed ; she was ill at ease ; faint, just 
 perceptible sounds, like signs of impatience, escaped from 
 her lips. She reached out a hand to the table, and took 
 a flask from it, from which she shook four or five drops of 
 some brown liquid into some milk before taking it ; again 
 there followed some painful sighs, and the exclamation, ' Mon 
 Dieu ! ' 
 
 " The cry, and the tone in which it was uttered, wrung my 
 heart. By degrees she lay motionless. This frightened me ; 
 but very soon I heard a sleeper's heavy, regular breathing. 
 I drew the rustling silk curtains apart, left my post, went to 
 the foot of the bed, and gazed at her with feelings that I can- 
 not define. She was so enchanting as she lay like a child, 
 with her arm above her head ; but the sweetness of the fair, 
 quiet visage, surrounded by the lace, only irritated me. I
 
 160 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 had not been prepared for the torture to which I was com- 
 pelled to submit. 
 
 " ' Man Dieu!' that scrap of a thought which I under- 
 stood not, but must even take as my sole light, had suddenly 
 modified my opinion of Fcedora. Trite or profoundly signi- 
 cant, frivolous or of deep import, the words might be con- 
 strued as expressive of either pleasure or pain, of physical or 
 of mental suffering. Was it a prayer or a malediction, a fore- 
 cast or a memory, a fear or a regret ? A whole life lay in that 
 utterance, a life of wealth or of penury ; perhaps it contained a 
 crime ! 
 
 "The mystery that lurked beneath this fair semblance 
 of womanhood grew afresh ; there were so many ways of 
 explaining Foedora, that she became inexplicable. Some sort 
 of language seemed to flow from between her lips. I put 
 thoughts and feelings into the accidents of her breathing, 
 .whether weak or regular, gentle or labored. I shared her 
 dreams ; I would fain have divined her secrets by reading 
 them through her slumber. I hesitated among contradictory 
 opinions and decisions without number. I could not deny 
 my heart to the woman I saw before me, with the calm, pure 
 beauty in her face. I resolved to make one more effort. If I 
 told her the story of my life, my love, my sacrifices, might I not 
 awaken pity in her or draw a tear from her who never wept ? 
 
 "As I set all my hopes on this last experiment, the sounds 
 in the streets showed that day was at hand. For a moment's 
 space I pictured Fcedora waking to find herself in my arms. 
 I could have stolen softly to her side and slipped them about 
 her in a close embrace. Resolved to resist the cruel tyranny 
 of this thought, I hurried into the salon, heedless of any 
 sounds I might make ; but luckily I came upon a secret door 
 leading to a little staircase. As I had expected, the key was 
 in the lock ; I slammed the door, went boldly out into the 
 court, and gained the street in three bounds, without looking 
 round to see whether I was observed.
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 151 
 
 " A dramatist was to read a comedy at the Countess' house 
 in two days' time; I went thither, intending to outstay the 
 others, so as to make a rather singular request of her ; I meant 
 to ask her to keep the following evening for me alone, and to 
 deny herself to other comers ; but when I found myself alone 
 with her my courage failed. Every tick of the clock alarmed 
 me. It wanted only a quarter of an hour of midnight. 
 
 "'If I do not speak,' I thought to myself, 'I must smash 
 my head against the corner of the mantelpiece.' 
 
 "I gave myself three minutes' grace; the three minutes 
 went by, and I did not smash my head upon the marble ; my 
 heart grew heavy, like a sponge with water. 
 
 " 'You are exceedingly amusing,' said she. 
 
 "'Ah, madame, if you could but understand me! 1 I an- 
 swered. 
 
 "'What is the matter with you?' she asked. 'You are 
 turning pale.' 
 
 " ' I am hesitating to ask a favor of you.' 
 
 " Her gesture revived my courage. I asked her to make 
 the appointment with me. 
 
 " 'Willingly,' she answered; 'but why will you not speak 
 to me now ? ' 
 
 " 'To be candid with you, I ought to explain the full scope 
 of your promise : I want to spend this evening by your side, 
 as if we were brother and sister. Have no fear; I am aware 
 of your antipathies ; you must have divined me sufficiently to 
 feel sure that I should wish you to do nothing that could be 
 displeasing to you ; presumption, moreover, would not thus 
 approach you. You have been a friend to me, you have 
 shown me kindness and great indulgence ; know, therefore, 
 that to-morrow I must bid you farewell. Do not take back 
 your word,' I exclaimed, seeing her about to speak, and I 
 went away. 
 
 "At eight o'clock one evening towards the end of May, 
 Fcedora and I were alone together in her gothic boudoir. I
 
 152 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 feared no longer ; I was secure of happiness. The Countess 
 should be mine, or I would seek a refuge in death. I had 
 condemned my faint-hearted love, and a man who acknowl- 
 edges his weakness is strong indeed. 
 
 "The Countess, in her blue cashmere gown, was reclining 
 on a sofa, with her feet on a cushion. She wore an Oriental 
 turban such as painters assign to early Hebrews ; its strange- 
 ness added an indescribable coquettish grace to her attractions. 
 A transitory charm seemed to have laid its spell on her face ; 
 it might have furnished the argument that at every instant we 
 become new and unparalleled beings, without any resemblance 
 to the us of the future or of the past. I had never yet seen 
 her so radiant. 
 
 " ' Do you know that you have piqued my curiosity? ' she 
 said, laughing. 
 
 " ' I will not disappoint it,' I said quietly, as I seated my- 
 self near her and took the hand that she surrendered to me. 
 ' You have a very beautiful voice ! ' 
 
 " ' You have never heard me sing ! ' she exclaimed, starting 
 involuntarily with surprise. 
 
 " ' I will prove that it is quite otherwise, whenever it is 
 necessary. Is your delightful singing still to remain a mys- 
 tery? Have no fear, I do not wish to penetrate it.' 
 
 " We spent about'an hour in familiar talk. While I adopted 
 the attitude and manner of a man to whom Fcedora must re- 
 fuse nothing, I showed her all a lover's deference. Acting in 
 this way, I received a favor I was allowed to kiss her hand. 
 She daintily drew off the glove ; and my whole soul was dis- 
 solved and poured forth in that kiss. I was steeped in the 
 bliss of an illusion in which I tried to believe. 
 
 " Fcedora lent herself most unexpectedly to my caress and 
 my flatteries. Do not accuse me of faint-heartedness ; if I 
 had gone a step beyond these fraternal compliments, the claws 
 would have been out of the sheath and into me. We re- 
 mained perfectly silent for nearly ten minutes. I was
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 153 
 
 admiring her, investing her with the charms she had not. 
 She was mine just then, and mine only, this enchanting 
 being was mine, as was permissible, in my imagination ; my 
 longing wrapped her round and held her close ; in my soul I 
 wedded her. The Countess was subdued and fascinated by 
 my magnetic influence. Ever since I have regretted that this 
 subjugation was not absolute; but just then I yearned for her 
 soul, her heart alone, and for nothing else. I longed for an 
 ideal and perfect happiness, a fair illusion that cannot last for 
 very long. At last I spoke, feeling that the last hours of my 
 frenzy were at hand. 
 
 "'Hear me, madame. I love you, and you know it; I 
 have said so a hundred times; you must have understood me. 
 I would not take upon me the airs of a coxcomb, nor would I 
 flatter you, nor urge myself upon you like a fool ; I would not 
 owe your love to such arts as these ; so I have been misunder- 
 stood. What sufferings have I not endured for your sake ! 
 For these, however, you were not to blame ; but in a few 
 minutes you shall decide for yourself. There are two kinds 
 of poverty, madame. One kind openly walks the street in 
 rags, an unconscious imitator of Diogenes, on a scanty diet, 
 reducing life to its simplest terms ; he is happier, maybe, than 
 the rich; he has fewer cares at any rate, and accepts such 
 portions of the world as stronger spirits refuse. Then there is 
 poverty in splendor, a Spanish pauper, concealing the life of 
 a beggar by his title, his bravery, and his pride ; poverty that 
 wears a white waistcoat and yellow kid gloves, a beggar with 
 a carriage, whose whole career will be wrecked for lack of a 
 half-penny. Poverty of the first kind belongs to the popu- 
 lace ; the second kind is that of blacklegs, of kings, and of 
 men of talent. I am neither a man of the people, nor a king, 
 nor a swindler ; possibly I have no talent either ; I am an 
 exception. With the name I bear I must die sooner than beg. 
 Set your mind at rest, madame,' I said ; 'to-day I have 
 abundance, I possess sufficient of the clay for my needs ; ' for
 
 154 THE WILD ASS> SKIN. 
 
 the hard look passed over her face which we wear whenever a 
 well-dressed beggar takes us by surprise. ' Do you remember 
 the day when you wished to go to the Gymnase without me, 
 never believing that I should be there? ' I went on. 
 
 "She nodded. 
 
 " ' I had laid out my last five-franc piece that I might see 
 you there. Do you recollect our walk in the Jardin des 
 Plantes? The hire of your cab took everything I had.' 
 
 " I told her about my sacrifices, and described the life I led ; 
 heated not with wine, as I am to-day, but by the generous en- 
 thusiasm of my heart, my passion overflowed in burning words ; 
 I have forgotten how the feelings within me blazed forth ; 
 neither memory nor skill of mine could possibly reproduce it. 
 It was no colorless chronicle of blighted affections ; my love 
 was strengthened by fair hopes ; and such words came to me, 
 by love's inspiration, that each had power to set forth a whole 
 life like echoes of the cries of a soul in torment. In such 
 tones the last prayers ascend from dying men on the battle- 
 field. I stopped, for she was weeping. Grand Dieu ! I 
 had reaped an actor's reward, the success of a counterfeit 
 passion displayed at the cost of five francs paid at the theatre 
 door. I had drawn tears from her. 
 
 " ' If I had known ' she said. 
 
 " ' Do not finish the sentence," I broke in. ' Even now I 
 love you well enough to murder you ' 
 
 "She reached for the bell-pull. I burst into a roar of 
 laughter. 
 
 " ' Do not call any one,' I said. ' I shall leave you to finish 
 your life in peace. It would be a blundering kind of hatred 
 that would murder you ! You need not fear violence of any 
 kind ; I have spent a whole night at the foot of your bed 
 without ' 
 
 "'Monsieur 'she exclaimed, blushing; but after that 
 
 first impulse of modesty that even the most hardened women 
 must surely own, she flung a scornful glance at me, and said
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 155 
 
 " 'You must have been very cold.' 
 
 " ' Do you think that I set such value on your beauty, 
 madame,' I answered, guessing the thoughts that moved her. 
 ' Your beautiful face is for me a promise of a soul yet more 
 beautiful. Madame, those to whom a woman is merely a 
 woman can always purchase odalisques fit for the seraglio, and 
 achieve their happiness at a small cost. But I aspired to 
 something higher ; I wanted the life of close communion of 
 heart and heart with you that have no heart. I know that 
 now. If you were to belong to another, I could kill him. 
 And yet, no ; for you would love him, and his death might 
 hurt you perhaps. What agony this is ! ' I cried. 
 
 " ' If it is any comfort to you,' she retorted cheerfully, 
 ' I can assure you that I shall never belong to any one " 
 
 " ' So you offer an affront to God Himself,' I interrupted ; 
 ' and you will be punished for it. Some day you will lie upon 
 your sofa suffering unheard-of ills, unable to endure the light 
 or the slightest sound, condemned to live as it were in the 
 tomb. Then, when you seek the causes of those lingering 
 and avenging torments, you will remember the woes that you 
 distributed so lavishly upon your way. You have sown curses, 
 and hatred will be your reward. We are the real judges, 
 the executioners of a justice that reigns here below, which 
 overrules the justice of man and the laws of God.' 
 
 " ' No doubt it is very culpable in me not to love you,' she 
 said, laughing. ' Am I to blame ? No. I do not love you ; 
 you are a man, that is sufficient. I am happy by myself; why 
 should I give up my way of living, a selfish way, if you will, 
 for the caprices of a master ? Marriage is a sacrament by 
 virtue of which each imparts nothing but vexations to the 
 other. Children, moreover, worry me. Did I not faithfully 
 warn you about my nature ? Why are you not satisfied to 
 have my friendship ? I wish I could make you amends for all 
 the troubles I have caused you, through not guessing the value 
 of your poor five- franc pieces. I appreciate the extent of your
 
 156 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 sacrifices ; but your devotion and delicate tact can be repaid 
 by love alone, and I care so little for you, that this scene has 
 a disagreeable effect upon me.' 
 
 "'I am fully aware of my absurdity,' I said, unable to 
 restrain my tears. ' Pardon me,' I went on, ' it was a delight 
 to hear those cruel words you have just uttered, so well I love 
 you. O, if I could testify my love with every drop of blood 
 in me ! ' 
 
 " ' Men always repeat these classical formulas to us, more 
 or less effectively,' she answered, still smiling. ' But it appears 
 very difficult to die at our feet, for I see corpses of that kind 
 about me everywhere. It is twelve o'clock. Allow me to 
 go to bed.' 
 
 " 'And in two hours' time you will cry to yourself, Ah, mon 
 Dieu .' ' 
 
 " 'Like the day before yesterday! Yes,' she said, 'I was 
 thinking of my stockbroker ; I had forgotten to tell him to 
 convert my five per cent, stock into the threes, and the three 
 per cents, had fallen during the day.' 
 
 " I looked at her and my eyes glittered with anger. Some- 
 times a crime may be a whole romance ; I understood that 
 just then. She was so accustomed, no doubt, to the most im- 
 passioned declarations of this kind, that my words and my 
 tears were forgotten already. 
 
 ' ' ' Would you marry a peer of France ? ' I demanded 
 abruptly. 
 
 " ' If he were a duke I might.' 
 
 " I snzed my hat and made her a bow. 
 
 " ' Permit me to accompany you to the door,' she said, 
 cutting irony in her tones, in the poise of her head, and in 
 her gesture. 
 
 " ' Madame ' 
 
 " ' Monsieur?' 
 
 " ' I shall never see you again.' 
 
 " 'I hope not,' and she insolently inclined her head.
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 157 
 
 " ' You wish to be a duchess? ' I cried, excited by a sort of 
 madness that her insolence roused in me. ' You are wild for 
 honors and titles ? Well, only let me love you ; bid my pen 
 write and my voice speak for you alone ; be the inmost soul 
 of my life, my guiding star ! Then only accept me for your 
 husband as a minister, a peer of France, a duke. I will make 
 of myself whatever you would have me be !' 
 
 " 'You made good use of the time you spent with the ad- 
 vocate,' she said, smiling. 'There is a fervency about your 
 pleadings. ' 
 
 " ' The present is yours,' I cried, ' but the future is mine ! 
 I only lose a woman ; you are losing a name and a family. 
 Time is big with my revenge ; time will spoil your beauty, 
 and yours will be a solitary death ; and enduring glory waits 
 for me !' 
 
 "'Thanks for your peroration!' she said, repressing a 
 yawn ; the wish that she might never see me again was ex- 
 pressed in her whole bearing. 
 
 " That remark silenced me. I flung at her a glance full of 
 hatred, and hurried away. 
 
 "Fcedora must be forgotten; I must cure myself of my 
 infatuation, and betake myself once more to my lonely studies, 
 or die. So I set myself tremendous tasks ; I determined to 
 complete my labors. For fifteen days I never left my garret, 
 spending whole nights in pallid thought. I worked with diffi- 
 culty, and by fits and starts, despite my courage and the 
 stimulation of despair. The muse had fled. I could not 
 exorcise the brilliant mocking image of Fcedora. Something 
 morbid brooded over every thought, a vague longing as dread- 
 ful as remorse. I imitated the anchorites of the Thebaid. If 
 I did not pray as they did, I lived a life in the desert like 
 theirs, hewing out my ideas as they were wont to hew their 
 rocks. I could at need have girdled my waist with spikes, 
 that physical suffering might quell mental anguish. 
 
 " One evening Pauline found her way into my room. 
 11
 
 158 THE WILD ASS' SKIA'. 
 
 "'You are killing yourself,' she said, imploringly; 'you 
 should go out and see your friends 
 
 " ' Pauline, you were a true prophet ; Foadora is killing me, 
 I want to die. My life is intolerable." 
 
 " ' Is there only one woman in the world ?' she asked smil- 
 ing. ' Why make yourself so miserable in so short a life?' 
 
 " I looked at Pauline in bewilderment. She left me before 
 I noticed her departure; the sound of her words had reached 
 me, but not their sense. Very soon I had to take my memoirs 
 in manuscript to my literary contractor. I was so absorbed 
 by my passion, that I could not remember how I had managed 
 to live without money; I only knew that the four hundred 
 and fifty francs due to me would pay my debts. So I went to 
 receive my salary, and met Rastignac, who thought me 
 changed and thinner. 
 
 " ' What hospital have you been discharged from ? ' he 
 asked. 
 
 " 'That woman is killing me,' I answered ; ' I can neither 
 despise her nor forget her.' 
 
 " ' You had much better kill her, then perhaps you would 
 think no more of her,' he said, laughing. 
 
 " ' I have often thought of it,' I replied ; ' but though some- 
 times the thought of a crime revives my spirits, of violence 
 and murder, either or both, I am really incapable of carrying 
 out the design. The Countess is an admirable monster who 
 would crave for pardon, and not every man, you know, is an 
 Othello.' 
 
 "'She is like every woman who is beyond our reach,' 
 Rastignac interrupted. 
 
 " ' I am mad,' I cried ; ' I can feel the madness raging at 
 times in my brain. My ideas are like shadows ; they flit 
 before me, and I cannot grasp them. Death would be pref- 
 erable to this life, and I have carefully considered the best 
 way of putting an end to the struggle. I am not thinking of 
 the living Fcedora in the Faubourg Saint Honore, but of my
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 159 
 
 Foedora here,' and I tapped my forehead. ' What do you say 
 to opium ? ' 
 
 " ' Pshaw ! horrid agonies,' said Rastignac. 
 
 " ' Or charcoal fumes ? ' 
 
 " ' A low dodge.' 
 
 " 'Or the Seine? ' 
 
 " ' The drag-nets, and the morgue too, are filthy.' 
 
 " ' A pistol-shot?' 
 
 " 'And if you miscalculate, you disfigure yourself for life. 
 Listen to me,' he went on, ' like all young men, I have pon- 
 dered over suicide. Which of us hasn't killed himself two or 
 three times before he is thirty? I find there is no better 
 course than to use existence as a means of pleasure. Go in 
 for thorough dissipation, and your passion or you will perish 
 in it. Intemperance, my dear fellow, commands all forms of 
 death. Does she not wield the thunderbolt of apoplexy ? 
 Apoplexy is a pistol-shot that does not miscalculate. Orgies 
 are lavish in all physical pleasures ; is not that the small 
 change for opium ? And the riot that makes us drink to 
 excess bears a challenge to mortal combat with wine. That 
 butt of Malmsey of the Duke of Clarence's must have had a 
 pleasanter flavor than Seine mud. When we sink gloriously 
 under the table, is not that a periodical death by drowning 
 on a small scale ? If we are picked up by the police and 
 stretched out on those chilly benches of theirs at the police- 
 station, do we not enjoy all the pleasures of the morgue ? For 
 though we are not blue and green, muddy and swollen corpses, 
 on the other hand we have the consciousness of the climax. 
 
 " ' Ah,' he went on, ' this protracted suicide has nothing in 
 common with a bankrupt grocer's demise. Tradespeople 
 have brought the river into disrepute ; they fling themselves 
 in to soften their creditors' hearts. In your place I should 
 endeavor to die gracefully ; and if you wish to invent a novel 
 way of doing it, by struggling with life after this manner, I 
 will be your second. I am disappointed and sick of every-
 
 160 THE IVH.D ASS' SKIN. 
 
 thing. The Alsacienne, whom it was proposed that I should 
 marry, had six toes on her left foot ; I cannot possibly live 
 with a woman who has six toes ! It would get about to a 
 certainty, and then I should be ridiculous. Her income was 
 only eighteen thousand francs; her fortune diminished in 
 quantity as her toes increased. The devil take it ; if we 
 begin an outrageous sort of life, we may come on some bit of 
 luck, perhaps ! ' 
 
 " Rastignac's eloquence carried me away. The attrac- 
 tions of the plan shone too temptingly, hopes were kindled, 
 the poetical aspects of the matter appealed to a poet. 
 
 " ' How about money ? ' I said. 
 
 " ' Haven't you four hundred and fifty francs ? ' 
 
 " ' Yes, but debts to my landlady and the tailor ' 
 
 " ' You would pay your tailor ? You will never be any- 
 thing whatever, not so much as a minister.' 
 
 " ' But can one do with twenty louis ? ' 
 
 " ' Go to the gaming-table.' 
 
 " I shuddered. 
 
 " ' You are going to launch out into what I call systematic 
 dissipation,' said he, noticing my scruples, ' and yet you are 
 afraid of a green table-cloth.' 
 
 " ' Listen to me,' I answered. ' I promised my father never 
 to set foot in a gaming-house. Not only is that a sacred 
 promise, but I still feel an unconquerable disgust whenever I 
 pass a gambling-hell ; take the money and go without me. 
 While our fortune is at stake, I will set my own affairs straight, 
 and then I will go to your lodgings and wait for you." 
 
 " That was the way I went to perdition. A young man 
 has only to come across a woman who will not love him, 
 or a woman who loves him too well, and his whole life 
 becomes a chaos. Prosperity swallows up our energy just 
 as adversity obscures our virtues. Back once more in my 
 Hotel de Saint-Quentin, I gazed about me a long while in 
 the garret where I had led my scholar's temperate life, a life
 
 A WOMAX WITHOUT A HEART. 161 
 
 which would perhaps have been a long and honorable one, 
 and that I ought not to have quitted for the fevered existence 
 which had urged me to the brink of a precipice. Pauline 
 surprised me in this dejected attitude. 
 
 < Why, what is the matter with you ? ' she asked. 
 
 " I rose and quietly counted out the money owing to her 
 mother, and added to it sufficient to pay for six months' rent 
 in advance. She watched me in some alarm. 
 
 " ' I am going to leave you, dear Pauline.' 
 
 " ' I knew it ! ' she exclaimed. 
 
 " ' Listen, my child. I have not given up the idea of coming 
 back. Keep my room for me for six months. If I do not 
 return by the fifteenth of November, you will come into pos- 
 session of my things. This sealed packet of manuscript is the 
 fair copy of my great work on ' The Will, " I went on, point- 
 ing to a package. Will you deposit it in the King's Library ? 
 And you may do as you wish with everything that is left 
 here.' 
 
 " Her look weighed heavily on my heart ; Pauline was an 
 embodiment of conscience there before me. 
 
 " ' I shall have no more lessons,' she said, pointing to the 
 piano.' 
 
 " I did not answer that. 
 
 " ' Will you write to me ? ' 
 
 " 'Good-bye, Pauline.' 
 
 " I gently drew her towards me, and set a kiss on that inno- 
 cent fair brow of hers, like snow that has not yet touched the 
 earth a father's or a brother's kiss. She fled. I would not 
 see Madame Gaudin, hung my key in its wonted place, and 
 departed. I was almost at the end of the Rue de Cluny when 
 I heard a woman's light footstep behind me. 
 
 " ' I have embroidered this purse for you," Pauline said ; 
 ' will you refuse even that ? ' 
 
 " By the light of the street lamp I thought I saw tears in 
 Pauline's eyes, and I groaned. Moved perhaps by a common
 
 162 THE WILD ASS' SKTN. 
 
 impulse, we parted in haste like people who fear the conta- 
 gion of the plague. 
 
 " As I waited with dignified calmness for Rastignac's return, 
 his room seemed a grotesque interpretation of the sort of life 
 I was about to enter upon. The clock on the chimney-piece 
 was surmounted by a Venus resting on her tortoise ; a half- 
 smoked cigar lay in her arms. Costly furniture of various 
 kinds love-tokens, very likely was scattered about. Old 
 shoes lay on a luxurious sofa. The comfortable armchair into 
 which I had thrown myself bore as many scars as a veteran ; 
 the arms were gashed, the back was overlaid with a thick, 
 stale deposit of pomade and hair-oil from the heads of all his 
 visitors. Splendor and squalor were oddly mingled, on the 
 walls, the bed, and everywhere else. You might have thought 
 of a Neapolitan palace and the groups of beggars about it. 
 It was the room of a gambler or a good-for-nothing, where 
 the luxury exists merely for one individual, who leads the 
 life of the senses and does not trouble himself over incon- 
 sistencies. 
 
 " There was a certain imaginative element about the picture 
 it presented. Life was suddenly revealed there in its rags and 
 spangles as the incomplete thing it really is, of course, but so 
 vividly and picturesquely; it was like a den where a brigand 
 has heaped up all the plunder in which he delights. Some 
 pages were missing from a copy of Byron's poems ; they had 
 gone to light a fire of a few sticks for this young person, who 
 played for stakes of a thousand francs, and had not a faggot ; 
 who kept a tilbury, and had not a whole shirt to his back. 
 Any day a countess or an actress or a run of luck at ecarte 
 might set him up with an outfit worthy of a king. A candle 
 had been stuck into the green bronze sheath of a vestaholder ; 
 a woman's portrait lay yonder, torn out of its carved gold 
 setting. How was it possible that a young man, whose nature 
 craved excitement, could renounce a life so attractive by 
 reason of its contradictions; a life that afforded all the de-
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 163 
 
 lights of war in the midst of peace ? I was growing drowsy 
 when Rastignac kicked the door open and shouted 
 
 " ' Victory ! Now we can take our time about dying.' 
 
 " He held out his hat filled with gold to me, and put it 
 down on the table ; then we pranced round it like a pair of 
 cannibals about to eat a victim ; we stamped, and danced, 
 and yelled, and sang; we gave each other blows fit to kill an 
 elephant, at sight of all the pleasures of the world contained in 
 that hat. 
 
 "'Twenty-seven thousand francs,' said Rastignac, adding 
 a few bank-notes to the pile of gold. ' That would be enough 
 for other folk to live upon ; will it be sufficient for us to die 
 on ? Yes ! we will breathe our last in a bath of gold 
 hurrah !' and we capered afresh. 
 
 "We divided the windfall. We began with double-napo- 
 leons, and came down to the smaller coins, one by one. 
 'This for you, this for me,' we kept on saying, distilling our 
 joy drop by drop. 
 
 "'We won't go to sleep,' cried Rastignac. 'Joseph! 
 some punch ! ' 
 
 " He threw gold to his faithful attendant. 
 
 " 'There is your share," he said, 'go and bury yourself, if 
 you can.' 
 
 " Next day I went to Lesage and chose my furniture, took 
 the rooms that you know in the Rue Taitbout, and left the 
 decoration to one of the best upholsterers. I bought horses. 
 I plunged into a vortex of pleasures, at once hollow and real. 
 I went in for play, gaining and losing enormous sums, but 
 only at friends' houses and in ball-rooms ; never in gaming- 
 houses, for which I still retained the holy horror of my early 
 days. Without meaning it, I made some friends, either 
 through quarrels or owing to the easy confidence established 
 among those who are going to the bad together; nothing, 
 possibly, makes us cling to one another so tightly as our evil 
 propensities.
 
 164 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 "I made several ventures in literature, which were flatter- 
 ingly received. Great men who followed the profession of 
 letters, having nothing to fear from me, belauded me, not so 
 much on account of my merits as to cast a slur on those of 
 their rivals. 
 
 "I became a 'free-liver,' to make use of the picturesque 
 expression appropriated by the language of excess. I made it 
 a point of honor not to be long about dying, and that my zeal 
 and prowess should eclipse those displayed by all others in the 
 jolliest company. I was always spruce and carefully dressed. 
 I had some reputation for cleverness. There was no sign 
 about me of that fearful way of living which makes a man into 
 a mere digesting apparatus, a funnel, a pampered beast. 
 
 "Very soon debauch rose before me in all the majesty of 
 its horror, and I grasped all that it meant. Those prudent, 
 steady-going characters who are laying down wine in bottles 
 for their heirs, can barely conceive, it is true, of so wide a 
 theory of life, nor appreciate its normal condition; but when 
 will you instil poetry into the provincial intellect? Opium 
 and tea, with all their delights, are merely drugs to folk of 
 that calibre. 
 
 "Is not the imperfect sybarite to be met with even in Paris 
 itself, that intellectual metropolis? Unfit to endure the 
 fatigues of pleasure, this sort of person, after a drinking bout, 
 is very much like those worthy bourgeois who fall foul of 
 music after hearing a new opera by Rossini. Does he not re- 
 nounce these courses in the same frame of mind that leads an 
 abstemious man to forswear RufFec pates, because the first one, 
 forsooth, gave him the indigestion ? 
 
 " Debauch is as surely an art as poetry, and is not for craven 
 spirits. To penetrate its mysteries and appreciate its charms, 
 conscientious application is required ; and as with every path 
 of knowledge, the way is thorny and forbidding at the outset. 
 The great pleasures of humanity are hedged about with for- 
 midable obstacles; not its single enjoyments, but enjoyment
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 165 
 
 as a system, a system which establishes seldom-experienced 
 sensations and makes them habitual, which concentrates and 
 multiplies them for us, creating a dramatic life within our life, 
 and imperatively demanding a prompt and enormous expendi- 
 ture of vitality. War, power, art, like debauch, are all forms of 
 demoralization, equally remote from the faculties of humanity, 
 equally profound, and all are alike difficult of access. But 
 when man has once stormed the heights of these grand mys- 
 teries, does he not walk in another world ? Are not generals, 
 ministers, and artists carried, more or less, towards destruction 
 by the need of violent distractions in an existence so remote 
 from ordinary life as theirs ? 
 
 " War, after all, is the excess of bloodshed, as the excess 
 of self-interest produces politics. Excesses of every sort are 
 brothers. These social enormities possess the attraction of 
 the abyss; they draw us towards themselves as St. Helena 
 beckoned Napoleon ; we are fascinated, our heads swim, we 
 wish to sound their depths, though we cannot account for the 
 wish. Perhaps the thought of infinity dwells in these preci- 
 pices, perhaps they contain some colossal flattery for the soul 
 of man ; for is he not, then, wholly absorbed in himself? 
 
 "The wearied artist needs a complete contrast to his para- 
 dise of imaginings and of studious hours ; he either craves, 
 like God, the seventh day of rest, or with Satan, the pleasures 
 of hell ; so that his senses may have free play in opposition to 
 the employment of his faculties. Byron could never have 
 taken for his relaxation to the independent gentleman's de- 
 lights of boston and gossip, for he was a poet, and so must 
 needs pit Greece against Mahmoud. 
 
 "In war, is not man an angel of extirpation, a sort of 
 executioner on a gigantic scale? Must not the spell be strong 
 indeed that makes us undergo such horrid sufferings so hostile 
 to our weak frames, sufferings that encircle every strong pas- 
 sion with a hedge of thorns ? The tobacco-smoker is seized 
 with convulsions, and goes through a kind of agony conse-
 
 166 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 quent upon his excesses ; but has he not borne a part in de- 
 lightful festivals in realms unknown ? Has Europe ever ceased 
 from wars? She has never given herself time to wipe the 
 stains from her feet that are steeped in blood to the ankle. 
 Mankind at large is carried away by fits of intoxication, as 
 nature has its accessions of love. 
 
 " For men in private life, for a vegetating Mirabeau dreaming 
 of storms in a time of calm, excess comprises all things ; it 
 perpetually embraces the whole sum of life ; it is something 
 better still it is a duel with an antagonist of unknown 
 power, a monster, terrible at first sight, that must be seized 
 by the horns, a labor that cannot be imagined. 
 
 " Suppose that nature has endowed you with a feeble 
 stomach or one of limited capacity ; you acquire a mastery 
 over it and improve it ; you learn to carry your liquor ; you 
 grow accustomed to being drunk ; you pass whole nights with- 
 out sleep ; at last you acquire the constitution of a colonel of 
 cuirassiers ; and in this way you create yourself afresh, as if 
 to fly in the face of Providence. 
 
 "A man transformed after this sort is like a neophyte who 
 has at last become a veteran, has accustomed his mind to shot 
 and shell and his legs to lengthy marches. When the monster's 
 hold on him is still uncertain, and it is not yet known which 
 will have the better of it, they roll over and over, alternately 
 victor and vanquished, in a world where everything is wonder- 
 ful, where every ache of the soul is laid to sleep, where only 
 the shadows of ideas are revived. 
 
 "This furious struggle has already become a necessity for 
 us. The prodigal has struck a bargain for all the enjoyments 
 with which life teems abundantly, at the price of his own 
 death, like the mythical persons in the legends who sold them- 
 selves to the devil for the power of doing evil. For them, 
 instead of flowing quietly on its monotonous course in the 
 depths of some counting-house or study, life is poured out in 
 a boiling torrent.
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 167 
 
 " Excess is, in short, for the body what the mystic's ecstasy 
 is for the soul. Intoxication steeps you in fantastic imaginings 
 every whit as strange as those of ecstatics. You know hours 
 as full of rapture as a young girl's dreams ; you travel withoyt 
 fatigue; you chat pleasantly with your friends; words come 
 to you with a whole life in each, and fresh pleasures without 
 regrets ; poems are set forth for you in a few brief phrases. 
 The coarse animal satisfaction, in which science has tried to 
 find a soul, is followed by the enchanted drowsiness that men 
 sigh for under the burden of consciousness. Is it not because 
 they all feel the need of absolute repose ? Because excess is 
 a sort of toll that genius pays to pain ? 
 
 "Look at all great men; nature made them pleasure- 
 loving or base, every one. Some mocking or jealous power 
 corrupted them in either soul or body, so as to make all their 
 powers futile, and their efforts of no avail. 
 
 "All men and all things appear before you in the guise you 
 choose, in those hours when wine has sway. You are lord of 
 all creation ; you transform it at your pleasure. And through- 
 out this unceasing delirium, play may pour, at your will, its 
 molten lead into your veins. 
 
 "Some day you will fall into the monster's power. Then 
 you will have, as I had, a frenzied awakening, with impotence 
 sitting by your pillow. Are you an old soldier? Phthisis 
 attacks you. A diplomatist ? An aneurism hangs death in 
 your heart by a thread. It will perhaps be consumption that 
 will cry to me, ' Let us be going !' as to Raphael of Urbino, 
 in old time, killed by an excess of love. 
 
 " In this way I have existed. I was launched into the world 
 too early or too late. My energy would have been dangerous 
 there, no doubt, if I had not squandered it in such ways as 
 these. Was not the world rid of an Alexander, by the cup 
 of Hercules, at the close of a drinking bout. 
 
 " There are some, the sport of destiny, who must either 
 have heaven or hell, the hospice of St. Bernard or riotous
 
 168 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 excess. Only just now I lacked the heart to moralize about 
 those two," and he pointed to Euphrasia and Aquilina. " They 
 are types of my own personal history, images of my life ! I 
 could scarcely reproach them ; they stood before me like 
 judges. 
 
 "In the midst of this drama that I was enacting, and while 
 my distracting disorder was at its height, two crises super- 
 vened ; each brought me keen and abundant pangs. The 
 first came a few days after I had flung myself, like Sardana- 
 palus, on my pyre. I met Fcedora under the peristyle of the 
 Bouffons. We both were waiting for our carriages. 
 
 " 'Ah ! so you are living yet.' 
 
 "That was the meaning of her smile, and probably of the 
 spiteful words she murmured into the ear of her cicisbeo, tell- 
 ing him my history, no doubt, rating mine as a common love 
 affair. She was deceived, yet she was applauding her per- 
 spicacity. Oh, that I should be dying for her, must still 
 adore her, always see her through my potations, see her still 
 when I was overcome with wine, or in the arms of courtesans ; 
 and know that I was a target for her scornful jests ? Oh, that I 
 should be unable to tear the love of her out of my breast and 
 to fling it at her feet ! 
 
 " Well, I quickly exhausted my funds, but owing to those 
 three years of discipline I enjoyed the most robust health, 
 and on the day that I found myself without a penny I felt 
 remarkably well. In order to carry on the process of dying, 
 I signed bills at short dates, and the day came when they must 
 be met. Painful excitements ! but how they quicken the pulses 
 of youth ! I was not prematurely aged ; I was young yet, and 
 full of vigor and life. 
 
 " At my first debt all my virtues came to life; slowly and 
 despairingly they seemed to pace towards me ; but I could com- 
 pound with them they were like aged aunts that begin with 
 a scolding and end by bestowing tears and money upon you. 
 
 " Imagination was less yielding ; I saw my name bandied
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 169 
 
 about through every city in Europe. ' One's name is oneself,' 
 says Eusebe Salverte. After these excursions I returned to 
 the room I had never quitted, like a doppel-ganger in a Ger- 
 man tale, and came to myself with a start. 
 
 " I used to see with indifference a banker's messenger going 
 on his errands through the streets of Paris, like a commercial 
 Nemesis, wearing his master's livery a gray coat and a silver 
 badge ; but now I hated the species in advance. One of them 
 came one morning to ask me to meet eleven bills that I had 
 scrawled my name upon. My. signature was worth three 
 thousand francs ! Taking me altogether, I myself was not 
 worth that amount. Sheriff's deputies rose up before me, 
 turning their callous faces upon my despair, as the hangman 
 regards the criminal to whom he says, ' It has just struck half- 
 past three.' I was in the power of their clerks; they could 
 scribble my name, drag it through the mire, and jeer at it. I 
 was a defaulter. Has a debtor any right to himself? Could 
 not other men call me to account for my way of living? 
 Why had I eaten puddings a la chipolata ? Why had I iced 
 my wine ? Why had I slept, or walked, or thought, or amused 
 myself when I had not paid them ? 
 
 "At any moment, in the middle of a poem, during some 
 train of thought, or while I was gaily breakfasting in the 
 pleasant company of my friends, I might look to see a gentle- 
 man enter in a coat of chestnut-brown, with a shabby hat in 
 his hand. This gentleman's appearance would signify my 
 debt. The bill I had drawn ; the spectre would compel me 
 to leave the table to speak to him, blight my spirits, despoil 
 me of my cheerfulness, of my mistress, of all I possessed, 
 down to my very bedstead. 
 
 "Remorse itself is more easily endured. Remorse does 
 not drive us into the street nor into the prison of Sainte- 
 Pelagie ; it does not force us into the detestable sink of vice. 
 Remorse only brings us to the scaffold, where the executioner 
 invests us with a certain dignity; as we pay the extreme
 
 170 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 penalty, everybody believes in our innocence ; but people will 
 not credit a penniless prodigal with a single virtue. 
 
 " My debts had other incarnations. There is the kind that 
 goes about on two feet, in a green-cloth coat, and blue spec- 
 tacles, carrying umbrellas of various hues ; you come face to 
 face with him at the corner of some street, in the midst of 
 your mirth. These have the detestable prerogative of saying, 
 ' M. de Valentin owes me something and does not pay. I 
 have a hold on him. He had better not show me any offen- 
 sive airs!' You must bow to your creditors, and, moreover, 
 bow politely. ' When are you going to pay me?' say they. 
 And you must lie, and beg money of another man, and cringe 
 to a fool seated on his strong box, and receive sour looks in 
 return from these horse-leeches; a blow would be less hateful; 
 you must put up with their crass ignorance and calculating 
 morality. A debt is a feat of the imaginative that they can- 
 not appreciate. A borrower is often carried away and over- 
 mastered by generous impulses ; nothing great, nothing 
 magnanimous can move or dominate those who live for money, 
 and recognize nothing but money. I myself held money in 
 abhorrence. 
 
 "Or a bill may undergo a final transformation into some 
 meritorious old man with a family dependent upon him. My 
 creditor may be a living picture for Greuze, a paralytic with 
 his children round him, a soldier's widow, holding out be- 
 seeching hands to me. Terrible creditors are those with whom 
 we are forced to sympathize, and when their claims are satisfied 
 we owe them a further debt of assistance. 
 
 "The night before the bills fell due, I lay down with the 
 false calm of those who sleep before their approaching execu- 
 tion, or with a duel in prospect, rocked as they are by delusive 
 hopes. But when I woke, when I was cool and collected, 
 when I found myself imprisoned in a banker's portfolio, and 
 floundering in statements covered with red ink then my 
 debts sprang up everywhere, like grasshoppers, before my eyes.
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 171 
 
 There were my debts, my clock, my armchairs ; my debts were 
 inlaid in the very furniture which I liked best to use. These 
 gentle inanimate slaves were to fall a prey to the harpies of the 
 Chatelet, were to be carried off by the broker's men, and 
 brutally thrown on the market. Ah, my property was a part 
 of myself! 
 
 " The sound of the door-bell rang through my heart ; while 
 it seemed to strike at me, where kings should be struck at in 
 the head. Mine was a martyrdom, without heaven for its re- 
 ward. For a magnanimous nature, debt is a hell, and a hell, 
 moreover, with sheriffs officers and brokers in it. An undis- 
 charged debt is something mean and sordid ; it is a beginning 
 of knavery ; it is something worse, it is a lie ; it prepares the 
 way for crime, and brings together the planks for the scaffold. 
 My bills were protested. Three days afterwards I met them, 
 and this is how it happened. 
 
 "A speculator came, offering to buy the island in the Loire 
 belonging to me, where my mother lay buried. I closed with 
 him. When I went to his solicitor to sign the deeds, I felt a 
 cavern-like chill in the dark office that made me shudder ; it 
 was the same cold dampness that had lain hold upon me at 
 the brink of my father's grave. I looked upon this as an evil 
 omen. I seemed to see the shade of my mother, and to hear 
 her voice. What power was it that made my own name ring 
 vaguely in my ears, in spite of the clamor of bells ? 
 
 "The money paid down for my island, when all my debts 
 were discharged, left me in possession of two thousand francs. 
 I could now have returned to a scholar's tranquil life, it is 
 true ; I could have gone back to my garret after having gained 
 an experience of life, with my head filled with the, results of 
 extensive observation, and with a certain sort of reputation 
 attaching to me. But Foedora's hold upon her victim was 
 not relaxed. We often met. I compelled her admirers to 
 sound my name in her ears, by dint of astonishing them with 
 my cleverness and success, with my horses and equipages. It
 
 172 THE WILD ASS' SJTLV. 
 
 all found her impassive and uninterested ; so did an ugly phrase 
 of Rastignac's, 'He is killing himself for you.' 
 
 "I charged the world at large with my revenge, but I was 
 not happy. While I was fathoming the miry depths of life, 
 I only recognized the more keenly at all times the happi- 
 ness of reciprocal affection ; it was a shadow that I followed 
 through all that befell me in my extravagance, and in my 
 wildest moments. It was my misfortune to be deceived in 
 my fairest beliefs, to be punished by ingratitude for benefiting 
 others, and to receive uncounted pleasures as the reward of 
 my errors a sinister doctrine, but a true one for the prodigal ! 
 
 " The contagious leprosy of Fcedora's vanity had taken 
 hold of me at last. I probed my soul, and found it cankered 
 and rotten. I bore the marks of the devil's claw upon my 
 forehead. It was impossible to me thenceforward to do with- 
 out the incessant agitation of a life fraught with danger at 
 every moment, or to dispense with the execrable refinements 
 of luxury. If I had possessed millions, I should still have 
 gambled, reveled, and, racketed about. I wished never to be 
 alone with myself, and I must have false friends and courte- 
 sans, wine and good cheer to distract me. The ties that 
 attach a man to family life had been permanently broken for 
 me. I had become a galley-slave of pleasure, and must accom- 
 plish my destiny of suicide. During the last days of my pros- 
 perity, I spent every night in the most incredible excesses ; 
 but every morning death cast me back upon life again. I 
 would have taken a conflagration with as little concern as any 
 man with a life annuity. However, I at last found myself 
 alone with a twenty-franc piece; I bethought me then of 
 Rastignac's luck 
 
 "Eh, eh! " Raphael exclaimed, interrupting himself, 
 
 as he remembered the talisman and drew it from his pocket. 
 Perhaps he was wearied by the long day's strain, and had no 
 more strength left wherewith to pilot his head through the 
 seas of wine and punch ; or perhaps, exasperated by this
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 173 
 
 symbol of his own existence, the torrent of his own eloquence 
 gradually overwhelmed him. Raphael became excited and 
 elated and like one completely deprived of reason. 
 
 "The devil take death!" he shouted, brandishing the 
 skin ; "I mean to live ! I am rich, I have every virtue ; 
 nothing will withstand me. Who would not be generous, 
 when everything is in his power ? Aha ! aha ! I wished for 
 two hundred thousand livres a year, and I shall have them. 
 Bow down before me, all of you, wallowing on the carpets 
 like swine in the mire ! You all belong to me a precious 
 property truly ! I am rich ! I could buy you all, even the 
 deputy snoring over there. Scum of society, give me your 
 benediction ! I am the Pope." 
 
 Raphael's vociferations had been hitherto drowned by a 
 thorough-bass of snores, but now they became suddenly 
 audible. Most of the sleepers started up with a cry, saw the 
 cause of the disturbance on his feet, tottering uncertainly, and 
 cursed him in concert for a drunken brawler. 
 
 "Silence !" shouted Raphael. "Back to your kennels, 
 you dogs! Emile, I have riches, I will give you Havana 
 cigars ! ' ' 
 
 "I am listening," the poet replied. "Death or Foedora ! 
 On with you ! That silky Foedora deceived you. Women 
 are all daughters of Eve. There is nothing dramatic about 
 that rigmarole of yours." 
 
 "Ah, but you were sleeping, slyboots." 
 
 " No' Death or Foedora ! 'I have it ! " 
 
 "Wake up!" Raphael shouted, beating Emile with the 
 piece of shagreen as if he meant to draw electric fluid out of it. 
 
 " Thunder!" said Emile, springing up and flinging his 
 arms round Raphael ; " my friend, remember the sort of 
 women you are with." 
 
 " I am a millionaire ! " 
 
 " If you are not a millionaire, you are most certainly 
 drunk." 
 
 12
 
 174 THE WILD ASS' 
 
 " Drunk with power. I can kill you ! Silence ! I am 
 Nero ! I am Nebuchadnezzar ! " 
 
 "But, Raphael, we are in queer company, and you ought 
 to keep quiet for the sake of your own dignity." 
 
 " My life has been silent too long. I mean to have my 
 revenge now on the world at large. I will not amuse myself 
 by squandering paltry five-franc pieces ; I will reproduce and 
 sum up my epoch by absorbing human lives, human minds, and 
 human souls. There are the treasures of pestilence that is 
 no paltry kind of wealth, is it ? I will wrestle with fevers 
 yellow, blue, or green with whole armies, with gibbets. 
 I can possess Fcedora. Yet no, I do not want Fcedora ; she 
 is a disease ; I am dying of Fcedora. I want to forget 
 Fcedora ! ' ' 
 
 " If you keep on calling out like this, I shall take you into 
 the dining-room." 
 
 "Do you see this skin? It is Solomon's will. Solomon 
 belongs to me a little varlet of a king ! Arabia is mine, 
 Arabia Petrsea to boot ; and the universe, and you too, if I 
 choose. If I choose ah ! be careful. I can buy up all your 
 journalist's shop ; you shall be my valet. You shall be my 
 valet, you shall manage my newspaper. Valet ! valet, that is 
 to say, free from aches and pains, because he has no brains." 
 
 At the word, Emile carried Raphael off into the dining- 
 room. 
 
 "All right," he remarked; "yes, my friend, I am yotr 
 valet. But you are about to be editor-in-chief of a newspaper ; 
 so be quiet, and behave properly, for my sake. Have you no 
 regard for me ? " 
 
 " Regard for you ! You shall have Havana cigars, with 
 this bit of shagreen; always with this skin, this supreme bit 
 of shagreen. It is a cure for corns, an efficacious remedy. 
 Do you suffer? I will remove them." 
 
 "Never have I known you so senseless " 
 
 "Senseless, my friend? Not at all. This skin contracts
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 17-") 
 
 whenever I form a wish 'tis a paradox. There is a Brahmin 
 underneath it ! The Brahmin must be a droll fellow, for our 
 desires, look you, are bound to expand " 
 
 "Yes, yes " 
 
 "I tell you " 
 
 " Yes, yes, very true, I am quite of your opinion our 
 desires expand " 
 
 "The skin, I tell you." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " You don't believe me. I know you, my friend ; you are 
 as full of lies as a new-made king." 
 
 " How can you expect me to follow your drunken maun- 
 derings?" 
 
 " I will bet you I can prove it. Let us measure it " 
 
 "Goodness! he will never get off to sleep," exclaimed 
 Emile, as he watched Raphael rummaging busily in the 
 dining-room. 
 
 Thanks to the peculiar clearness with which external objects 
 are sometimes projected on an inebriated brain, in sharp con- 
 trast to its own obscure imaginings, Valentin found an ink- 
 stand and a table-napkin, with the quickness of a monkey, 
 repeating all the time 
 
 " Let us measure it ! Let us measure it ! " 
 
 "All right," said Emile ; " let us measure it." 
 
 The two friends spread out the table-napkin and laid the 
 Wild Ass' Skin upon it. As Emile's hand appeared to be 
 steadier than Raphael's, he drew a line with pen and ink 
 round the talisman, while his friend said 
 
 "I wished for an income of two hundred thousand livres, 
 didn't I? Well, when that comes, you will observe a mighty 
 diminution of my shagreen." 
 
 "Yes now go to sleep. Shall I make you comfortable on 
 that sofa? Now then, are you all right? " 
 
 " Yes, my nursling of the press. You shall amuse me ; you 
 shall drive the flies away from me. The friend of adversity
 
 176 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 should be the friend of prosperity. So I will give you some 
 Havan na cig ' 
 
 " Come, now, sleep. Sleep off your gold, you millionaire !" 
 
 "You! sleep off your paragraphs! Good-night! Say 
 good-night to Nebuchadnezzar! love! wine! France! 
 glory and tr treas " 
 
 Very soon the snorings of the two friends were added to 
 the music with which the rooms resounded an ineffectual 
 concert ! The lights went out one by one, their crystal 
 sconces cracking in the final flare. Night threw dark shadows 
 over this prolonged revelry, in which Raphael's narrative had 
 been a second orgy of speech, of words without ideas, of ideas 
 for which words had often been lacking. 
 
 Towards noon, next day, the fair Aquilina bestirred her- 
 self. She yawned wearily. She had slept with her head 
 upon a painted ^velvet footstool, and her cheeks were mottled 
 over by contact with the surface. Her movements awoke 
 Euphrasia, who suddenly sprang up with a hoarse cry ; her 
 pretty face, that had been so fresh and fair in the evening, 
 was sallow now and pallid ; she looked like a candidate for 
 the hospital. The rest awoke also by degrees, with portentous 
 groanings, to feel themselves over in every stiffened limb, and 
 to experience the infinite varieties of weariness that weighed 
 upon them. 
 
 A servant came in to throw back the shutters and open the 
 windows. There they all stood, brought back to conscious- 
 ness by the warm rays of sunlight that shone upon the sleepers' 
 heads. Their movements during slumber had disordered the 
 elaborately arranged hair and toilettes of the women. They 
 presented a ghastly spectacle in the bright daylight. Their 
 hair fell ungracefully about them ; their eyes, lately so bril- 
 liant, were heavy and dim; the expression of their faces was 
 entirely changed. The sickly hues, which daylight brings 
 out so strongly, were frightful. An olive tint had crept over 
 the lymphatic faces, so fair and soft when in repose; the
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 177 
 
 dainty red lips were grown pale and dry, and bore tokens of 
 the degradation of excess. Each disowned his mistress of the 
 night before ; the women looked wan and discolored, like 
 flowers trampled under foot by a passing procession. 
 
 The men who scorned them looked even more horrible. 
 Those human faces would have made you shudder. The 
 hollow eyes with the dark circles round them seemed to see 
 nothing ; they were dull with wine and stupefied with heavy 
 slumbers that had been exhausting rather than refreshing. 
 There was an indescribable, ferocious and stolid bestiality 
 about the haggard faces, where bare physical appetite appeared 
 shorn of all the poetical illusion with which the intellect in- 
 vests it. Even these fearless champions, accustomed to meas- 
 ure themselves with excess, were struck with horror at this 
 awakening of vice, stripped of its disguises, at being con- 
 fronted thus with sin, the skeleton in rags, lifeless and hollow, 
 bereft of the sophistries of the intellect and the enchantments 
 of luxury. Artists and courtesans scrutinized in silence and 
 with haggard glances the surrounding disorder, the rooms 
 where everything had been laid waste at the havoc wrought 
 by heated passions. 
 
 Demoniac laughter broke out when Taillefer, catching the 
 smothered murmurs of his guests, tried to greet them with a 
 grin. His darkly flushed, perspiring countenance loomed upon 
 this pandemonium, like the image of a crime that knows no 
 remorse (see " L'Auberge rouge"). The picture was com- 
 plete. A picture of foul life in the midst of luxury, a hideous 
 mixture of the pomp and squalor of humanity ; an awakening 
 after the frenzy of debauch has crushed and squeezed all the 
 fruits of life in her strong hands, till nothing but unsightly 
 refuse is left to her, and lies in which she believes no longer. 
 You might have thought of death gloating over a family 
 stricken with the plague. 
 
 The sweet scents and dazzling lights, the mirth and the 
 excitement were all no more; disgust with its nauseous sensa-
 
 178 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 tions and searching philosophy was there instead. The sun 
 shone in like truth, the pure outer air was like virtue ; in con- 
 trast with the heated atmosphere, heavy with the fumes of the 
 previous night of revelry. 
 
 Accustomed as they were to their life, many of the girls 
 thought of other days and other wakings ; pure and innocent 
 days when they looked out and saw the roses and honeysuckle 
 about the casement, and the fresh country-side without enrap- 
 tured by the gkd music of the skylark ; while earth lay 
 in mists, lighted by the dawn, and all the glittering radiance 
 of dew. Others imagined the family breakfast, the father 
 and children round the table, the innocent laughter, the un- 
 speakable charm that pervaded it all, the simple hearts and 
 their meal as simple. 
 
 An artist mused upon his quiet studio, on his statue in its 
 severe beauty, and the graceful model who was waiting for 
 him. A young man recollected a lawsuit on which the fortunes 
 of a family hung, and an important transaction that needed 
 his presence. The scholar regretted his study and the noble 
 work that called for him. Nearly everybody was sorry for 
 himself. Emile appeared just then as smiling, blooming, and 
 fresh as the smartest assistant in a fashionable shop. 
 
 " You are all as ugly as bailiffs. You won't be fit for any- 
 thing to-day, so this day is lost, and I vote for breakfast." 
 
 At this Taillefer went out to give some orders. The women 
 went languidly up to the mirrors to set their toilettes in order. 
 Each one shook herself. The wilder sort lectured the steadier 
 ones. The courtesans made fun of those who looked unable 
 to continue the boisterous festivity ; but these wan forms 
 revived at once, stood in groups, and talked and smiled. Some 
 servants quickly and adroitly set the furniture and everything 
 else in its place, and a magnificent breakfast was gotten ready. 
 
 The guests hurried to the dining-room. Everything there 
 bore indelible marks of yesterday's excess, it is true, but there 
 were at any rate some traces of ordinary, rational existence,
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 179 
 
 such traces as may be found in a sick man's dying struggles. 
 And so the revelry was laid away and buried, like carnival of a 
 Shrove Tuesday by masks, wearied out with dancing, drunk 
 with drunkenness, and quite ready to be persuaded of the 
 pleasures of lassitude, lest they be forced to admit their own 
 exhaustion. 
 
 As soon as these bold spirits surrounded the capitalist's 
 breakfast table, Cardot appeared. He had left the rest to 
 make a night of it after the dinner, and finished the evening 
 after his own fashion in the retirement of domestic life. Just 
 now a sweet smile wandered over his features. He seemed to 
 have a presentiment that there would be some inheritance to 
 sample and divide, involving inventories and engrossing; an 
 inheritance rich in fees and deeds to draw up, and something 
 as juicy as the trembling fillet of beef in which their host had 
 just plunged his knife. 
 
 " Oh, ho ! we are to have breakfast in the presence of a 
 notary," cried Cursy. 
 
 "You have come here just at the right time," said the 
 banker, indicating the breakfast; "you can jot down the 
 numbers, and initial off all the dishes." 
 
 "There is no will to make here, but contracts of marriage 
 there may be, perhaps," said the scholar, who had made a 
 satisfactory arrangement on this occasion for the first time in 
 twelve months. 
 
 "Oh! Oh!" 
 
 "Ah! Ah!" 
 
 "One moment," cried Cardot, fairly deafened by a chorus 
 of wretched jokes. "I came here on serious business. I am 
 bringing six millions for one of you. (Dead silence.) " Mon- 
 sieur," he went on, turning to Raphael, who at that moment 
 was unceremoniously wiping his eyes on a corner of the table- 
 napkin, " was not your mother a Mile. O'Flaharty?" 
 
 "Yes," said Raphael, mechanically enough; "Barbara 
 Marie."
 
 180 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 "Have you your certificate of birth about you," Cardot 
 went on, "and Mme. de Valentin's as well?" 
 
 "I believe so." 
 
 "Very well, then, monsieur; you are the sole heir of 
 Major O'Flaharty, who died in August, 1828, at Calcutta." 
 
 " An incalculable fortune," said the critic. 
 
 "The Major having bequeathed several amounts to public 
 institutions in his will, the French government sent in a claim 
 for the remainder to the East India Company," the notary 
 continued. " The estate is clear and ready to be transferred 
 at this moment. I had been looking in vain for the heirs and 
 assigns of Mile. Barbara Marie O'Flaharty for a fortnight 
 past, when yesterday at dinner " 
 
 Just then Raphael suddenly staggered to his feet; he looked 
 like a man who has just received a blow. Acclamation took 
 the form of silence, for stifled envy had been the first feeling 
 in every breast, and all eyes devoured him like flames. Then 
 a murmur rose, and grew like the voice of a discontented 
 audience, or the first mutterings of a riot, as everybody made 
 some comment on this news of great wealth brought by the 
 notary. 
 
 This abrupt subservience of fate brought Raphael thor- 
 oughly to his senses. He immediately spread out the table- 
 napkin with which he had lately taken the measure of the 
 piece of shagreen. He heeded nothing as he laid the talisman 
 upon it, and shuddered involuntarily at the sight of a slight 
 difference between the present size of the skin and the outline 
 traced upon the linen. 
 
 " Why, what is the matter with him?" Taillefer cried. 
 " He comes by his fortune very cheaply." 
 
 "Support him," said Bixiou to Emile. "The joy will 
 kill him." 
 
 A ghastly white hue overspread every line of the wan 
 features of the heir-at-law. His face was drawn, every out- 
 line grew haggard ; the hollows in his livid countenance grew
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 181' 
 
 deeper, and his eyes were fixed and staring. He was facing 
 death. 
 
 The opulent banker, surrounded by faded women, and 
 faces with satiety written on them, the enjoyment that had 
 reached the pitch of agony, was a living illustration of his 
 own life. 
 
 Raphael looked thrice at the talisman, which lay passively 
 within the merciless outlines on the table-napkin ; he tried 
 not to believe it, but his incredulity vanished utterly before 
 the light of an inner presentiment. The whole world was 
 his ; he could have all things, but the will to possess them was 
 utterly extinct. Like a traveler in the midst of the desert, 
 with but a little water left to quench his thirst, he must 
 measure his life by the draughts he took of it. He saw what 
 every desire of his must cost him in the days of his life. He 
 believed in the powers of the Wild Ass' Skin at last ; he 
 listened to every breath he drew; he felt ill already; he 
 asked himself: 
 
 "Am I not consumptive? Did not my mother die of a 
 lung complaint? " 
 
 " Aha, Raphael ! what fun you will have ! What will you 
 give me?" asked Aquilina. 
 
 " Here's to the death of his uncle, Major O'Flaharty ! 
 There's a man for you ! " 
 
 " He will be a peer of France." 
 
 "Pooh ! what is a peer of France since July? " said the 
 amateur critic. 
 
 " Are you going to take a box at the Bouffons ? " 
 
 " You are going to treat us all, I hope ? " put in Bixiou. 
 
 "A man of his sort will be sure to do things in style," 
 said Emile. 
 
 The hurrah set up by the jovial assembly rang in Valentin's 
 ears, but he could not grasp the sense of a single word. 
 Vague thoughts crossed him of the Breton peasant's life of 
 mechanical labor, without a wish of any kind ; he pictured
 
 182 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 him burdened with a family, tilling the soil, living on buck- 
 wheat meal, drinking cider out of a pitcher, believing in the 
 Virgin and the King, taking the sacrament at Easter, dancing 
 of a Sunday on the green sward, and understanding never a 
 word of the rector's sermon. The actual scene that lay before 
 him, the gilded furniture, the courtesans, the feast itself, and 
 the surrounding splendors, seemed to catch him by the throat 
 and made him cough. 
 
 " Do you wish for some asparagus? " the banker cried. 
 
 " 1 'wish for nothing /" thundered Raphael. 
 
 "Bravo!" Taillefer exclaimed; "you understand your 
 position ; a fortune confers the privilege of being impertinent. 
 You are one of us. Gentlemen, let us drink to the might of 
 gold ! M. Valentin here, six times a millionaire, has become a 
 power. He is a king, like all the rich ; everything is at his dis- 
 posal, everything lies under his feet. From this time forth the 
 axiom that ' all Frenchmen are alike in the eyes of the law,' is 
 for him a fib at the head of the Constitutional Charter. He is 
 not going to obey the law the law is going to obey him. 
 There are neither scaffolds nor executioners for millionaires." 
 
 " Yes, there are," said Raphael ; " they are their own exe- 
 cutioners." 
 
 " Here is another victim of prejudices," cried the banker. 
 
 "Let us drink !" Raphael said, putting the talisman into 
 his pocket. 
 
 "What are you doing?" said Emile, checking his move- 
 ment. "Gentlemen," he added, addressing the company, 
 who were rather taken aback by Raphael's behavior, "yon 
 must know that our friend Valentin here what am I saying? 
 I mean my Lord Marquis de Valentin is in possession of 
 a secret for obtaining wealth. His wishes are fulfilled as soon 
 as he knows them. He will make us all rich together, or he 
 is a flunkey, and devoid of all decent feeling." 
 
 " Oh, Raphael dear, I should like a set of pearl ornaments !" 
 Euphrasia exclaimed.
 
 A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. 183 
 
 "If he has any gratitude in him, he will give me a couple 
 of carriages with fast steppers," said Aquilina. 
 
 " Wish for a hundred thousand a year for me ! " 
 
 " India shawls !" 
 
 "Pay my debts!" 
 
 " Send an apoplexy to my uncle, the old stick ! " 
 
 " Ten thousand a year in the funds, and I'll cry quits with 
 you, Raphael ! " 
 
 " Deeds of gift and no mistake," was the notary's com- 
 ment. 
 
 " He ought, at least, to rid me of the gout ! " 
 
 " Lower the funds ! " shouted the banker. 
 
 These phrases flew about like the last discharge of rockets 
 at the end of a display of fireworks ; and were uttered, per- 
 haps more in earnest than in jest. 
 
 " My good friend," Emile said solemnly, "I shall be quite 
 satibfied with an income of two hundred thousand livres. 
 Please to set about it at once." 
 
 " Do you not know the cost, Emile?" asked Raphael. 
 
 " A nice excuse ! " the poet cried ; " ought we not to sacri- 
 fice ourselves for our friends?" 
 
 "I have almost a mind to wish that you were all dead," 
 Valentin made answer, with a dark, inscrutable look at his 
 boon companions. 
 
 " Dying people are frightfully cruel," said Emile, laughing. 
 " You are rich now," he went on gravely ; " very well, I will 
 give you two months at most before you grow vilely selfish. 
 You are so dense already that you cannot understand a joke. 
 You have only to go a little further to believe in your Wild 
 Ass' Skin. 
 
 Raphael kept silent, fearing the banter of the company ; 
 but he drank immoderately, trying to drown in intoxication 
 the recollection of his fatal power.
 
 Ill 
 THE AGONY. 
 
 IN the early days of December an old man of some seventy 
 years of age pursued his way along the Rue de Varenne, 
 in spite of the falling rain. He peered up at the door of 
 each house, trying to discover the address of the Marquis 
 Raphael de Valentin, in a simple, childlike fashion, and with 
 the abstracted look peculiar to philosophers. His face plainly 
 showed traces of a struggle between a heavy mortification and 
 an authoritative nature ; his long gray hair hung in disorder 
 about a face like a piece of parchment, shriveling in the fire. 
 If a painter had come upon this curious character, he would, 
 no doubt, have transferred him .to his sketch-book on his 
 return, a thin, bony figure, clad in black, and have inscibed 
 beneath it : "Classical poet in search of a rhyme." When 
 he had identified the number that had been given to him, 
 this re-incarnation of Rollin knocked meekly at the door of a 
 splendid mansion. 
 
 " Is Monsieur Raphael in?" the worthy man inquired of 
 the Swiss in livery. 
 
 "My Lord the Marquis sees nobody," said the servant, 
 swallowing a huge morsel that he had just dipped in a large 
 bowl of coffee. 
 
 " There is his carriage," said the elderly stranger, pointing 
 to a fine equipage that stood under the wooden canopy that 
 sheltered the steps before the house, in place of a striped linen 
 awning. " He is going out ; I will wait for him." 
 
 "Then you might wait here till to-morrow morning, old 
 boy," said the Swiss. "A carriage is always waiting for 
 monsieur. Please go away. If I were to let any stranger 
 
 (184)
 
 THE AGONY. 185 
 
 come into the house without orders, I should lose an income 
 of six hundred francs." 
 
 A tall old man, in a costume not unlike that of a subordi- 
 nate in the civil service, came out of the vestibule and hurried 
 part of the way down the steps, while he made a survey of the 
 astonished elderly applicant for admission. 
 
 " What is more, here is M. Jonathan," the Swiss remarked ; 
 " speak to him." 
 
 Fellow-feeling of some kind, or curiosity, brought the two 
 old men together in a central space in the great entrance 
 court. A few blades of grass were growing in the crevices of 
 the pavement ; a terrible silence reigned in that great house. 
 The sight of Jonathan's face would have made you long to 
 understand the mystery that brooded over it, and that was 
 announced by the smallest trifles about the melancholy place. 
 
 When Raphel inherited his uncle's vast estate, his first care 
 had been to seek out the old and devoted servitor of whose 
 affection he knew that he was secure. Jonathan had wept 
 tears of joy at the sight of his young master, of whom he 
 thought he had taken a final farewell ; and when the Marquis 
 exalted him to the high office of steward, his happiness could 
 not be surpassed. So old Jonathan became an intermediary 
 power between Raphael and the world at large. He was the 
 absolute disposer of his master's fortune, the blind instrument 
 of an unknown will, and a sixth sense, as it were, by which 
 the emotions of life were communicated to Raphael. 
 
 ."I should like to speak with M. Raphael, sir," said the 
 elderly person to Jonathan, as he climbed up the steps some 
 way, into a shelter from the rain. 
 
 "To speak with my lord the Marquis ? " the steward cried. 
 " He scarcely speaks even to me, his foster-father !" 
 
 "But I am likewise his foster-father," said the old man. 
 " If your wife was his foster-mother, I fed him myself with 
 the milk of the Muses. He is my nursling, my child, carus 
 alumnus ! I formed his mind, cultivated his understanding,
 
 18G 7'HE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 developed his genius, and, I venture to say it, to my own 
 honor and glory. Is he not one of the most remarkable men 
 of our epoch? He was one of my pupils in two lower forms, 
 and in rhetoric. I am his professor." 
 
 " Ah, sir, then you are M. Porriquet ? " 
 
 " Exactly, sir, but 
 
 " Hush ! hush ! " Jonathan called to two underlings, whose 
 voices broke the monastic silence that shrouded the house. 
 
 ''But is the Marquis ill, sir?" the professor continued. 
 
 "My dear sir," Jonathan replied, "heaven only knows 
 what is the matter with my master. You see, there are not a 
 couple of houses like ours anywhere in Paris. Do you under- 
 stand ? Not two houses. Faith, that there are not. My 
 lord the Marquis had this hotel purchased for him ; it form- 
 erly belonged to a duke and a peer of France ; then he spent 
 three hundred thousand francs over furnishing it. That's a 
 good deal, you know, three hundred thousand francs ! But 
 every room in the house is a perfect wonder. ' Good,' said 
 I to myself when I saw this magnificence ; ' it is just like it 
 used to be in the time of my lord, his late grandfather; and 
 the young Marquis is going to entertain all Paris and the 
 Court ! ' Nothing of the kind ! My lord refused to see any 
 one whatever. 'Tis a funny life that he leads, M. Porriquet, 
 you understand. An inconciliable life. He rises everyday at 
 the same time. I am the only person, you see, that may 
 enter his room. I open the shutters at seven o'clock, summer 
 or winter. It is all arranged very oddly. As I come in I 
 say to him 
 
 " 'You must get up and dress, my lord Marquis.' 
 
 " Then he rises and dresses hinself. I have to give him 
 his dressing-gown, and it is always after the same pattern, 
 and of the same material. I am obliged to replace it when it 
 can be used no longer, simply to save him the trouble of ask- 
 ing for a new one. A queer fancy ! As a matter of fact, he 
 has a thousand francs to spend every day, and he does as he
 
 THE AGONY. 187 
 
 pleases, the dear child. And besides, I am so fond of him 
 that if he gave me a box on the ear on one side, I should hold 
 out the other to him ! The most difficult things he will tell 
 me to do, and yet I do them, you know ! He gives me such a lot 
 of trifles to attend to, that I am well set to work ! He reads 
 the newspapers, doesn't he? Well, my instructions are to 
 put them always in the same place, on the same table. I 
 always go at the same hour and shave him myself; and don't 
 I tremble ! The cook would forfeit the annuity of a thousand 
 crowns that he is to come into after my lord's death, if break- 
 fast is not served inconciliably at ten o'clock precisely. The 
 menus are drawn up for the whole year round, day after day. 
 My lord the Marquis has not a thing to wish for. He has 
 strawberries whenever there are any, and he has the earliest 
 mackerel to be had in Paris. The programme is printed 
 every morning. He knows his dinner by rote. In the next 
 place, he dresses himself at the same hour, in the same clothes, 
 the same linen, that I always put on the same chair, you 
 understand ? I have to see that he always has the same cloth ; 
 and if it should happen that his coat came to grief (a mere 
 supposition), I should have to replace it by another without 
 saying a word about it to him. If it is fine, I go in and say 
 to my master 
 
 " ' You ought to go out, sir.' 
 
 " He says Yes, or No. If he has a notion that he will go 
 out, he doesn't wait for his horses ; they are always ready 
 harnessed; the coachman stops there inconciliably, whip in 
 hand, just as you see him out there. In the evening, after 
 dinner, my master goes one day to the opera, the other to the 
 
 Ital no, he hasn't yet gone to the Italiens, though, for I 
 
 could not find a box for him until yesterday. Then he comes 
 in at eleven o'clock precisely, to go to bed. At any time in 
 the day when he has nothing to do, he reads he is always 
 reading, you see it is a notion he has. My instructions are 
 to read the Journal dela Librairie before he sees it, and to
 
 188 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 buy new books, so that he finds them on his chimney-piece on 
 the very day that they are published. I have orders to go 
 into his room every hour or so, to look after the fire and 
 everything else, and to see that he wants nothing. He gave 
 me a little book, sir, to learn off by heart, with all my duties 
 written in it a regular catechism ! In summer I have to 
 keep a cool and even temperature with blocks of ice, and at 
 all seasons to put fresh flowers all about. He is rich ! He 
 has a thousand francs to spend every day ; he can indulge his 
 fancies! And he hadn't even necessaries for so long, poor 
 child ! He doesn't annoy anybody; he is as good as gold ; 
 he never opens his mouth, for instance; the house and garden 
 are absolutely silent. In short, my master has not a single 
 wish left ; everything comes in the twinkling of an eye, if he 
 raises his hand, and instanter. Quite right, too. If servants 
 are not looked after, everything falls into confusion. You 
 would never believe the lengths he goes about things. His 
 rooms are all what do you call it ! er er en suite. Very 
 well ; just suppose, now, that he opens his room door or the 
 door of his study ; presto ! all the other doors fly open them- 
 selves by a patent contrivance ; and then he can go from one 
 end of the house to the other and not find a single door shut; 
 which is all very nice and pleasant and convenient for us great 
 folk ! But, on my word, it costs us a lot of money ! And, 
 after all, M. Porriquet, he said to me at last 
 
 " ' Jonathan, you will look after me as if I were a baby in 
 long clothes.' Yes, sir, 'long clothes! ' those were his very 
 words. 'You will think of all my requirements for me.' I 
 am the master, so to speak, and he is the servant, you under- 
 stand? The reason of it? Ah, my word, that is just what 
 nobody on earth knows but he himself and God Almighty. 
 It is quite inconciliable ! " 
 
 " He is writing a poem ! " exclaimed the old professor. 
 
 "You think he is writing a poem, sir ? It is a very absorbing 
 affair, then ! But, you know, I don't think he is. He often
 
 THE AGONY. 189 
 
 tells me that he wants to live like a vergetation ; he wants to 
 vergetate. Only yesterday he was looking at a tulip while he 
 was dressing, and he said to me 
 
 " 'There is my own life I am vergetating, my poor Jona- 
 than.' Now, some of them insist that that is monomania. 
 It is inconciliable ! ' ' 
 
 "All this makes it very clear to me, Jonathan," the pro- 
 fessor answered, with a magisterial solemnity that greatly im- 
 pressed the old servant, "that your master is absorbed in a 
 great work. He is deep in vast meditations, and has no wish 
 to be distracted by the petty preoccupations of ordinary life. 
 A man of genius forgets everything among his intellectual 
 labors. One day the famous Newton " 
 
 "Newton? oh, ah! I don't know the name," said 
 Jonathan. 
 
 " Newton, a great geometrician," Porriquet went on," once 
 sat for twenty-four hours leaning his elbow on the table ; when 
 he emerged from his musings, he was a day out in his reckon- 
 ing, just as if he had been sleeping. I will go to see him, 
 dear lad ; I may perhaps be of some use to him." 
 
 " Not for a moment ! " Jonathan cried. " Not though you 
 were King of France I mean the real one. You could not 
 go in unless you forced the doors open and walked over my 
 body. But I will go and tell him you are here, M. Porriquet, 
 and I will put it to him like this, ' Ought he to come up ? ' 
 And he will say Yes or No. I never say, ' Do you wish ? ' or 
 ' Will you ? ' or ' Do you want ? ' Those words are scratched 
 out of the dictionary. He let out at me once with a ' Do you 
 want to kill me? ' he was so very angry." 
 
 Jonathan left the old schoolmaster in the vestibule, signing 
 to him to come no further, and soon returned with a favor- 
 able answer. He led the old gentleman through one magnifi- 
 cent room after another, where every door stood open. At 
 last Porriquet beheld his pupil at some distance seated beside 
 
 the fire. 
 
 13
 
 190 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 Raphael was reading the paper. He sat in an arm-chair, 
 wrapped in a dressing-gown with some large pattern on it. 
 The intense melancholy that preyed upon him could be dis- 
 cerned in his languid posture and feeble frame ; it was depicted 
 on his brow and white face ; he looked like some plant 
 bleached by darkness. There was a kind of effeminate grace 
 about him ; the fancies peculiar to wealthy invalids were also 
 noticeable. His hands were soft and white, like a pretty 
 woman's ; he wore his fair hair, now grown scanty, curled 
 about his temples with a refinement of vanity. 
 
 The Greek cap that he wore was pulled to one side by the 
 weight of its tassel ; too heavy for the light material of which 
 it was made. He had let the paper-knife fall at his feet, a 
 malachite blade with gold mounting, which he had used to 
 cut the leaves of a book. The amber mouth-piece of a mag- 
 nificent India hookah lay on his knee ; the enameled coils 
 lay like a serpent in the room, but he had forgotten to draw 
 out its fresh perfume. And yet there was a complete contra- 
 diction between the general feebleness of his young frame and 
 the blue eyes, where all his vitality seemed to dwell ; an 
 extraordinary intelligence seemed to look out from them and 
 to grasp everything at once. 
 
 That expression was painful to see. Some would have read 
 despair in it, and others some inner conflict terrible as remorse. 
 It was the inscrutable glance of helplessness that must perforce 
 consign its desires to the depth of its own heart ; or of a 
 miser enjoying in imagination all the pleasures that his money 
 could procure for him, while he declines to lessen his hoard ; 
 the look of a bound Prometheus, of the fallen Napoleon of 
 1815, when he learned at the Elysee the strategical blunder 
 that his enemies had made, and asked for twenty-four hours 
 of command in vain ; or rather it was the same look that 
 Raphael had turned upon the Seine, or upon his last piece of 
 gold at the gaming table only a few months ago. 
 
 He was submitting his intelligence and his will to the homely
 
 THE AGONY. 191 
 
 common-sense of an old peasant whom fifty years of domestic 
 service had scarcely civilized. He had given up all the rights 
 of life in order to live ; he had despoiled his soul of all the 
 romance that lies in a wish ; and almost rejoiced at thus be- 
 coming a sort of automaton. The better to struggle with the 
 cruel power that he had challenged, he had followed Origen's 
 example, and had maimed and chastened his imagination. 
 
 The day after he had seen the dimunition of the Wild 
 Ass' Skin, at his sudden accession of wealth, he happened to 
 be at his notary's house. A well-known physician had told 
 them quite seriously, at dessert, how a Swiss attacked by con- 
 sumption had cured himself. The man had never spoken a 
 word for ten years, and had compelled himself to draw six 
 breaths only, every minute, in the close atmosphere of a cow- 
 house, adhering all the time to a regimen of exceedingly light 
 diet. " I will be like that man," thought Raphael to himself. 
 He wanted life at any price, and so he led the life of a 
 machine in the midst of all the luxury around him. 
 
 The old professor confronted this youthful corpse and shud- 
 dered ; there seemed something unnatural about the meagre, 
 enfeebled frame. In the Marquis, with his eager eyes and 
 careworn forehead, he could hardly recognize the fresh-cheeked 
 and rosy pupil with the active limbs, whom he remembered. 
 If the worthy classicist, sage critic, and general preserver of 
 the traditions of correct taste had read Byron, he would have 
 thought that he had come on a Manfred when he looked to find 
 Childe Harold. 
 
 "Good-day, Pere Porriquet, " said Raphael, pressing the 
 old schoolmaster's frozen fingers in his own hot damp ones ; 
 " how are you? " 
 
 "I am very well," replied the other, alarmed by the touch 
 of that feverish hand. " But how about you ? " 
 
 " Oh, I am hoping to keep myself in health." 
 
 "You are engaged on some great work, no doubt?" 
 
 "No," Raphael answered. "Exegimonumentum,*P&e'PoT-
 
 192 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 riquet ; I have contributed an important page to science, and 
 have now bidden her farewell forever. I scarcely know where 
 my manuscript is." 
 
 " The style is no doubt correct ? ' ' queried the schoolmaster. 
 " You, I hope, would never have adopted the barbarous lan- 
 guage of the new school, which fancies it has worked such 
 wonders by discovering Ronsard ! " 
 
 " My work treats of physiology pure and simple." 
 
 "Oh, then, there is no more to be said," the schoolmaster 
 answered. "Grammar must yield to the exigencies of dis- 
 covery. Nevertheless, young man, a lucid and harmonious 
 style the diction of Massillon, of M. de Buffon, of the great 
 Racine a classical style, in short, can never spoil anything 
 But, my friend," the schoolmaster interrupted himself, "I 
 was forgetting the object of my visit, which concerns my own 
 interests." 
 
 Too late Raphael recalled to mind the verbose eloquence 
 and elegant circumlocutions which in a long professorial career 
 had grown habitual to his old tutor, and almost regretted that 
 he had admitted him ; but just as he was about to wish to see 
 him safely outside, he promptly suppressed his secret desire 
 with a stealthy glance at the Wild Ass' Skin. It hung there 
 before him, fastened down upon some white material, sur- 
 rounded by a red line accurately traced about its prophetic 
 outlines. Since that fatal carouse, Raphael had stifled every 
 least whim, and had lived so as not to cause the slightest 
 movement in the terrible talisman. The Wild Ass' Skin was 
 like a tiger with which he must live without exciting its fero- 
 city. He bore patiently, therefore, with the old schoolmaster's 
 prolixity. 
 
 Porriquet spent an hour in telling him about the persecu- 
 tions directed against him ever since the Revolution of July. 
 The worthy man, having a liking for strong governments, had 
 expressed the patriotic wish that grocers should be left to 
 their counters, statesmen to the management of public busi-
 
 THE AGONY. 193 
 
 ness, advocates to the Palais de Justice, and the peers of 
 France to the Luxembourg; but one of the popularity-seeking 
 ministers of the Citizen King had ousted him from his chair, 
 on an accusation of Charlism, and the old man now found 
 himself without pension or post, and with no bread to eat. 
 As he played the part of guardian angel to a poor nephew, 
 for whose schooling at Saint Sulpice he was paying, he came 
 less on his own account than for his adopted child's sake, to 
 entreat his former pupil's interest with the new minister. He 
 did not ask to be reinstated, but only for a position at the 
 head of some provincial school. 
 
 Raphael had fallen a victim to unconquerable drowsiness 
 by the time that the worthy man's monotonous voice ceased 
 to sound in his ears. Civility had compelled him to look at 
 the pale and unmoving eyes of the deliberate and tedious old 
 narrator, till he himself had reached stupefaction, magnetized 
 in an inexplicable way by the power of inertia. 
 
 " Well, my dear Pere Porriquet," he said, not very certain 
 what the question was to which he was replying, "but I can 
 do nothing for you, nothing at all. I wish very heartily that 
 you may succeed " 
 
 All at once, without seeing the change wrought on the old 
 man's sallow and wrinkled brow by these conventional phrases, 
 full of indifference and selfishness, Raphael sprang to his feet 
 like a startled roebuck. He saw a thin white line between 
 the black piece of hide and the red tracing about it, and gave 
 a cry so fearful that the poor professor was frightened by it. 
 
 " Old fool ! Go ! " he cried. " You will be appointed as 
 headmaster. Couldn't you have asked me for an annuity of 
 a thousand crowns rather than a murderous wish ? Your vi'sit 
 would have cost me nothing. There are a hundred thousand 
 situations to be had in France, but I have only one life. A 
 man's life is worth more than all the situations in the world. 
 Jonathan ! " 
 
 Jonathan appeared.
 
 194 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 " This is your doing, double-distilled idiot ! What made 
 you suggest that I should see M. Porriquet ? " and he pointed 
 to the old man, who was petrified with fright. " Did I put 
 myself into your hands for you to tear me in pieces ? You 
 have just shortened my life by ten years ! Another blunder 
 of this kind, and you will lay me where I have laid my father. 
 Would I not far rather have possessed the beautiful Foedora ? 
 And I have obliged that old hulk instead that rag of hu- 
 manity ! I had money enough for him. And, moreover, if 
 all the Porriquets in the world were dying of hunger, what is 
 that to me ? " 
 
 Raphael's face was white with anger ; a slight froth marked 
 his trembling lips ; there was a savage gleam in his eyes. 
 The two elders shook with terror in his presence like two chil- 
 dren at the sight of a snake. The young man fell back in his 
 armchair, a kind of reaction took place in him, the tears 
 flowed fast from his angry eyes. 
 
 "Oh, my life ! " he cried, " that fair life of mine. Never 
 to know a kindly thought again, to love no more ; nothing is 
 left to me! " 
 
 He turned to the professor and went on in a gentle voice 
 " The harm is done, my old friend. Your services have been 
 well repaid ; and my misfortune has at any rate contributed 
 to the welfare of a good and worthy man." 
 
 His tones betrayed so much feeling that the almost unin- 
 telligible words drew tears from the two old men, such tears 
 as are shed over some pathetic song in a foreign tongue. 
 
 " He is epileptic," muttered Porriquet. 
 
 "I understand your kind intentions, my friend," Raphael 
 answered gently. "You would make excuses for me. Ill- 
 health cannot be helped, but ingratitude is a grievous fault. 
 Leave me now," he added. "To-morrow, or the next day, 
 or possibly to-night, you will receive your appointment ; 
 resistance has triumphed over motion. Farewell." 
 
 The old schoolmaster went away, full of keen apprehension
 
 THE AGONY. 195 
 
 as to Valentin's sanity. A thrill of horror ran through him ; 
 there had been something supernatural, he thought, in the 
 scene he had passed through. He could hardly believe his 
 own impressions, and questioned them like one awakened 
 from a painful dream. 
 
 " Now attend to me, Jonathan," said the young man to his 
 old servant. "Try to understand the charge confided to 
 you." 
 
 "Yes, my Lord Marquis." 
 
 " I am as a man outlawed from humanity." 
 
 "Yes, my Lord Marquis." 
 
 "All the pleasures of life disport themselves round my bed 
 of death, and dance about me like fair women ; but if I 
 beckon to them I must die. Death always confronts me. 
 You must be the barrier between the world and me." 
 
 "Yes, my Lord Marquis," said the old servant, wiping the 
 drops of perspiration from his wrinkled forehead. " But if 
 you don't wish to see pretty women how will you manage at 
 the Italiens this evening? An English family is returning to 
 London, and I have taken their box for the rest of the season, 
 and it is in a splendid position superb; in the first row." 
 
 Raphael, deep in his own musings, paid no attention to 
 him. 
 
 Do you see that splendid equipage, a brougham painted a 
 dark brown color, but with the arms of an ancient and noble 
 family shining from the panels ? As it rolls past, all the shop- 
 girls admire it, and look longingly at the yellow satin lining, 
 the rugs from la Savonnerie, the daintiness and freshness of 
 every detail, the silken cushions and tightly-fitting glass 
 windows. Two liveried footmen are mounted behind this 
 aristocratic carriage ; and within, a head lies back among the 
 silken cushions, the feverish face and hollow eyes of Raphael, 
 melancholy and sad. Emblem of the doom of wealth ! He 
 flies across Paris like a rocket, and reaches the peristyle of the 
 The&tre Favart. The passers-by make way for him; the
 
 196 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 two footmen help him to alight, an envious crowd looking on 
 the while. 
 
 "What has that fellow done to be so rich ? " asks a poor 
 law-student, who cannot listen to the magical music of Ros- 
 sini for lack of a five-franc piece. 
 
 Raphael walked slowly along the gangway ; he expected no 
 enjoyment from these pleasures he had once coveted so eagerly. 
 In the interval before the second act of Semiramide he walked 
 up and down in the lobby, and along the corridors, leaving 
 his box, which he had not yet entered, to look after itself. 
 The instinct of property was dead within him already. Like 
 all invalids, he thought of nothing but his own sufferings. He 
 was leaning against the chimney-piece in the green-room. A 
 group had gathered about it of dandies, young and old, of 
 ministers and ex-ministers, of peers without peerages, and peer- 
 ages without peers, for so the Revolution of July had ordered 
 matters. Among a host of adventurers and journalists, in 
 fact, Raphael beheld a strange, unearthly figure a few paces 
 away among the crowd. He went towards this grotesque 
 object to see it better, half-closing his eyes with exceeding 
 superciliousness. 
 
 " What a wonderful bit of painting ! " he said to himself. 
 The stranger's hair and eyebrows and a Mazarin tuft on the 
 chin had been dyed black, but the result was a spurious, 
 glossy, purple tint that varied its hues according to the 
 light ; the hair had been too white, no doubt, to take the 
 preparation. Anxiety and cunning were depicted in the 
 narrow, insignificant face, with its wrinkles incrusted by thick 
 layers of red and white paint. This red enamel, lacking on 
 some portions of his face, strongly brought out his natural 
 feebleness and livid hues. It was impossible not to smile 
 at this visage with the protuberant forehead and pointed 
 chin, a face not unlike those grotesque wooden figures that 
 German herdsmen carve in their spare moments. 
 
 An attentive observer looking from Raphael to this elderly
 
 THE AGONY. 197 
 
 Adonis would have remarked a young man's eyes set in a mask 
 of age, in the case of the marquis, and in the other case the 
 dim eyes of age peering forth from behind a mask of youth. 
 Valentin tried to recollect when and where he had seen this 
 little old man before. He was thin, fastidiously cravatted, 
 booted and spurred like one-and-twenty ; he crossed his arms 
 and clinked his spurs as if he possessed all the wanton energy 
 of youth. He seemed to move about without constraint or 
 difficulty. He had carefully buttoned up his fashionable 
 coat, which disguised his powerful, elderly frame, and gave 
 him the appearance of an antiquated coxcomb who still follows 
 the fashions. 
 
 For Raphael this animated puppet possessed all the interest 
 of an apparition. He gazed at it as if it had been some 
 smoke-begrimed Rembrandt, recently restored and newly 
 framed. This idea found him a clue to the truth among his 
 confused recollections ; he recognized the dealer in antiqui- 
 ties, the man to whom he owed his calamities ! 
 
 A noiseless laugh broke just then from the fantastical per- 
 sonage, straightening the line of his lips that stretched across 
 a row of artificial teeth. That laugh brought out, for 
 Raphael's heated fancy, a strong resemblance between the 
 man before him and the type of head that painters have as- 
 signed to Goethe's Mephistopheles. A crowd of superstitious 
 thoughts entered Raphael's sceptical mind ; he was convinced 
 of the powers of the devil and of all the sorcerer's enchant- 
 ments embodied in mediaeval tradition, and since worked up 
 by poets. Shrinking in horror from the destiny of Faust, he 
 prayed for the protection of Heaven with all the ardent faith 
 of a dying man in God and the Virgin. A clear, bright radi- 
 ance seemed to give him a glimpse of the heaven of Michel 
 Angelo or of Raphael of Urbino : a venerable white-bearded 
 man, a beautiful woman seated in an aureole of the clouds 
 and winged cherub heads. Now he had grasped and received 
 the meaning of those imaginative, almost human creations;
 
 198 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 they seemed to explain what had happened to him, to leave 
 him yet one hope. 
 
 But when the greenroom of the Italiens returned upon his 
 sight, he beheld not the Virgin, but a very handsome young 
 person. The execrable Euphrasia, in all the splendor of her 
 toilette, with its orient pearls, had come thither, impatient 
 for her ardent, elderly admirer. She was insolently exhibiting 
 herself with her defiant face and glittering eyes to an envious 
 crowd of stockbrokers, a visible testimony to the inexhaustible 
 wealth that the old dealer permitted her to squander. 
 
 Raphael recollected the mocking wish with which he had 
 accepted the old man's luckless gift, and tasted all the sweets 
 of revenge when he beheld the spectacle of sublime wisdom 
 fallen to such a depth as this, wisdom for which such humilia- 
 tion had seemed a thing impossible. The centenarian greeted 
 Euphrasia with a ghastly smile, receiving her honeyed words 
 in reply. He offered her his emaciated arm, and went twice 
 or thrice round the greenroom with her ; the envious glances 
 and compliments with which the crowd received his mistress 
 delighted him ; he did not see the scornful smiles, nor hear 
 the caustic comments to which he gave rise. 
 
 " In what cemetery did this young ghoul unearth that 
 corpse of hers? " asked the dandy of the romantic faction. 
 
 "Euphrasia began to smile. The speaker was a slender, 
 fair-haired youth, with bright blue eyes, and a moustache. 
 His short dress coat, hat tilted over one ear, and sharp tongue, 
 all denoted the species. 
 
 "How many old men," said Raphael to himself, "bring 
 an upright, virtuous, and hard-working life to a close in folly ! 
 His feet are cold already, and he is making love." 
 
 "Well, sir," exclaimed Valentin, stopping the merchant's 
 progress, while he stared hard at Euphrasia, " have you quite 
 forgotten the stringent maxims of your philosophy? " 
 
 "Ah, I am as happy now as a young man," said the other, 
 in a cracked voice. "I used to look at existence from a
 
 THE AGONY. 199 
 
 wrong standpoint. One hour of love has a whole life in it." 
 The playgoers heard the bell ring, and left the greenroom 
 to take their places again. Raphael and the old merchant sepa- 
 rated. As he entered his box, the Marquis saw Foedora sitting 
 exactly opposite to him on the other side of the theatre. The 
 Countess had probably only just come, for she was just flinging 
 off her scarf to leave her throat uncovered, and was occupied 
 with going through all the indescribable manoeuvres of a 
 coquette arranging herself. All eyes were turned upon her. 
 A young peer of France had come with her; she asked him 
 for the lorgnette which she had given him to carry. Raphael 
 knew the despotism to which his successor had resigned him- 
 self, in her gestures, and in the way she treated her companion. 
 He was also under the spell no doubt, another dupe beating 
 with all the might of a real affection against the woman's cold 
 calculations, enduring all the tortures from which Valentin 
 had luckily freed himself. 
 
 Fcedora's face lighted up with indescribable joy. After 
 directing her lorgnette upon every box in turn, to make a rapid 
 survey of all the dresses, she was conscious that by her toilette 
 and her beauty she had eclipsed the loveliest and best-dressed 
 women in Paris. She laughed to show her white teeth ; her 
 head with its wreath of flowers was never still, in her quest 
 of admiration. Her glances went from one box to another, 
 as she diverted herself with the awkward way in which a 
 Russian princess wore her bonnet, or over the utter failure of 
 a bonnet with which a banker's daughter had disfigured her- 
 self. 
 
 All at once she met Raphael's steady gaze and turned pale, 
 aghast at the intolerable contempt in her rejected lover's eyes. 
 Not one of her exiled suitors had failed to own her power over 
 them ; Valentin alone was proof against her attractions. A 
 power that can be defied with impunity is drawing to its end. 
 This axiom is as deeply engraved on the heart of woman as 
 in the minds of kings. In Raphael, therefore, Fcedora saw
 
 200 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 the deathblow of her influence and her ability to please. An 
 epigram of his, made at the opera the day before, was already 
 known in the salons of Paris. The biting edge of that terrible 
 speech had already given the Countess an incurable wound. 
 We know how to cauterize a wound, but we know of no treat- 
 ment as yet for the stab of a phrase. As every other woman 
 in the house looked by turns at her and at the Marquis, Fcedora 
 would have consigned them all to the dungeons of some Bas- 
 tille ; for in spite of her capacity for dissimulation, her discom- 
 fiture was discerned by her rivals. Her unfailing consolation 
 had slipped from her at last. The delicious thought, " I am 
 the most beautiful," the thought that all times had soothed 
 every mortification, had turned into a lie. 
 
 At the opening of the second act a woman took up her 
 position not very far from Raphael, in a box that had been 
 empty hitherto. A murmur of admiration went up from the 
 whole house. In that sea of human faces there was a move- 
 ment of every living wave ; all eyes were turned upon the 
 stranger lady. The applause of young and old were so pro- 
 longed, that when the orchestra began, the musicians turned 
 to the audience to request silence, and then they themselves 
 joined in the plaudits and swelled the confusion. Excited 
 talk began in every box, every woman equipped herself with 
 an opera glass, elderly men grew young again, and polished 
 the glasses of their lorgnettes with their gloves. The enthus- 
 iasm subsided by degrees, the stage echoed with the voices of 
 the singers, and order reigned as before. The aristocratic 
 section, ashamed of having yielded to a spontaneous feeling, 
 again assumed their wonted politely frigid manner. The well- 
 to-do dislike to be astonished at anything ; at the first sight 
 of a beautiful thing it becomes their duty to discover the 
 defect in it which absolves them from admiring it the feeling 
 of all ordinary minds. Yet a few still remained motionless 
 and heedless of the music, artlessly absorbed in the delight 
 of watching Raphael's neighbor.
 
 THE AGONY. 201 
 
 Valentin noticed Taillefer's mean, obnoxious countenance 
 by Aquilina's side in a lower box, and received an approving 
 smirk from him. Then he saw Emile, who seemed to say 
 from where he stood in the orchestra, " Just look at that lovely 
 creature there, close beside you ! " Lastly, he saw Rastignac, 
 with Mme. de Nucingen and her daughter, twisting his gloves 
 like a man in despair, because he was tethered to his place, 
 and could not leave it to go any nearer to the unknown fair 
 divinity. 
 
 Raphael's life depended upon a covenant that he had made 
 with himself, and had hitherto kept sacred. He would give 
 no special heed to any woman whatever ; and the better to 
 guard against temptation, he used a cunningly contrived opera- 
 glass which destroyed the harmony of the fairest features by 
 hideous distortions. He had not recovered from the terror 
 that had seized on him in the morning when, at a mere ex- 
 pression of civility, the Wild Ass' Skin had contracted so 
 abruptly. So Raphael was determined not to turn his face in 
 the direction of his neighbor. He sat imperturbable as a 
 duchess, with his back against the corner of the box, thereby 
 shutting out half of his neighbor's view of the stage, appear- 
 ing to disregard her, and even to be unaware that a pretty 
 woman sat there just behind him. 
 
 His neighbor copied Valentin's position exactly ! she leaned 
 her elbow on the edge of her box and turned her face in three- 
 quarter profile upon the singers on the stage, as if she were 
 sitting to a painter. These two people looked like two 
 estranged lovers still sulking, still turning their backs upon 
 each other, who will go into each other's arms at the first 
 tender word. 
 
 Now and again his neighbor's ostrich feathers or her hair 
 came in contact with Raphael's head, giving him a pleasur- 
 able thrill, against which he sternly fought. In a little 
 while he felt the touch of the soft frill of lace that went 
 round her dress; he could hear the gracious sounds of the
 
 202 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 folds of her dress itself, light rustling noises full of enchant- 
 ment ; he could even feel her movements as she breathed, 
 with the gentle stir thus imparted to her form and to her 
 draperies, it seemed to Raphael that all her being was suddenly 
 communicated to him in an electric spark. The lace and 
 tulle that caressed him imparted the delicious warmth of her 
 bare, white shoulders. By a freak in the ordering of things, 
 these two creatures, kept apart by social conventions, with 
 the abysses of death between them, breathed together and 
 perhaps thought of one another. Finally, the subtle perfume 
 of aloes completed the work of Raphael's intoxication. 
 Opposition heated his imagination, and his fancy, become 
 the wilder for the limits imposed upon it, sketched a woman 
 for him in outlines of fire. He turned abruptly, the stranger 
 made a similar movement, startled no doubt at being brought 
 in contact with a stranger ; and they remained face to face, 
 each with the same thought. 
 
 "Pauline! " 
 
 "M. Raphael! " 
 
 Each surveyed the other, both of them petrified with aston- 
 ishment. Raphael noticed Pauline's daintily simple costume. 
 A woman's experienced eyes would have discerned and ad- 
 mired the outlines beneath the modest gauze folds of her 
 bodice and the lily whiteness of her throat. And then her 
 more than mortal clearness of soul, her maidenly modesty, 
 her graceful bearing, all were unchanged. Her sleeve was 
 quivering with agitation, for the beating of her heart was 
 shaking her whole frame. 
 
 " Come to the Hotel de Saint-Quentin to-morrow for your 
 papers," she said. " I will be there at noon. Be punctual." 
 
 She rose hastily and disappeared. Raphael thought of 
 following Pauline, feared to compromise her, and stayed. He 
 looked at Fcedora ; she seemed to him positively ugly. Un- 
 able to understand a single phrase of the music, and feeling 
 stifled in the theatre, he went out, and returned home.
 
 THE AGONY. 203 
 
 "Jonathan," he said to the old servant, as soon as he lay 
 in bed, "give me half a drop of laudanum on a piece of 
 sugar, and don't wake me to-morrow till twenty minutes to 
 twelve." 
 
 "I want Pauline to love me," he cried next morning, 
 looking at the talisman the while in unspeakable anguish. 
 
 The skin did not move in the least ; it seemed to have lost 
 its power to shrink ; doubtless it could not fulfil a wish ful- 
 filled already. 
 
 "Ah ! " exclaimed Raphael, feeling as if a mantle of lead 
 had fallen away, which he had worn ever since the day when 
 the talisman had been given to him ; " so you are playing me 
 false, you are not obeying me, the pact is broken ! I am 
 free; I shall live. Then was it all a wretched joke?" But 
 he did not dare to believe in his own thought as he uttered it. 
 
 He dressed himself as simply as had formerly been his 
 wont, and set out on foot for his old lodging, trying to go 
 back in fancy to the happy days when he abandoned himself 
 without peril to vehement desires, the days when he had not 
 yet condemned all human enjoyment. As he walked he 
 beheld Pauline not the Pauline of the Hotel Saint-Quentin, 
 but the Pauline of last evening. Here was the accomplished 
 mistress he had so often dreamed of, the intelligent young 
 girl with the loving nature and artistic temperament, who 
 understood poets, who understood poetry, and lived in luxu- 
 rious surroundings. Here, in short, was Fcedora, gifted with 
 a great soul ; or Pauline become a countess, and twice a 
 millionaire, as Fcedora had been. When he reached the worn 
 threshold, and stood upon the broken step at the door, where 
 in other days he had so many desperate thoughts, an old 
 woman came out of the room within and spoke to him. 
 
 "You are M. Raphael de Valentin, are you not? " 
 
 " Yes, good mother," he replied. 
 
 " You know your old room then," she replied ; " you are 
 expected up there."
 
 204 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 " Does Mme. Gaudin still own the house? " Raphael asked. 
 
 " Oh no, sir. Mme. Gaudin is a baroness now. She lives 
 in a fine house of her own on the other side of the river. Her 
 husband has come back. My goodness, he brought back 
 thousands and thousands, They say she could buy up all 
 the Quartier Saint-Jacques if she liked. She gave me her 
 basement room for nothing, and the remainder of her lease. 
 Ah, she's a kind woman all the same; she is no more proud 
 to-day than she was yesterday." 
 
 Raphael hurried up the staircase to his garret ; as he 
 reached the last few steps he heard the sounds of a piano. 
 Pauline was there, simply dressed in a cotton gown, but the 
 way that it was made, like the gloves, hat, and shawl that she 
 had thrown down carelessly upon the bed, revealed a change 
 of fortune. 
 
 " Ah, there you are ! " cried Pauline, turning her head, and 
 rising with unconcealed delight. 
 
 Raphael went to sit beside her, flushed, confused, and 
 happy ; he looked at her in silence. 
 
 "Why did you leave us then?" she asked, dropping hei 
 eyes as the flush deepened on his face. "What became of 
 you ? ' ' 
 
 " Ah, I have been very miserable, Pauline ; I am very 
 miserable still." 
 
 "Alas!" she said, filled with pitying tenderness. "I 
 guessed your fate yesterday when I saw you so well dressed, 
 and apparently so wealthy; but in reality? Eh, M. Raphael, 
 is it as it always used to be with you?" 
 
 Valentin could not restrain the tears that sprang to his 
 eyes. 
 
 "Pauline," he exclaimed, "I " 
 
 He went no further, love sparkled in his eyes, and his 
 emotion overflowed his face. 
 
 " Oh, he loves me ! he loves me ! " cried Pauline. 
 
 Raphael felt himself unable to say one word ; he bent his
 
 PAULINE DREW HER HANDS AWAY, LAID THEM ON 
 
 RAPHAEL'S SHOULDERS, AVD DREW HIM 
 
 TOWARDS HER.
 
 THE AGONY. 205 
 
 head. The young girl took his hand at this ; she pressed 
 it as she said, half-sobbing and half-laughing 
 
 " Rich, rich, happy and rich ! Your Pauline is rich. But 
 I ? Oh, I ought to be very poor to-day. I have said, times 
 without number, that I would give all the wealth upon this 
 earth for those words, ' He loves me ! ' O my Raphael ! 
 I have millions. You like luxury, you will be glad ; but 
 you must love me and my heart besides, for there is so much 
 love for you in my heart. You don't know ! My father has 
 come back. I am a wealthy heiress. Both he and my 
 mother leave me completely free to decide my own fate. I 
 am free do you understand ! " 
 
 Seized with a kind of frenzy, Raphael grasped Pauline's 
 hands and kissed them eagerly and vehemently, with an almost 
 convulsive caress. Pauline drew her hands away, laid them 
 on Raphael's shoulders, and drew him towards her. They 
 understood one another in that close embrace, in the 
 unalloyed and sacred fervor of that one kiss without an 
 afterthought the first kiss by which two souls take posses- 
 sion of each other. 
 
 "Ah, I will not leave you any more," said Pauline, falling 
 back in her chair. " I do not know how I come to be so 
 bold ! " she added, blushing. 
 
 " Bold, my Pauline ! Do not fear it. It is love, love true 
 and deep and everlasting like my own, is it not ? " 
 
 "Speak!" she cried. "Go on speaking, so long your 
 lips have been dumb for me." 
 
 " Then you have loved me all along ? " 
 
 " Loved you? Mon Dieu ! How often I have wept here, 
 setting your room straight, and grieving for your poverty and 
 my own. I would have sold myself to the evil one to spare 
 you one vexation ! You are my Raphael to-day, really my 
 own Raphael, with that handsome head of yours, and your 
 heart is mine too; yes, that above all, your heart O wealth 
 inexhaustible! Well, where was I? "she went on after a 
 14
 
 206 THE WILD ASS 1 SKIN. 
 
 pause. " Oh yes ! We have three, four, or five millions, I 
 believe. If I were poor, I should perhaps desire to bear your 
 name, to be acknowledged as your wife ; but as it is, I would 
 give up the whole world for you, I would be your servant still, 
 now and always. Why, Raphael, if I give you my fortune, 
 my heart, myself to-day, I do no more than I did that day when 
 I put a certain five-franc piece in the drawer there," and she 
 pointed to the table. "Oh, how your exultation hurt me 
 then!" 
 
 " Oh, why are you rich ? " Raphael cried ; " why is there 
 no vanity in you? I can do nothing for you." 
 
 He wrung his hands in despair and happiness and love. 
 
 "When you are the Marquise de Valentin, I know that the 
 title and the fortune for thee, heavenly soul, will not be 
 worth " 
 
 "One hair of your head," she cried. 
 
 " I have millions too. But what is wealth to either of us 
 now? There is my life ah, that I can offer, take it." 
 
 " Your love, Raphael, your love is all the world to me. 
 Are your thoughts of me? I am the happiest of the happy ! " 
 
 " Can any one overhear us? " asked Raphael. 
 
 "Nobody," she replied, with a mischievous gesture. 
 
 "Come, then ! " cried Valentin, holding out his arms. 
 
 She sprang upon his knees and clasped her arms about his 
 neck. 
 
 " Kiss me ! " she cried, " after all the pain you have given 
 me ; to blot out the memory of the grief that your joys have 
 caused me; and for the sake of the nights that I spent in 
 painting hand-screens " 
 
 " Those hand-screens of yours?" 
 
 " Now that we are rich, my darling, I can tell you all about 
 it. Poor boy ! how easy it is to delude a clever man ! Could 
 you have had white waistcoats and clean shirts twice a week 
 for three francs every month to the laundress? Why, you 
 used to drink twice as much milk as your money would have
 
 THE AGONY. 207 
 
 paid for. I deceived you all round over firing, oil, and 
 even money. O Raphael mine, don't have me for your wife, 
 I am far too cunning ! " she said laughingly. 
 
 " How did you manage it ? " 
 
 "I used to work till two o'clock in the morning; I gave 
 my mother half the money made by my screens, and the other 
 half went to you." 
 
 They looked at one another for a moment, both bewildered 
 by love and gladness. 
 
 " Some day we shall have to pay for this happiness by some 
 terrible sorrow," cried Raphael. 
 
 11 Perhaps you are married ! " cried Pauline. "Oh, I will 
 not give you up to another woman." 
 
 " I am free, my beloved." 
 
 " Free ? ' ' she repeated. " Free, and mine ? " 
 
 She slipped down upon her knees, clasped her hands, and 
 looked at Raphael in an enthusiasm of devotion. 
 
 " I am afraid I shall go mad. How handsome you are ! " 
 she went on, passing her fingers through her lover's fair hair. 
 " How stupid your Countess Fcedora is ! How pleased I was 
 yesterday with the homage they all paid to me ! She has 
 never been applauded. Dear, when I felt your arm against 
 my back, I heard a vague voice within me that cried, ' He is 
 there ! ' and I turned round and saw you. I fled, for I longed 
 so to throw my arms about you before them all." 
 
 "How happy you are you can speak!" Raphael ex- 
 claimed. " My heart is overwhelmed ; I would weep, but I 
 cannot. Do not draw your hand away. I could stay here 
 looking at you like this for the rest of my life, I think ; happy 
 and content." 
 
 " O my love, say that once more ! " 
 
 "Ah, what are words? " answered Valentin, letting a hot 
 tear fall on Pauline's hands. " Some time I will try to tell 
 you of my love ; just now I can only feel it." 
 
 "You," she said, " with your lofty soul and your great
 
 208 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 genius, with that heart of yours, that I know so well ; are 
 you really mine, as I am yours ? ' ' 
 
 " For ever and ever, my sweet creature," said Raphael in 
 an uncertain voice. " You shall be my wife, my protecting 
 angel. My griefs have always been dispelled by your pres- 
 ence, and my courage revived ; that angelic smile now on 
 your lips has purified me, so to speak. A new life seems about 
 to begin for me. The cruel past and my wretched follies are 
 hardly more to me than evil dreams. At your side I breathe 
 an atmosphere of happiness, and I am pure. Be with 
 me always," he added, pressing her solemnly to his beating 
 heart. 
 
 " Death may come when it will," said Pauline in ecstasy; 
 " I have lived ! " 
 
 Happy he who shall divine their joy, for he must have 
 experienced it. 
 
 " I wish that no one might enter this dear garret again, my 
 Raphael," said Pauline, after two hours of silence. 
 
 " We must have the door walled up, put bars across the 
 windows, and buy the house," the Marquis answered. 
 
 "Yes, we will," she said. Then a moment later she added : 
 " Our search for your manuscripts has been a little lost sight 
 of," and they both laughed like children. 
 
 "Pshaw! I don't care a jot for the whole circle of the 
 sciences," Raphael answered. 
 
 ' Ah, sir, and how about glory ? " 
 
 " I glory in you alone." 
 
 " You used to be very miserable as you made these little 
 scratches and scrawls," she said, turning the papers over. 
 
 "My Pauline " 
 
 "Oh, yes, I am your Pauline and what then? " 
 
 " Where are you living now? " 
 
 " In the Rue Saint Lazare. And you? " 
 
 " In the Rue de Varenne." 
 
 "What a long way apart we shall be until " She
 
 THE AGONY. 209 
 
 stopped, and looked at her lover with a mischievous and 
 coquettish expression. 
 
 "But at the most we need only be separated for a fort- 
 night," Raphael answered. 
 
 " Really ! we are to be married in a fortnight? " and she 
 jumped for joy like a child. 
 
 "I am an unnatural daughter? " she went on. "I give 
 no more thought to my father or my mother, or to anything 
 in the world. Poor love, you don't know that my father is 
 very ill ? He returned from the Indies in very bad health. 
 He nearly died at Havre, where we went to find him. Good 
 heavens! " she cried, looking at her watch; "it is three 
 o'clock already ! I ought to be back again when he wakes at 
 four. I am mistress of the house at home ; my mother does 
 everything that I wish, and my father worships me ; but I 
 will not abuse their kindness ; that would be wrong. My 
 poor father ! He would have me go to the Italiens yesterday. 
 You will come to see him to-morrow, will you not ? " 
 
 "Will Madame la Marquise de Valentin honor me by tak- 
 ing my arm?" 
 
 " I am going to take the key of this room away with me," 
 she said. " Isn't our treasure-house a palace? " 
 
 "One more kiss, Pauline." 
 
 "A thousand, Mon Dieu /" she said, looking at Raphael. 
 " Will it always be like this? I feel as if I were dreaming." 
 
 They went slowly down the stairs together, step for step, 
 with arms closely linked, trembling both of them beneath 
 their load of joy. Each pressing close to the other's side, like 
 a pair of doves, they reached the Place de la Sorbonne, where 
 Pauline's carriage was waiting. 
 
 " I want to go home with you," she said. " I want to see 
 your own room and your study, and sit at the table where you 
 work. It will be like old times," she said, blushing. 
 
 She spoke to the servant. " Joseph, before returning home 
 I am going to the Rue de Varenne. It is a quarter-past three
 
 210 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 now, and I must be back again by four o'clock. George must 
 hurry the horses." And so in a few moments the lovers came 
 to Valentin's abode. 
 
 " How glad I am to have seen all this for myself! " Pauline 
 cried, creasing the silken bed-curtains in Raphael's room be- 
 tween her fingers. "As I go to sleep, I shall be here in 
 thought. I shall imagine your dear head on the pillow there. 
 Raphael, tell me, did no one advise you about the furniture 
 of your hotel ? " 
 
 " No one whatever." 
 
 "Really? It was not a woman who " 
 
 "Pauline! " 
 
 " Oh, I know I am fearfully jealous. You have good taste. 
 I will have a bed like yours to-morrow." 
 
 Quite beside himself with happiness, Raphael caught Pauline 
 in his arms. 
 
 " Oh, my father ! " she said ; "my father " 
 
 " I will take you back to him," cried Valentin, " for I want 
 to be away from you as little as possible." 
 
 " How loving you are ! 1 did not venture to suggest it '" 
 
 "Are you not my life?" 
 
 It would be tedious to set down accurately me charm- 
 ing prattle of the lovers, for tones and looks and gestures 
 that cannot be rendered alone gave it significance. Valentin 
 went back with Pauline to her own door, and returned 
 with as much happiness i.i his heart as mortal man can 
 know. 
 
 When he was seated in his armchair beside the fire, think- 
 ing over the sudden and complete way in which his wishes Kad 
 been fulfilled, a cold shiver went through him, as if the blade 
 of a dagger had been plunged into his breast he thought 
 of the Wild Ass' Skin, and saw that it had shrunk a little. He 
 uttered the most tremendous French oaths, without any of the 
 Jesuitical reservations made by the Abbess of Andouillettes, 
 leaned his head against the back of the chair, and sat motion-
 
 THE AGONY. 211 
 
 less, fixing his unseeing eyes upon the bracket of the curtain 
 pole. 
 
 "Good God!" he cried; every wish! Every desire of 
 mine! Poor Pauline " 
 
 He took a pair of compasses and measured the extent of 
 existence that the morning had cost him. 
 
 " I have scarcely enough for two months ! " he said. 
 
 A cold sweat broke out over him ; moved by an ungovern- 
 able spasm of rage, he seized the Wild Ass' Skin, exclaiming 
 
 " I am a perfect fool ! " 
 
 He rushed out of the house and across the garden, and flung 
 the talisman down a well. 
 
 "Vogue la galere," cried he. The devil take all this non- 
 sense." 
 
 So Raphael gave himself up to the happiness of being be- 
 loved, and led with Pauline the life of heart and heart. 
 Difficulties which it would be somewhat tedious to describe 
 had delayed their marriage, which was to take place early in 
 March. Each was sure of the other ; their affection had been 
 tried, and happiness had taught them how strong it was. 
 Never has love made two souls, two natures, so absolutely one. 
 The more they came to know each other, the more they loved. 
 On either side there was the same hesitating delicacy, the 
 same transports of joy such as angels know ; there were no 
 clouds in their heaven ; the will of either was the other's law. 
 
 Wealthy as they both were, they had not a caprice which 
 they could not gratify, and for that reason had no caprices. 
 A refined taste, a feeling for beauty and poetry, was instinct 
 in the soul of the bride ; her lover's smile was more to her 
 than all the pearls of Ormuz. She disdained feminine finery; 
 a muslin dress and flowers formed her most elaborate toilette. 
 
 Pauline and Raphael shunned every one else, for solitude 
 was abundantly beautiful to them. The idlers at the opera, 
 or at the Italiens, saw this charming and unconventional pair 
 evening after evening. Some gossip went the round of the
 
 212 THE WILD ASS> SKIN. 
 
 salons at first, but the harmless lovers were soon forgotten in 
 the course of events which took place in Paris; their marriage 
 was announced at length to 'excuse them in the eyes of the 
 prudish; and as it happened, their servants did not babble; 
 so their bliss did not draw down upon them any very severe 
 punishment. 
 
 One morning towards the end of February, at the time 
 when the brightening days bring a belief in the nearness of the 
 joys of spring, Pauline and Raphael were breakfasting to- 
 gether in a small conservatory, a kind of a drawing-room 
 filled with flowers, on a level with the garden. The mild 
 rays of the pale winter sunlight, breaking through the thicket 
 of exotic plants, warmed the air somewhat. The vivid con- 
 trast made by the variety of foliage, the colors of the masses 
 of flowing shrubs, the freaks of light and shadow, gladdened 
 the eyes. While all the rest of Paris still sought warmth from 
 its melancholy hearth, these two were laughing in a bower of 
 camellias, lilacs, and blossoming heath. Their happy faces rose 
 above lilies of the valley, narcissus blooms, and Bengal roses. 
 A mat of plaited African grass, variegated like a carpet, lay 
 beneath their feet in this luxurious conservatory. The walls, 
 covered with a green linen material, bore no traces of damp. 
 The surfaces of the rustic wooden furniture shone with clean- 
 liness. A kitten, attracted by the odor of milk, had estab- 
 lished itself upon the table ; it allowed Pauline to bedabble 
 it in coffee ; she was playing merrily with it, taking away the 
 cream that she had just allowed the kitten to sniff at, so as to 
 exercise its patience, and to keep up the contest. She burst 
 out laughing at every antic, and by the comical remarks she 
 constantly made, she hindered Raphael from perusing the 
 paper; he had dropped it a dozen times already. This morn- 
 ing picture seemed to overflow with inexpressible gladness, 
 like everything that is natural and genuine. 
 
 Raphael, still pretending to read his paper, furtively watched 
 Pauline with the cat his Pauline, in the dressing-gown that
 
 THE AGONY. 213 
 
 hung carelessly about her ; his Pauline, with her hair loose 
 on her shoulders, with a tiny, white, blue-veined foot peeping 
 out of a velvet slipper. It was pleasant to see her in this 
 negligent dress ; she was delightful as some fanciful picture 
 by Westall; half-girl, half-woman, as she seemed to be, or 
 perhaps more of a girl than a woman, there was no alloy in 
 the happiness she enjoyed, and of love she knew as yet only 
 its first ecstasy. When Raphael, absorbed in happy musing, 
 had forgotten the existence of the newspaper, Pauline flew 
 upon it, crumpled it up into a ball, and threw it out into the 
 garden ; the kitten sprang after the rotating object, which 
 spun round and round, as politics are wont to do. This 
 childish scene recalled Raphael to himself. He would have 
 gone on reading, and felt for the sheet he no longer possessed. 
 Joyous laughter rang out like the song of a bird, one peal 
 leading to another. 
 
 " I am quite jealous of the paper," she said, as she wiped 
 away the tears that her childlike merriment had brought into 
 her eyes. "Now, is it not a heinous offence," she went 
 on, as she became a woman all at once, "to read Russian 
 proclamations in my presence, and to attend to the prosings 
 of the Emperor Nicholas rather than to looks and words 
 of love! " 
 
 "I was not reading, my dear angel; I was looking at 
 you." 
 
 Just then the gravel walk outside the conservatory rang with 
 the sound of the gardener's heavily nailed boots. 
 
 "I beg your pardon, my Lord Marquis and yours, too, 
 madame if I am intruding, but I have brought you a curi- 
 osity the like of which I never set eyes on. Drawing a 
 bucket of water just now, with due respect, I got out this 
 strange salt-water plant. Here it is. It must be thoroughly 
 used to water, anyhow, for it isn't saturated or even damp at 
 all. It is as dry as a piece of wood, and has not swelled a 
 bit. As my Lord Marquis certainly knows a great deal more
 
 214 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 about things than I do, I thought I ought to bring it, and 
 that it would interest him." 
 
 Therewith the gardener showed Raphael the inexorable 
 piece of skin ; there were barely six square inches of the skin 
 left. 
 
 "Thanks, Vaniere," Raphael said. "The thing is very 
 curious." 
 
 " What is the matter with you, my angel ; you are growing 
 quite white ! " Pauline cried. 
 
 "You can go, Vaniere." 
 
 " Your voice frightens me," the girl went on; it is so 
 strangely altered. What is it? How are you feeling? Where 
 is the pain ? You are in pain ! Jonathan ! here ! call a 
 doctor ! " she cried. 
 
 " Hush, my Pauline," Raphael answered, as he regained 
 composure. " Let us get up and go. Some flower here has 
 a scent that is too much for me. It is that verbena, perhaps." 
 
 Pauline flew upon the innocent plant, seized it by the stalk, 
 and flung it out into the garden ; then with all the might of 
 the love between them, she clasped Raphael in a close em- 
 brace, and with languishing coquetry raised her red lips to his 
 for a kiss. 
 
 " Dear angel," she cried, " when I saw you turn so white 
 I understood that I could not live on without you ; your life 
 is my life too. Lay your hand on my back, Raphael mine; 
 I feel a chill like death ; the feeling of cold is there yet. 
 Your lips are burning. How is your hand? Cold as ice," 
 she added. 
 
 " Mad girl ! " exclaimed Raphael. 
 
 " Why that tear ? Let me drink it." 
 
 " O Pauline, Pauline, you love me far too much ! " 
 
 " There is something very extraordinary going on in your 
 mind, Raphael ! Do not dissimulate. I shall very soon find 
 out your secret. Give that to me," she went on, taking the 
 Wild Ass' Skin.
 
 THE AGONY. 215 
 
 "You are my executioner !" the young man exclaimed, 
 glancing in horror at the talisman. 
 
 "How changed your voice is!" cried Pauline, as she 
 dropped the fatal symbol of destiny. 
 
 " Do you love me? " he asked. 
 
 " Do I love you ? Is there any doubt? " 
 
 " Then leave me ; go away ! " 
 
 The poor child went. 
 
 "So! " cried Raphael, when he was alone. " In an en- 
 lightened age, when we have found out that diamonds are a 
 crystallized form of charcoal, at a time when everything is 
 made clear, when the police would hail a new Messiah before 
 the magistrates, and submit his miracles to the Academic des 
 Sciences in an epoch when we no longer believe in anything 
 but a notary's signature that I, forsooth, should believe in a 
 sort of Mene, Tekel, Upharsin ! No, by heaven, I will not 
 believe that the Supreme Being would take pleasure in tortur- 
 ing a harmless creature Let us see the learned about it." 
 
 Between the Halle des Vins, with its extensive assembly of 
 barrels, and the Salpetriere, that extensive seminary of drunk- 
 enness, lies a small pond, which Raphael soon reached. All 
 sorts of ducks of rare varieties were there disporting them- 
 selves ; their colored markings shone in the sun like the glass 
 in cathedral windows. Every kind of duck in the world was 
 represented, quacking, dabbling, and moving about a kind 
 of parliament of ducks assembled against its will, but luckily 
 without either charter or political principles, living in com- 
 plete immunity from sportsmen, under the eyes of any natur- 
 alist that chanced to see them. 
 
 "That is M. Lavrille," said one of the keepers to Raphael, 
 who had asked for that high priest of zoology. 
 
 The Marquis saw a short man buried in protound reflections, 
 caused by the appearance of a pair of ducks. The man of 
 science was middle aged ; he had a pleasant face, made pleas- 
 anter still by a kindly expression, but an absorption in scien-
 
 216 THE WILD ASS' SKTN. 
 
 tific ideas engrossed his whole person. His peruke was 
 strangely turned up, by being constantly raised to scratch his 
 head ; so that a line of white hair was left plainly visible, a 
 witness to an enthusiasm for investigation, which, like every 
 other strong passion, so withdraws us from mundane consid- 
 erations, that we lose all consciousness of the " I " within us. 
 Raphael, the student and man of science, looked respectfully 
 at the naturalist, who devoted his nights to enlarging the 
 limits of human knowledge, and whose very errors reflected 
 glory upon France ; but a she-coxcomb would have laughed, 
 no doubt, at the break in continuity between the breeches and 
 striped waistcoat worn by the man of learning ; the interval, 
 moreover, was modestly filled by a shirt which had been con- 
 siderably creased, for he stooped and raised himself by turns, 
 as his zoological observations required. 
 
 After the first interchange of civilities, Raphael thought it 
 necessary to pay M. Lavrille a bland compliment upon his 
 ducks. 
 
 "Oh, we are well off for ducks," the naturalist replied. 
 "The genus, moreover, as you doubtless know, is the most 
 prolific in the order of palmipeds. It begins with the swan 
 and ends with the zin-zin duck, comprising in all one hundred 
 and thirty-seven very distinct varieties, each having its own 
 name, habits, country, and character, and every one no more 
 like another than a white man is like a negro. Really, sir, 
 when we dine off a duck, we have no notion for the most part 
 of the vast extent " 
 
 "He interrupted himself as he saw a small pretty duck 
 come up to the surface of the pound. 
 
 " There you see the cravatted swan, a poor native of 
 Canada ; he has come a very long way to show us his brown 
 and gray plumage and his little black cravat ! Look, he is 
 preening himself. That one is the famous eider duck that 
 provides the down, the eider-down under which our fine ladies 
 sleep; isn't it pretty? Who wouldn't admire the little pink-
 
 THE AGONY. 217 
 
 ish white breast and the green beak? I have just been a 
 witness, sir," he went on, "to a marriage that I had long 
 despaired of bringing about ; they have paired rather auspici- 
 ously, and I shall await the results very eagerly. This will be 
 a hundred and thirty-eighth species, I flatter myself, to which, 
 perhaps, my name will be given. That is the newly-mated 
 pair," he said, pointing out two of the ducks ; "one of them 
 is a laughing goose (anas albifrons], and the other the great 
 whistling duck, Buffon's anas ruffina. I have hesitated a long 
 while between the whistling duck, the duck with white eye- 
 brows, and the shoveler duck (anas clypeata). Stay, that is 
 the shoveler that fat, brownish-black rascal, with the green- 
 ish neck and that coquettish iridescence on it. But the whist- 
 ling duck was a crested one, sir, and you will understand that 
 I deliberated no longer. We only lack the variegated black- 
 capped duck now. These gentlemen here, unanimously claim 
 that that variety of duck is only a repetition of the curve- 
 beaked teal, but for my own part," and the gesture he made 
 was worth seeing. He expressed at once the modesty and 
 pride of a man of science; the pride full of obstinacy, and the 
 modesty well tempered with assurance. 
 
 " I don't think it is," he added. " You see, my dear sir, 
 that we are not amusing ourselves here. I am engaged at this 
 moment upon a monograph on the genus duck. But I am at 
 your disposal." 
 
 While they went towards a rather pleasant house in the 
 Rue de Buffon, Raphael submitted the skin to M. Lavrille's 
 inspection. 
 
 " I know the product," said the man of science, when he 
 had turned his magnifying glass upon the talisman. "It 
 used to be used for covering boxes. The shagreen is very old. 
 They prefer to use skate's skin nowadays for making sheaths. 
 This, as you are doubtless aware, is the hide of the raja 
 sephen, a Red Sea fish." 
 
 "But this, sir, since you are so exceedingly good "
 
 218 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 "This," the man of science interrupted, as he resumed, 
 " this is quite another thing ; between these two shagreens, 
 sir, there is a difference just as wide as between sea and land, 
 or fish and flesh. The fish's skin is harder, however, than the 
 skin of the land animal. This," he said, as he indicated the 
 talisman, " is, as you doubtless know, one of the most curious 
 of zoological products." 
 
 " But to proceed " said Raphael. 
 
 " This," replied the man of science, as he flung himself 
 down into his armchair, " is an ass' skin, sir." 
 
 " Yes, I know," said the young man. 
 
 "A very rare variety of ass is found in Persia," the natur- 
 alist continued, " the onager of the ancients, equusasinus, the 
 koulan of the Tartars ; Pallas went out there to observe it, 
 and has made it known to science, for as a matter of fact the 
 animal for a long time was believed to be mythical. It is 
 mentioned, as you know, in Holy Scripture; Moses forbade 
 that it should be coupled with its own species, and the onager 
 is yet more famous for the prostitutions of which it was the 
 object, and which are often mentioned by the prophets of the 
 Bible. Pallas, as you know doubtless, states in his Act. Petropy. , 
 tome II., that these bizarre excesses are still devoutly believed 
 in among the Persians and the Nogais as a sovereign remedy 
 for lumbago and sciatic gout. We poor Parisians scarcely 
 believe that. The Museum has no example of the onager. 
 
 " What a magnificent animal ! " he continued. " It is full 
 of mystery ; its eyes are provided with a sort of burnished 
 covering, to which the Orientals attribute the powers of fasci- 
 nation ; it has a glossier and finer coat than our handsomest 
 horses possess, striped with more or less tawny bands, very 
 much like the zebra's hide. There is something pliant and 
 silky about its hair, which is sleek to the touch. Its powers 
 of sight vie in precision and accuracy with those of man ; 
 it is rather larger than our largest domestic donkeys, and 
 is possessed of extraordinary courage. If it is surprised by
 
 THE AGONY. 219 
 
 any chance, it defends itself against the most dangerous wild 
 beasts with remarkable success; the rapidity of its move- 
 ments can only be compared with the flight of birds; an 
 onager, sir, would run the best Arab or Persian horses to 
 death. According to the father of the conscientious Doctor 
 Niebuhr, whose recent loss we are deploring, as you doubt- 
 less know, the ordinary average pace of one of these won- 
 derful creatures would be seven thousand geometric feet 
 per hour. Our own degenerate race of donkeys can give no 
 idea of the ass in his pride and independence. He is active 
 and spirited in his demeanor ; he is cunning and sagacious ; 
 there is grace about the outlines of his head ; every move- 
 ment is full of attractive charm. In the East he is the king 
 of beasts. Turkish aud Persian superstition even credits him 
 with a mysterious origin ; and when stories of the prowess 
 attributed to him are told in Thibet or in Tartary, the 
 speakers mingle Solomon's name with that of this noble 
 animal. A tame onager, in short, is worth an enormous 
 amount ; it is well-nigh impossible to catch them among the 
 mountains, where they leap like roe-bucks, and seem as if 
 they could fly like birds. Our myth of the winged horse, 
 our Pegasus, had its origin doubtless in these countries, where 
 the shepherds could see the onager springing from one rock to 
 another. In Persia they breed asses for the saddle, a cross 
 between a tamed onager and a she-ass, and they paint them 
 red, following immemorial tradition. Perhaps it was this 
 custom that gave rise to our own proverb, ' Surly as a red 
 donkey.' At some period when natural history was much 
 neglected in France, I think a traveler must have brought 
 over one of these strange beasts that endures servitude with 
 such impatience. Hence the adage. The skin that you have 
 lain before me is the skin of an onager. Opinions differ as 
 to the origin of the name. Some claim that Chagri is a 
 Turkish word ; others insist that Chagri must be the name of 
 the place where this animal product underwent the chemical
 
 220 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 process of preparation so clearly described by Pallas, to 
 which the peculiar graining that we admire is due ; Martellens 
 has written to me saying that Chaagri\& a river " 
 
 " I thank you, sir, for the information that you have given 
 me ; it would furnish an admirable footnote for some Dom 
 Calmet or other, if such erudite hermits yet exist; but I have 
 had the honor of pointing out to you that this scrap was in 
 the first instance quite as large as that map," said Raphael, 
 indicating an open atlas to Lavrille; "but it has shrunk 
 visibly in three months' time ' 
 
 "Quite so," said the man of science. "I understand. 
 The remains of any substance primarily organic are naturally 
 subject to a process of decay. It is quite easy to understand, 
 and its progress depends upon atmospherical conditions. 
 Even metals contract and expand appreciably, for engineers 
 have remarked somewhat considerable interstices between 
 great blocks of stone originally clamped together with iron 
 bars. The field of science is boundless, but human life is 
 very short, so that we do not claim to be acquainted with 
 all the phenomena of nature." 
 
 "Pardon the question that I am about to ask you, sir," 
 Raphael began, half-embarassed, " but are you quite sure that 
 this piece of skin is subject to the ordinary laws of zoology, 
 and that it can be stretched ? " 
 
 "Certainly oh, bother!" muttered M. Lavrille, 
 
 trying to stretch the talisman. " But if you, sir, will go to 
 see Planchette," he added, "the celebrated professor of 
 mechanics, he will certainly discover some method of acting 
 upon this skin, of softening and expanding it." 
 
 " Ah, sir, you are the preserver of my life," and Raphael 
 took leave of the learned naturalist and hurried off to Plan- 
 chette, leaving the worthy Lavrille in his study, all among the 
 bottles and dried plants that filled it up. 
 
 Quite unconsciously Raphael brought away with him from 
 this visit, all of science that man can grasp, and terminology
 
 THE AGONY. 221 
 
 to wit. Lavrille, the worthy man, was very much like Sancho 
 Panza giving to Don Quixote the history of the goats ; he was 
 entertaining himself by making out a list of animals and tick- 
 ing them off. Even now that his life was nearing its end, he 
 was scarcely acquainted with a mere fraction of the countless 
 numbers of the great tribes that God has scattered, for some 
 unknown end, throughout the ocean of worlds. 
 
 Raphael was well pleased. "I shall keep my ass well in 
 hand," cried he. Sterne had said before his day, "Let us 
 take care of our ass, if we wish to live to old age." But it is 
 such a fantastic brute ! 
 
 Planchette was a tall, thin man, a poet of a surety, lost in 
 one continual thought, and always employed in gazing into 
 the bottomless abyss of motion. Commonplace minds accuse 
 these lofty intellects of madness ; they form a misinterpreted 
 race that lives apart in a wonderful carelessness of luxuries 
 or other people's notions. They will spend whole days at a 
 stretch, smoking a cigar that has gone out, and enter a draw- 
 ing-room with the buttons on their garments not in every case 
 formally wedded to the button-holes. Some day or other, 
 after a longtime spent in measuring space, or in accumulating 
 Xs under Aa-Gg, they succeed in analyzing some natural law, 
 and resolve it into its elemental principles, and all on a sud- 
 den the crowd gapes at a new machine ; or it is a handcart 
 perhaps that overwhelms us with astonishment by the apt sim- 
 plicity of its construction. The modest man of science 
 smiles at his admirers, and remarks, " What is that invention 
 of mine? Nothing whatever. Man cannot create a force; 
 he can but direct it ; and science consists in learning from 
 nature." 
 
 The mechanician was standing bolt upright, planted on 
 both feet, like some victim dropped straight from the gibbet, 
 when Raphael broke in upon him. He was intently watching 
 an agate ball that rolled over a sun-dial, and awaited its final 
 settlement. The worthy man had received neither pension nor 
 15
 
 222 THE WILD .4SS' 
 
 decoration ; he had not known how to make the right use of his 
 ability for calculation. He was happy in his life spent on the 
 watch for a discovery ; he had no thought either of reputa- 
 tion, of the outer world, nor even of himself, and led the 
 life of science for the sake of science. 
 
 "It is inexplicable," he exclaimed. "Ah, your servant, 
 sir," he went on, becoming aware of Raphael's existence. 
 " How is your mother ? You must go and see my wife." 
 
 " And I also could have lived thus," thought Raphael, as 
 he recalled the learned man from his meditations by asking 
 of him how to produce any effect on the talisman, which he 
 placed before him. 
 
 " Although my credulity must amuse you, sir," so the 
 Marquis ended, "I will conceal nothing from you. That 
 skin seems to me to be endowed with an insuperable power 
 of resistance." 
 
 " People of fashion, sir, always treat science rather super- 
 ciliously," said Planchette. "They all talk to us pretty 
 much as the incredulous did when he brought some ladies to 
 see Lalande just after an eclipse, and remarked, ' Be so good 
 as to begin it over again.' What effect do you want to pro- 
 duce? The object of the science of mechanics is either the 
 application or the neutralization of the laws of motion. As 
 for motion pure and simple, I tell you humbly, that we cannot 
 possibly define it. That disposed of, unvarying phenomena 
 have been observed which accompany the actions of solids 
 and fluids. If we set up the conditions by which these phe- 
 nomena are brought to pass, we can transport bodies or com- 
 municate locomotive power to them at a predetermined rate 
 of speed. We can project them, divide them up in a few or 
 an infinite number of pieces, accordingly as we break them or 
 grind them to powder ; we can twist bodies or make them 
 rotate, modify, compress, expand, or extend them. The 
 whole science, sir, rests upon a single fact. 
 
 "You see this ball," he went on; "here it lies upon this
 
 THE AGONY. 223 
 
 slab. Now, it is over there. What name shall we give 
 to what has taken place, so natural from a physical point 
 of view, so amazing from a moral ? Movement, loco- 
 motion, changing of place? What prodigious vanity lurks 
 underneath the words. Does a name solve the difficulty ? 
 Yet it is the whole of our science for all that. Our machines 
 either make direct use of this agency, this fact, or they con- 
 vert it. This trifling phenomenon, applied to large masses, 
 would send Paris flying. We can increase speed by an expendi- 
 ture of force, and augment the force by an increase of speed. 
 But what are speed and force ? Our science is as powerless to 
 tell us that as to create motion. Any movement whatever is 
 an immense power, and man does not create power of any 
 kind. Everything is movement, thought itself is a move- 
 ment, upon movement nature is based. Death is a movement 
 whose limitations are little known. If God is eternal, be sure 
 that He moves perpetually; perhaps God is movement. That 
 is why movement, like God, is inexplicable, unfathomable, un- 
 limited, incomprehensible, intangible. Who has ever touched, 
 comprehended, or measured movement ? We feel its effects 
 without seeing it ; we can even deny them as we can deny 
 the existence of a God. Where is it? Where is it not? 
 Whence comes it ? What is its source ? What is its end ? 
 It surrounds us, it intrudes upon us, and yet escapes us. It is 
 evident as a fact, .obscure as an abstraction ; it is at once 
 effect and cause. It requires space, even as we, and what is 
 space? Movement alone recalls it to us; without movement, 
 space is but an empty meaningless word. Like space, like 
 creation, like the infinite, movement is an insoluble prob- 
 lem which confounds human reason ; man will never conceive 
 it, whatever else he may be permitted to conceive. 
 
 " Between each point in space occupied in succession by 
 that ball," continued the man of science, "there is an abyss 
 confronting human reason, an abyss into which Pascal fell. In 
 order to produce any effect upon an unknown substance, we
 
 224 THE WILD ASS' SKIA r . 
 
 ought first of all to study that substance ; to know whether. 
 in accordance with its nature, it will be broken by the force 
 of a blow, or whether it will withstand it ; if it breaks in 
 pieces, and you have no wish to split it up, we shall not achieve 
 the end proposed. If you want to compress it, a uniform 
 impulse must be communicated to all the particles of the sub- 
 stance, so as to diminish the interval that separates them in 
 an equal degree. If you wish to expand it, we should try to 
 bring a uniform eccentric force to bear on every molecule ; 
 for unless we conform accurately to this law, we shall have 
 breaches in continuity. The modes of motion, sir, are in- 
 finite, and no limit exists to combinations of movement. 
 Upon what effect have you determined?" 
 
 " I want any kind of pressure that is strong enough to 
 expand the skin indefinitely," began Raphael, quite out of 
 patience. 
 
 "Substance is finite," the mathematician put in, "and 
 therefore will not admit of indefinite expansion, but pressure 
 will necessarily increase the extent of surface at the expense 
 of the thickness, which will be diminished until the point is 
 reached when the material gives out 
 
 "Bring about that result, sir," Raphael cried, "and you 
 will have earned millions." 
 
 " Then I should rob you of your money," replied the other, 
 phlegmatic as a Dutchman. " I am going to show you, in a 
 word or two, that a machine can be made that is fit to crush 
 Providence itself in pieces like a fly. It would reduce a man 
 to the condition of a piece of wastepaper ; a man boots 
 and spurs, hat and cravat, trinkets and gold and all " 
 
 " What a fearful machine ! " 
 
 " Instead of flinging their brats into the water, the Chinese 
 ought to make them useful in this way," the man of science 
 went on, without reflecting on the regard man has for his 
 progeny. 
 
 Quite absorbed by his idea, Planchette took an empty flower-
 
 THE AGONY. 225 
 
 pot, with a hole in the bottom, and put it on the surface of 
 the dial, then he went to look for a little clay in a corner of 
 the garden. Raphael stood spellbound, like a child to whom 
 his nurse is telling some wonderful story. Planchette put the 
 clay down upon the slab, drew a pruning-knife from his pocket, 
 cut two branches from an elder tree, and began to clear them 
 of pith by blowing through them, as if Raphael had not been 
 present. 
 
 "There are the rudiments of the apparatus," he said. 
 Then he connected one of the wooden pipes with the bottom 
 of the flower-pot by a clay joint, in such a way that the 
 mouth of the elder stem was just under the hole of the 
 flower-pot ; you might have compared it to a big tobacco- 
 pipe. He spread a bed of clay over the surface of the slab, 
 in a shovel-shaped mass, set down the flower-pot at the wider 
 end of it, and laid the pipe of elder stem along the portion 
 which represented the handle of the shovel. Next he put a 
 lump of clay at the end of the elder stem and therein planted 
 the other pipe, in an upright position, forming a second elbow 
 which connected it with the first horizontal pipe in such a 
 manner that the air, or any given fluid in circulation, could 
 flow through this improvised piece of mechanism from the 
 mouth of the vertical tube, along the intermediate passages, 
 and so into the large empty flower-pot. 
 
 "This apparatus, sir," he said to Raphael, with all the 
 gravity of an academician pronouncing his initiatory discourse, 
 "is one of the great Pascal's grandest claims upon our 
 admiration." 
 
 " I don't understand." 
 
 The man of science smiled. He went up to a fruit-tree and 
 took down a little phial in which the druggist had sent him 
 some liquid for catching ants ; he broke off the bottom and 
 made a funnel of the top, carefully fitting it to the mouth of 
 the vertical hollowed stem that he had set in the clay, and at 
 the opposite end to the great reservoir, represented by the
 
 226 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 flower-pot. Next, by means of a watering-pot, he poured 
 in sufficient water to rise to the same level in the large 
 vessel and in the tiny circular funnel at the end of the 
 elder stem. 
 
 Raphael was thinking of his piece of skin. 
 
 "Water is considered to-day, sir, to be an incompressible 
 body," said the mechanician; "never lose sight of that 
 fundamental principle ; still it can be compressed, though 
 only so very slightly that we should regard its faculty for 
 contracting as a zero. You see the amount of surface pre- 
 sented by the water at the brim of the flower-pot? " 
 
 " Yes, sir." 
 
 " Very good ; now suppose that that surface is a thousand 
 times larger than the orifice of the elder stem through which 
 I poured out the liquid. Here, I am taking the funnel 
 away 
 
 "Granted." 
 
 " Well, then, if by any method whatever I increase the volume 
 of that quantity of water by pouring in yet more through the 
 mouth of the little tube ; the water thus compelled to flow 
 downwards would rise in the reservoir, represented by the 
 flower-pot, until it reached the same level at either end." 
 
 " That is quite clear," cried Raphael. 
 
 "But there is this difference," the other went on. "Suppose 
 that the thin column of water poured into the little vertical 
 tube there exerts a force equal, say, to a pound weight, for 
 instance, its action will be punctually communicated to the 
 great body of the liquid, and will be transmitted to every 
 part of the surface represented by the water in the flower-pot, 
 so that at the surface there will be a thousand columns of 
 water, every one pressing upwards as if they were impelled by 
 a force equal to that which compels the liquid to descend in 
 the vertical tube; and of necessity they reproduce here," 
 said Planchette, indicating to Raphael the top of the flower- 
 pot, "the force introduced over there, a thousandfold, "and
 
 THE AGONY. 227 
 
 the man of science pointed out to the Marquis the upright 
 wooden pipe set in the clay. 
 
 " That is quite simple," said Raphael. 
 
 Planchette smiled again. 
 
 "In other words," he went on, with the mathematician's 
 natural stubborn propensity for logic, " in order to resist the 
 force of the incoming water, it would be necessary to exert, 
 upon every part of the large surface, a force equal to that 
 brought into action in the vertical column, but with this 
 difference if the column of liquid is a foot in height, the 
 thousand little columns of the wide surface will only have a 
 very slight elevating power. 
 
 " Now," said Planchette, as he gave a fillip to his bits of 
 stick, " let us replace this funny little apparatus by steel tubes 
 of suitable strength and dimensions; and if you cover the 
 liquid surface of the reservoir with a strong sliding plate of 
 metal, and if to this metal plate you oppose another, solid 
 enough and strong enough to resist any test, if, furthermore, 
 you give me the power of continually adding water to the 
 volume of liquid contents by means of the little vertical tube, 
 the object fixed between the two solid metal plates must of 
 necessity yield to the tremendous crushing force which in- 
 definitely compresses it. The method of continually pouring 
 in water through a little tube, like the manner of communica- 
 ting force through the volume of the liquid to a metal plate, 
 is an absurdly primitive mechanical device. A brace of 
 pistons and a few valves would do it all. Do you perceive, 
 my dear sir," he said, taking Valentin by the arm, "there is 
 scarcely a substance in existence that would not be compelled 
 to dilate when fixed in between these two indefinitely resisting 
 surfaces ? ' ' 
 
 " What t the author of the Lettres provinciates invented 
 it?" Raphael exclaimed. 
 
 " He and no other, sir. The science of mechanics knows 
 no simpler nor more beautiful contrivance. The opposite
 
 228 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 principle, the capacity of expansion possessed by water, 
 has brought the steam-engine into being. But water will 
 only expand up to a certain point, while its incompressibility, 
 being a force in a manner negative, is, of necessity, 
 infinite." 
 
 "If this skin is expanded," said Raphael, "I promise you 
 to erect a colossal statue to Blaise Pascal ; to found a prize of 
 a hundred thousand francs to be offered every ten years for 
 the solution of the grandest problem of mechanical science 
 effected during the interval ; to find dowries for all your 
 cousins and second cousins, and finally to build an asylum on 
 purpose for impoverished or insane mathematicians." 
 
 "That would be exceedingly useful," Planchette replied. 
 "We will go to Spieghalter to-morrow, sir," he continued, 
 with the serenity of a man living on a plane wholly intellect- 
 ual. " That distinguished mechanic has just completed, after 
 my own designs, an improved mechanical arrangement by 
 which a child could get a thousand trusses of hay inside his 
 cap." 
 
 "Then good-bye till to-morrow." 
 
 " Till to-morrow, sir." 
 
 "Talk of mechanics!" cried Raphael; "isn't it the 
 greatest of the sciences ? The other fellow with his onagers, 
 classifications, ducks, and species, and his phials full of bottled 
 monstrosities, is at best only fit for a billiard-marker in a 
 saloon." 
 
 The next morning Raphael went off in great spirits to find 
 Planchette, and together they set out for the Rue de la Sant6 
 auspicious appellation ! Arrived at Spieghalter's, the young 
 man found himself in a vast foundry ; his eyes lighted upon a 
 multitude of glowing and roaring furnaces. There was a 
 storm of sparks, a deluge of nails, an ocean of pistons, vices, 
 levers, valves, girders, files, and nuts ; a sea of melted metal, 
 balks of timber and bar-steel. Iron filings filled your throat. 
 There was iron in the atmosphere ; the men were covered
 
 THE AGONY. 229 
 
 with it ; everything reeked of iron. The iron seemed to be a 
 living organism ; it became a fluid, moved, and seemed to 
 shape itself intelligently after every fashion, to obey the 
 worker's every caprice. Through the uproar made by the 
 bellows, the crescendo of the falling hammers, and the shrill 
 sounds of the lathes that drew groans from the steel, Raphael 
 passed into a large, clean, and airy place where he was able 
 to inspect at his leisure the great press that Planchette had 
 told him about. He admired the cast-iron beams, as one 
 might call them, and the twin bars of steel coupled together 
 with indestructible bolts. 
 
 "If you were to give seven rapid turns to that crank," 
 said Spieghalter, pointing out a beam of polished steel, "you 
 would make a steel bar spurt out in thousands of jets, that 
 would get into your legs like needles." 
 
 " The deuce," exclaimed Raphael. 
 
 Planchette himself slipped the piece of skin between the 
 metal plates of the all-powerful press; and, brimful of the 
 certainty of a scientific conviction, he worked the crank ener- 
 getically. 
 
 "Lie flat, all of you; we are dead men!" thundered 
 Spieghalter, as he himself fell prone on the floor. 
 
 A hideous shrieking sound rang through the workshops. 
 The water in the machine had broken the chamber, and now 
 spouted out in a jet of incalculable force ; luckily it went in 
 the direction of an old furnace, which was overthrown, 
 knocked to pieces, and twisted like a house that has been 
 enveloped and carried away by a waterspout. 
 
 " Ha ! " remarked Planchette serenely, " the piece of skin 
 is as safe and sound as my eye. There was a flaw in your 
 reservoir somewhere, or a crevice in the large tube " 
 
 " No, no ; I know my reservoir. The devil is in your 
 contrivance, sir; you can take it away," and the German 
 pounced upon a smith's hammer, flung the skin down on an 
 anvil, and, with all the strength that rage gives, dealt the
 
 230 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 talisman the most formidable blow that had ever resounded 
 through his workshops. 
 
 " There is not so much as a mark on it ! " said Planchette, 
 stroking the perverse bit of skin. 
 
 The workmen hurried in. The foreman took the skin and 
 buried it in the glowing coal of a forge, while, in a semicircle 
 round the fire, they all awaited the action of a huge pair of 
 bellows. Raphael, Spieghalter, and Professor Planchette 
 stood in the midst of the grimy, expectant crowd. Raphael, 
 looking round on faces dusted over with iron filings, white 
 eyes, greasy, blackened clothing, and hairy chests, could 
 have fancied himself transported into the wild nocturnal 
 world of German ballad poetry. After the skin had been 
 in the fire for ten minutes, the foreman pulled it out with 
 a pair of pincers. 
 
 " Hand it over to me," said Raphael. 
 
 The foreman held it out by way of a joke. The Marquis 
 readily handled it ; it was cool and flexible between his 
 fingers. An exclamation of alarm went up ; the workmen 
 fled in terror. Valentin was left alone with Planchette in 
 the empty workshop. 
 
 "There is certainly something infernal in the thing!" 
 cried Raphael, in desperation. "Is no human power able 
 to give me one day more of existence?" 
 
 "I made a mistake, sir," said the mathematician, with 
 a penitent expression ; " we ought to have subjected that 
 peculiar skin to the action of a rolling machine. Where 
 could my eyes have been when I suggested the use of com- 
 pression?" 
 
 "It was I that asked for it," Raphael answered. 
 
 The mathematician heaved a sigh of relief, like a culprit 
 acquitted by a dozen jurors. Still, the strange problem 
 afforded by the skin interested him ; he meditated a mo- 
 ment, and then remarked 
 
 " This unknown material ought to be treated chemically
 
 THE AGONY. 231 
 
 by reagents. Let us call on Japhet perhaps the chemist 
 may have better luck than the mechanic." 
 
 Valentin thereupon urged his horse into a rapid trot, 
 hoping to find the chemist, the celebrated Japhet, in his 
 laboratory. 
 
 "Well, old friend," Planchette began, seeing Japhet in 
 his armchair, examining a precipitate; "how goes chem- 
 istry?" 
 
 "Gone to sleep. Nothing new at all. The Academic, 
 however, has recognized the existence of salicine, but sali- 
 cine, asparagine, vanqueline, and digitaline are not really 
 discoveries ' ' 
 
 "Since you cannot invent substances," said Raphael, 
 " you are obliged to fall back on inventing names." 
 
 " Most emphatically true, young man." 
 
 "Here," said Planchette, addressing the chemist, "try to 
 analyze this composition ; if you can extract any element 
 whatever from it, I christen it diaboline beforehand, for we 
 have just smashed a hydraulic press in trying to compress it." 
 
 "Let's see! let's have a look at it!" cried the delighted 
 chemist; "it may, perhaps, be a fresh element." 
 
 "It is simply a piece of the skin of an ass, sir," said 
 Raphael. 
 
 " Sir ! " said the illustrious chemist sternly. 
 
 " I am not joking," the Marquis answered, laying the piece 
 of skin before him. 
 
 Baron Japhet applied the nervous fibres of his tongue to 
 the skin ; he had skill in thus detecting salts, acids, alkalis, 
 and gases. After several experiments, he remarked 
 
 " No taste whatever ! Come, we will give it a little fluoric 
 acid to drink." 
 
 Subjected to the influence of this ready solvent of animal 
 tissue, the skin underwent no change whatsoever. 
 
 " It is not shagreen at all !" the chemist cried. " We will 
 treat this unknown mystery as a mineral, and try its mettle by
 
 232 THE WILD ASS SKIN. 
 
 dropping it in a crucible where I have at this moment some 
 red potash." 
 
 Japhet went out, and returned almost immediately. 
 
 "Allow me to cut away a bit of this strange substance, sir," 
 he said to Raphael ; " it is so extraordinary " 
 
 "A bit ! " exclaimed Raphael; "not so much as a hair's- 
 breadth. You may try though," he added half-banteringly, 
 half-sadly. 
 
 The chemist broke a razor in his desire to cut the skin ; he 
 tried to break it by a powerful electric shock ; next he sub- 
 mitted it to the influence of a galvanic battery ; but all the 
 thunderbolts his science wotted of fell harmless on the dread- 
 ful talisman. 
 
 It was seven o'clock in the evening. Planchette, Japhet, 
 and Raphael, unaware of the flight of time, were awaiting the 
 outcome of a final experiment. The Wild Ass' Skin emerged 
 triumphant from a formidable encounter in which it had been 
 engaged with a considerable quantity of chloride of nitrogen. 
 
 " It is all over with me," Raphael wailed. "It is the finger 
 
 of God? I shall die! "and he left the two amazed 
 
 scientific men. 
 
 "We must be very careful not to talk about this affair at 
 the Academic; our colleagues there would laugh at us," 
 Planchette remarked to the chemist, after a long pause, in 
 which they looked at each other without daring to communi- 
 cate their thoughts. The learned pair looked like two Chris- 
 tians who had issued from their tombs to find no God in the 
 heavens. Science had been powerless ; acids so much clear 
 water ; red potash had been discredited ; the galvanic battery 
 and electric shock had been a couple of playthings. 
 
 "A hydraulic press broken like a biscuit!" commented 
 Planchette. 
 
 "I believe in the devil," said the Baron Japhet, after a 
 moment's silence. 
 
 "And I in God," replied Planchette.
 
 THE AGONY. 233 
 
 Each spoke in character. The universe for a mechanician 
 is a machine that requires an operator; for chemistry that 
 fiendish employment of decomposing all things the world is 
 a gas endowed with the power of movement. 
 
 "We cannot deny the fact," the chemist replied. 
 
 "Pshaw! those gentlemen the doctrinaires have invented a 
 nebulous aphorism for our consolation ' Stupid as a fact.' ' 
 
 "Your aphorism," said the chemist, "seems to me as a 
 fact very stupid." 
 
 They began to laugh, and went off to dine like folk for 
 whom a miracle is nothing more than a phenomenon. 
 
 Valentin reached his own house shivering with rage and 
 consumed with anger. He had no more faith in anything. 
 Conflicting thoughts shifted and surged to and fro in his brain, 
 as is the case with every man brought face to face with an in- 
 conceivable fact. He had readily believed in some hidden 
 flaw in Spieghalter's apparatus ; he had not been surprised by 
 the incompetence and failure of science and of fire ; but the 
 flexibility of the skin as he handled it, taken with its stubborn- 
 ness when all the means of destruction that man possesses had 
 been brought to bear upon it in vain these things terrified 
 him. The incontrovertible fact made him dizzy. 
 
 "I am mad," he muttered. "I have had no food since 
 the morning, and yet I am neither hungry nor thirsty, and 
 there is a fire in my breast that burns me." 
 
 He put back the skin in the frame where it had been en- 
 closed but lately, drew a line in red ink about the actual con- 
 figuration of the talisman, and seated himself in his armchair. 
 
 "Eight o'clock already!" he exclaimed. "To-day has 
 gone like a dream." 
 
 He leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair, propped his 
 head with his left hand, and so remained, lost in secret dark 
 reflections and consuming thoughts that men condemned to 
 die bear away with them. 
 
 "O Pauline! " he cried. "Poor child! there are gulfs
 
 234 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 that love can never traverse, despite the strength of his wings." 
 Just then he very distinctly heard a smothered sigh, and 
 knew by one of the most tender privileges of passionate love 
 that it was Pauline's breathing. 
 
 "That is my death warrant," he said to himself. " If she 
 were there, I should wish to die in her arms." 
 
 A burst of gleeful and heavy laughter made him turn his 
 face towards the bed ; he saw Pauline's face through the 
 transparent curtains, smiling like a child for gladness over a 
 successful piece of mischief. Her pretty hair fell over her 
 shoulders in countless curls ; she looked like a Bengal rose 
 upon a pile of white roses. 
 
 "I cajoled Jonathan," said she. "Doesn't the bed be- 
 long to me, to me who am your wife? Don't scold me, dar- 
 ling; I only wanted to surprise you, to sleep beside you. 
 Forgive me for my freak." 
 
 She sprang out of bed like a kitten, showed herself gleaming 
 in her lawn raiment, and sat down on Raphael's knee. 
 
 " Love, what gulf were you talking about ? " she said, with 
 an anxious expression apparent upon her face. 
 
 "Death." 
 
 " You hurt me," she answered. " There are some thoughts 
 upon which we, poor women that we are, cannot dwell ; they 
 are death to us. Is it strength of love in us, or lack of cour- 
 age ? I cannot tell. Death does not frighten me," she be- 
 gan again, laughingly. "To die with you, both together, 
 to-morrow morning, in one last embrace, would be joy. It 
 seems to me that even then I should have lived more than a 
 hundred years. What does the number of days matter if we 
 have spent a whole lifetime of peace and love in one night, in 
 one hour? " 
 
 "You are right; Heaven is speaking through that pretty 
 mouth of yours. Grant that I may kiss you, and let us die," 
 said Raphael. 
 
 " Then let us die," she said, laughing.
 
 THE AGONY. 235 
 
 Towards nine o'clock in the morning the daylight streamed 
 through the chinks of the window shutters. Obscured some- 
 what by the muslin curtains, it yet sufficed to show clearly the 
 rich colors of the carpet, the silks and furniture of the room, 
 where the two lovers were lying asleep. The gilding sparkled 
 here and there. A ray of sunlight fell and faded upon the 
 soft down quilt that the freaks of love had thrown to the 
 floor. The outlines of Pauline's dress, hanging from a 
 cheval glass, appeared like a shadowy ghost. Her dainty 
 shoes had been left at a distance from the bed. A nightin- 
 gale came to perch upon the sill ; its trills repeated over 
 again, and the sounds of its wings suddenly shaken out for 
 flight, awoke Raphael. 
 
 "For me to die," he said, following out a thought begun 
 in his dream, " my organization, the mechanism of flesh and 
 bone, that is quickened by the will in me, and makes of me 
 an individual man, must display some perceptible disease. 
 Doctors ought to understand the symptoms of any attack on 
 vitality, and could tell me whether I am sick or sound." 
 
 He gazed at his sleeping wife. She had stretched her head 
 out to him, expressing in this way even while she slept the 
 anxious tenderness of love. Pauline seemed to look at him 
 as she lay with her face turned towards him in an attitude as 
 full of grace as a young child's, with her pretty, half-opened 
 mouth held out towards him, as she drew her light, even 
 breath. Her little pearly teeth seemed to heighten the red- 
 ness of the fresh lips with the smile hovering over them. 
 The red glow in her complexion was brighter, and its white- 
 ness was, so to speak, whiter still just then than in the most 
 impassioned moments of the waking day. In her uncon- 
 strained grace, as she lay, so full of believing trust, the ador- 
 able attractions of childhood were added to the enchantments 
 of love. 
 
 Even the most unaffected women still obey certain social 
 conventions, which restrain the free expansion of the soul
 
 236 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 within them during their waking hours ; but slumber seems to 
 give them back the spontaneity of life which makes infancy 
 lovely. Pauline blushed for nothing ; she was like one of 
 those beloved and heavenly beings, in whom reason has not 
 yet put motives into their actions and mystery into their 
 glances. Her profile stood out in sharp relief against the 
 fine cambric of the pillows ; there was a certain sprightliness 
 about her loose hair in confusion, mingled with the deep lace 
 ruffles ', but she was sleeping in happiness, her long lashes 
 were tightly pressed against her cheeks, as if to secure her 
 eyes from too strong a light, or to aid an effort of her soul to 
 recollect and to hold fast a bliss that had been perfect but 
 fleeting. Her tiny pink and white ear, framed by a lock 
 of her hair and outlined by a wrapping of Mechlin lace, 
 would have made an artist, a painter, an old man, wildly 
 in love, and would perhaps have restored a madman to his 
 senses. 
 
 Is it not an ineffable bliss to behold the woman that you 
 love, sleeping, smiling in a peaceful dream beneath your pro- 
 tection, loving you even in dreams, even at the point where 
 the individual seems to cease to exist, offering to you yet the 
 mute lips that speak to you in slumber of the latest kiss ? Is 
 it not indescribable happiness to see a trusting woman, half- 
 clad, but wrapped round in her love as by a cloak modesty 
 in the midst of dishevelment to see admiringly her scattered 
 clothing, the silken stocking hastily put off to please you last 
 evening, the unclasped girdle that implies a boundless faith in 
 you. A whole romance lies there in that girdle ; the woman 
 that it used to protect exists no longer ; she is yours, she has 
 become you ; henceforward any betrayal of her is a blow 
 dealt at yourself. 
 
 In this softened mood Raphael's eyes wandered over the 
 room, now filled with memories and love, and where the very 
 daylight seemed to take delightful hues. Then he turned his 
 gaze at last upon the outlines of the woman's form, upon
 
 THE AGONY. 237 
 
 youth and purity, and love that even now had no thought that 
 was not for him alone, above all things, and longed to live 
 for ever. As his eyes fell upon Pauline, her own opened at 
 once as if a ray of sunlight had lighted on them. 
 
 "Good morning," she said, smiling. "How handsome 
 you are, bad man ! " 
 
 The grace of love and youth, of silence and dawn, shone in 
 their faces, making a divine picture, with the fleeting spell 
 over it all that belongs only to the earliest days of passion, 
 just as simplicity and artlessness are the peculiar possession of 
 childhood. Alas ! love's springtide joys, like our own youth- 
 ful laughter, must even take flight, and live for us no longer 
 save in memory ; either for our despair, or to shed some 
 soothing fragrance over us, according to the bent of our 
 inmost thoughts. 
 
 "What made me wake you?" said Raphael. "It was 
 so great a pleasure to watch you sleeping that it brought 
 tears to my eyes." 
 
 "And to mine, too," she answered. "I cried in the 
 night while I watched you sleeping, but not with happi- 
 ness. Raphael, dear, pray listen to me. Your breathing is 
 labored while you sleep, and something rattles in your chest 
 that frightens me. You have a little dry cough when you 
 are asleep, exactly like my father's, who is dying of phthisis. 
 In those sounds from your lungs I recognized some of the 
 peculiar symptoms of that complaint. Then you are fever- 
 ish ; I know you are, your hand was moist and burning 
 
 Darling, you are young," she added with a shudder, "and 
 
 you could still get over it if unfortunately But, no," 
 
 she cried cheerfully, " there is no ' unfortunately,' the dis- 
 ease is contagious, so the doctors say." 
 
 She flung both arms about Raphael, drawing in his breath 
 through one of those kisses in which the soul reaches its 
 end. 
 
 "I do not wish to live to old age," she said. "Let us 
 16
 
 238 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 both die young, and go to heaven while flowers fill our 
 hands." 
 
 " We always make such designs as those when we are well 
 and strong," Raphael replied, burying his hands in Pauline's 
 hair. But even then a horrible fit of coughing came on, one 
 of those deep ominous coughs that seem to come from the 
 depths of the tomb, a cough that leaves the sufferer ghastly 
 pale, trembling, and perspiring ; with aching sides and quiver- 
 ing nerves, with a feeling of weariness pervading the very 
 marrow of the spine, and unspeakable languor in every vein. 
 Raphael slowly laid himself down, pale, exhausted, and over- 
 come, like a man who has spent all the strength in him over 
 one final effort. Pauline's eyes, grown large with terror, were 
 fixed upon him ; she lay quite motionless, pale, and silent. 
 
 "Let us commit no more follies, my angel," she said, try- 
 ing not to let Raphael see the dreadful forebodings that dis- 
 turbed her. She covered her face with her hands, for she saw 
 death before her the hideous skeleton. Raphael's face had 
 grown as pale and livid as any skull unearthed from a church- 
 yard to assist the studies of some scientific man. Pauline 
 remembered the exclamation that had escaped from Valentin 
 the previous evening, and to herself she said 
 
 "Yes, there are gulfs that love can never cross, and therein 
 love must bury itself." 
 
 On a March morning, some days after this wretched scene, 
 Raphael found himself seated in an armchair, placed in the 
 window in the full light of day. Four doctors stood round 
 him, each in turn trying his pulse, feeling him over, and 
 questioning him with apparent interest. The invalid sought 
 to guess their thoughts, putting a construction on every move- 
 ment they made, and on the slightest contraction of their 
 brows. His last hope lay in this consultation. This court 
 of appeal was about to pronounce its decision life or death. 
 
 Valentin had summoned the oracles of modern medicine, 
 so that he might have the last word of science. Thanks to his
 
 THE AGONY. 239 
 
 wealth and title, there stood before him three embodied 
 theories ; human knowledge fluctuated round the three points. 
 Three of the doctors brought among them the complete circle 
 of medical philosophy; they represented the points of con- 
 flict round which the battle raged, between spiritualism, 
 analysis, and goodness knows what in the way of mocking 
 eclecticism. 
 
 The fourth doctor was Horace Bianchon, a man of science 
 with a future before him, the most distinguished man of the 
 new school in medicine, a discreet and unassuming repre- 
 sentative of a studious generation that is preparing to receive 
 the inheritance of fifty years of experience treasured up by 
 the Ecole de Paris, a generation that perhaps will erect the 
 monument for the building of which the centuries behind us 
 have collected the different materials. As a personal friend 
 of the Marquis and of Rastignac, he had been in attendance 
 on the former for some days past, and was helping him to 
 answer the inquiries of the three professors, occasionally 
 insisting somewhat upon those symptoms which, in his opinion, 
 pointed to pulmonary disease. 
 
 " You have been living at a great pace, leading a dissipated 
 life, no doubt, and you have devoted yourself largely to in- 
 tellectual work?" queried one of the three celebrated authori- 
 ties, addressing Raphael. He was a square-headed man, with 
 a large frame and energetic organization, which seemed to 
 mark him as superior to his two rivals. 
 
 " I made up my mind to kill myself with debauchery, after 
 spending three years over an extensive work, with which per- 
 haps you may some day occupy yourselves," Raphael replied. 
 
 The great doctor shook his head, and so displayed his satis- 
 faction. " I was sure of it," he seemed to say to himself. He 
 was the illustrious Brisset, the successor of Cabanis and Bichat, 
 head of the Organic School, a doctor popular with believers 
 in material and positive science, who see in man a complete 
 individual, subject solely to the laws of his own particular
 
 240 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 organization ; and who consider that his normal condition 
 and abnormal states of disease can both be traced to obvious 
 causes. 
 
 After this reply, Brisset looked, without speaking, at a 
 middle-sized person, whose darkly flushed countenance and 
 glowing eyes seemed to belong to some antique satyr , and 
 who, leaning his back against the corner of the embrasure, 
 was studying Raphael, without saying a word. Doctor Came- 
 ristus, a man of creeds and enthusiasms, the head of the 
 " Vitalists," a romantic champion of the esoteric doctrines 
 of Van Helmont, discerned a lofty informing principle in 
 human life, a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon which 
 mocks at the scalpel, deceives the surgeon, eludes the drugs 
 of the pharmacopoeia, the formulae of algebra, the demonstra- 
 tions of anatomy, and derides all our efforts ; a sort of invisi- 
 ble, intangible flame, which, obeying some divinely appointed 
 law, will often linger on in a body in our opinion devoted to 
 death, while it takes flight from an organization well fitted 
 for prolonged existence. 
 
 A bitter smile hovered upon the lips of the third doctor, 
 Maugredie, a man of acknowledged ability, but a Pyrrhonist 
 and a scoffer, with the scalpel for his one article of faith. He 
 would consider, as a concession to Brisset, that a man who, as 
 a matter of fact, was perfectly well was dead, and recognize 
 with Cam6ristus that a man might be living on after his ap- 
 parent demise. He found something sensible in every theory, 
 and embraced none of them, claiming that the best of all 
 systems of medicine was to have none at all, and to stick to 
 the facts. This Panurge of the Clinical Schools, the king of 
 observers, the great investigator, great sceptic, the man of 
 desperate expedients, was scrutinizing the Wild Ass' Skin. 
 
 "I should very much like to be a witness of the coinci- 
 dence of its retrenchment with your wish," he said to the 
 Marquis. 
 
 "Where is the use?" cried Brisset.
 
 THE AGONY. 241 
 
 " Where is the use ? " echoed Cameristus. 
 
 "Ah, you are both of the same mind," replied Maugredie. 
 
 "The contraction is perfectly simple," Brisset went on. 
 
 " It is supernatural," remarked Cameristus. 
 
 "In short," Maugredie made answer, with affected so- 
 lemnity, and handing the piece of skin to Raphael as he spoke, 
 " the shriveling faculty of the skin is a fact inexplicable, and 
 yet quite natural, which, ever since the world began, has been 
 the despair of medicine and of pretty women. 
 
 All Valentin's observation could discover no trace of a 
 feeling for his troubles in any of the three doctors. The three 
 received every answer in silence, scanned him unconcernedly, 
 and interrogated him unsympathetically. Politeness did not 
 conceal their indifference ; whether deliberation or certainty 
 was the cause, their words at any rate came so seldom and so 
 languidly, that at times Raphael thought that their attention 
 was wandering. From time to time Brisset, the sole speaker, 
 remarked, " Good! just so!" as Bianchon pointed out the 
 existence of each desperate symptom. Cameristus seemed 
 to be deep in meditation ; Maugredie looked like a comic 
 author, studying two queer characters with a view to repro- 
 ducing them faithfully upon the stage. There was deep, un- 
 concealed distress and grave compassion in Horace Bianchon's 
 face. He had been a doctor for too short a time to be un- 
 touched by suffering and unmoved by a deathbed ; he had not 
 learned to keep back the sympathetic tears that obscure a 
 man's clear vision and prevent him from seizing, like the 
 general of an army, upon the auspicious moment for victory, 
 in utter disregard of the groans of dying men. 
 
 After spending about half an hour over taking in some sort 
 the measure of the patient and the complaint, much as a tailor 
 measures a young man for a coat when he orders his wedding 
 outfit, the authorities uttered several commonplaces, and even 
 talked of politics. Then they decided to go into Raphael's 
 study to exchange their ideas and frame their verdict.
 
 242 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 "May I not be present during the discussion, gentlemen?" 
 Valentin had asked them, but Brisset and Maugredie protested 
 against this, and, in spite of their patient's entreaties, declined 
 altogether to deliberate in his presence. 
 
 Raphael gave way before their custom, thinking that he 
 could slip into a passage adjoining, whence he could easily 
 overhear the medical conference in which the three professors 
 were about to engage. 
 
 "Permit me, gentlemen," said Brisset, as they entered, 
 "to give you my own opinion at once. I neither wish to 
 force it upon you nor to have it discussed. In the first place, 
 it is unbiased, concise, and based on an exact similarity that 
 exists between one of my own patients and the subject that we 
 have been called in to examine; and, moreover, I am ex- 
 pected at my hospital. The importance of the case that de- 
 mands my presence there will excuse me for speaking the first 
 word. The subject with which we are concerned has been 
 exhausted in an equal degree by intellectual labors what did 
 he set about, Horace?" he asked of the young doctor. 
 
 "A 'Theory of the Will.' " 
 
 " The devil ! but that's a big subject. He is exhausted, I 
 say, by too much brain-work, by irregular courses, and by the 
 repeated use of too powerful stimulants. Violent exertion of 
 body and mind has demoralized the whole system. It is 
 easy, gentlemen, to recognize in the symptoms of the face and 
 body generally intense irritation of the stomach, an affection 
 of the great sympathetic nerve, acute sensibility of the epigas- 
 tric region, and contraction of the right and left hypochon- 
 driac. You have noticed, too, the large size and prominence 
 of the liver. M. Bianchon has, besides, constantly watched 
 the patient, and he tells us that indigestion is troublesome and 
 difficult. Strictly speaking, there is no stomach left, and so 
 the man has disappeared. The brain is atrophied because the 
 man digests no longer. The progressive deterioration wrought 
 in the epigastric region, the seat of vitality, has vitiated the
 
 THE AGOi\Y. 243 
 
 whole system. Thence, by continued fevered vibrations, the 
 disorder has reached the brain by means of the nervous plexus, 
 hence the excessive irritation in that organ. There is mono- 
 mania. The patient is burdened with a fixed idea. That 
 piece of skin really contracts, to his way of thinking ; very 
 likely it always has been as we have seen it ; but whether 
 it contracts or no, that thing is for him just like the fly that 
 some Grand Vizier or other had on his nose. If you put 
 leeches at once on the epigastrium, and reduce the irritation 
 in that part, which is the very seat of man's life, and if you 
 diet the patient, the monomania will leave him. I will say 
 no more to Dr. Bianchon ; he should be able to grasp the 
 whole treatment as well as the details. There nuy be, per- 
 haps, some complication of the disease the bronchial tubes, 
 possibly, may be also inflamed ; but, I believe, that treatment 
 for the intestinal organs is very much more important and 
 necessary, and more urgently required than for the lungs. 
 Persistent study of abstract matters and certain violent pas- 
 sions have induced serious disorders in that vital mechanism. 
 However, we are in time to set these conditions right. Noth- 
 ing is too seriously affected. You will easily get your friend 
 round again," he remarked to Bianchon. 
 
 " Our learned colleague is taking the effect for the cause," 
 Cameristus replied. " Yes, the changes that he has observed 
 so keenly certainly exist in the patient ; but it is not the 
 stomach that, by degrees, has set up nervous action in the 
 system, and so affected the brain, like a hole in a window- 
 pane spreading cracks round about it. It took a blow of 
 some kind to make a hole in the window ; who gave the 
 blow? Do we know that ? Have we investigated the patient's 
 case sufficiently? Are we acquainted with all the events of 
 his life ? 
 
 "The vital principle, gentlemen," he continued, "the 
 Archeus of Van Helmont, is affected in his case the very 
 essence and centre of life is attacked. The divine spark, the
 
 244 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 transitory intelligence which holds the organism together, 
 which is the source of the will, the inspiration of life, has 
 ceased to regulate the daily phenomena of the mechanism and 
 the functions of every organ ; thence arise all the complica- 
 tions which my learned colleague has so thoroughly appre- 
 ciated. The epigastric region does not affect the brain, but 
 the brain affects the epigastric region. No," he went on, 
 vigorously slapping his chest, " no, I am not a stomach in the 
 form of a man. No, everything does not lie there. I do not 
 feel that I have the courage to say that if the epigastric region 
 
 is in good order, everything else is in a like condition 
 
 "We cannot trace," he went on more mildly, "to one 
 physical cause the serious disturbances that supervene in this 
 or that subject which has been dangerously attacked, nor sub- 
 mit them to a uniform treatment. No one man is like 
 another. We have each peculiar organs, differently affected, 
 diversely nourished, adapted to perform different functions, 
 and to induce a condition necessary to the accomplishment 
 of an order of things which is unknown to us. The sublime 
 will has so wrought that a little portion of the great All is set 
 within us to sustain the phenomena of living ; in every man 
 it formulates itself distinctly, making each, to all appearance, 
 a separate individual, yet in one point coexistent with the 
 infinite cause. So we ought to make a separate study of each 
 subject, discover all about it, find out in what its life consists, 
 and wherein its power lies. From the softness of a wet 
 sponge to the hardness of pumice-stone there are infinite fine 
 degrees of difference. Man is just like that. Between the 
 sponge-like organizations of the lymphatic and the vigorous 
 iron muscles of such men as are destined for a long life, what 
 a margin for errors for the single inflexible system of a lower- 
 ing treatment to commit ; a system that reduces the capacities 
 of the human frame, which you always conclude have been 
 over-excited. Let us look for the origin of the disease in the 
 mental and not in the physical viscera. A doctor is an
 
 THE AGONY. 245 
 
 inspired being, endowed by God with a special gift the 
 power to read the secrets of vitality ; just as the prophet has 
 received the eyes that foresee the future, the poet his faculty 
 of evoking nature, and the musician the power of arranging 
 sounds in an harmonious order that is possibly a copy of an 
 ideal harmony on high." 
 
 " There is his everlasting system of medicine, arbitrary, 
 monarchical, and pious," muttered Brisset. 
 
 " Gentlemen," Maugredie broke in hastily, to distract 
 attention from Brisset's comment, " don't let us lose sight of 
 the patient." 
 
 "What is the good of science?" Raphael moaned. 
 " Here is my recovery halting between a string of beads and 
 a rosary of leeches, between Dupuytren's bistoury and Prince 
 Hohenlohe's prayer. There is Maugredie suspending his judg- 
 ment on the line that divides facts from words, mind from 
 matter. Man's ' it is,' ' and it is not,' is always on my track; 
 it is the Carymary Carymara of Rabelais for evermore : my dis- 
 order is spiritual, Carymary, or material, Carymara. Shall I 
 live? They have no idea. Planchette was more straight- 
 forward with me, at any rate, when he said, ' I do not know.' 
 
 Just then Valentin heard Maugredie's voice. 
 
 "The patient suffers from monomania; very good, I am 
 quite of that opinion," he said, "but he has two hundred 
 thousand a year ; monomaniacs of that kind are very un- 
 common. As for knowing whether his epigastric region has 
 affected his brain, or his brain his epigastric region, we shall 
 find that out, perhaps, whenever he dies. But to resume. 
 There is no disputing the fact that he is ill ; some sort of treat- 
 ment he must have. Let us leave theories alone, and put 
 leeches on him, tocounteract the nervous and intestinal irrita- 
 tion, as to the existence of which we all agree ; and let us 
 send him to drink the waters, in that way we shall act on 
 both systems at once. If there really is tubercular disease, 
 we can hardly expect to save his life ; so that "
 
 246 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 Raphael abruptly left the passage, and went back to his 
 armchair. The four doctors very soon came out of the study ; 
 Horace was the spokesman. 
 
 "These gentlemen," he told him, ''have unanimously 
 agreed that leeches must be applied to the stomach at once, 
 and that both physical and moral treatment are imperatively 
 needed. In the first place, a carefully prescribed rule of diet, 
 so as to soothe the internal irritation " here Brisset signified 
 his approval ; " and in the second, a hygienic regimen, to set 
 your general condition right. We all, therefore, recommend 
 you to go to take the waters at Aix in Savoy ; or, if you like 
 it better, at Mont Dore in Auvergne ; the air and the situa- 
 tion are both pleasanter in Savoy than in the Cantal, but you 
 will consult your own taste." 
 
 Here it was Cameristus who nodded assent. 
 
 " These gentlemen," Bianchon continued, " having recog- 
 nized a slight affection of the respiratory organs, are agreed 
 as to the utility of the previous course of treatment that I 
 have prescribed. They think that there will be no difficulty 
 about restoring you to health, and that everything depends 
 upon a wise and alternate employment of these various means. 
 And " 
 
 " And that is the cause of the milk in the cocoanut," 
 said Raphael, with a smile, as he led Horace into his study 
 to pay the fees for this useless consultation. 
 
 "Their conclusions are logical," the young doctor replied. 
 " Cameristus feels, Brisset examines, Maugredie doubts. Has 
 not a man a soul, a body, and an intelligence? One of these 
 three elemental constituents always influences us more or less 
 strongly ; there will always be the personal element in human 
 science. Believe me, Raphael, we effect no cures ; we only 
 assist them. Another system the use of mild remedies while 
 nature exerts her powers lies between the extremes of theory 
 of Brisset and Cameristus, but one ought to have known the 
 patient for some ten years or so to obtain a good result on
 
 THE AGONY. 247 
 
 these lines. Negation lies at the back of all medicine, as in 
 every other science. So endeavor to live wholesomely ; try 
 a trip to Savoy ; the best course is, and always will be, to 
 trust to nature." 
 
 It was a month later, on a fine summer-like evening, that 
 several people, who were taking the waters at Aix, returned 
 from the promenade and met together in the salons of the Club. 
 Raphael remained alone by a window for a long time. His 
 back was turned upon the gathering, and he himself was deep 
 in those involuntary musings in which thoughts arise in suc- 
 cession and fadeaway, shaping themselves indistinctly, passing 
 over us like thin, almost colorless clouds. Melancholy is 
 sweet to us then, and delight is shadowy, for the soul is half- 
 asleep. Valentin gave himself up to this life of sensations; 
 he was steeping himself in the warm, soft twilight, enjoying 
 the pure air with the scent of the hills in it, happy in that he 
 felt no pain, and had tranquillized his threatening Wild Ass' 
 Skin at last. It grew cooler as the red glow of the sunset 
 faded on the mountain-peaks ; he shut the window and left 
 his place. 
 
 "Will you be so kind as not to close the windows, sir?" 
 said an old lady ; "we are being stifled " 
 
 The peculiar sharp and jarring tones in which the phrase 
 was uttered grated on Raphael's ears ; it fell on them like an 
 indiscreet remark let slip by some man in whose friendship we 
 would fain believe, a word which reveals unsuspected depths 
 of selfishness and destroys some pleasing sentimental illusion 
 of ours. The Marquis glanced, with the cool inscrutable ex- 
 pression of a diplomatist, at the old lady, called a servant, 
 and, when he came, curtly bade him 
 
 "Open that window." 
 
 Great surprise was clearly expressed on all faces at the 
 words. The whole roomful began to whisper to each other, 
 and turned their eyes upon the invalid, as though he had given 
 some serious offence. Raphael, who had never quite managed
 
 248 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 to rid himself of the bashfulness of his early youth, felt a 
 momentary confusion ; then he shook off his torpor, exerted 
 his faculties, and asked himself the meaning of this strange 
 scene. 
 
 A sudden and rapid impulse quickened his brain ; the past 
 weeks appeared before him in a clear and definite vision; the 
 reasons for the feelings he inspired in others stood out for him 
 in relief, like the veins of some corpse which a naturalist, by 
 some cunningly contrived injection, has colored so as to show 
 their least ramifications. 
 
 He discerned himself in this fleeting picture ; he followed 
 out his own life in it, thought by thought, day after day. He 
 saw himself, not without astonishment, an absent gloomy 
 figure in the midst of these lively folk, always musing over his 
 own fate, always absorbed by his own sufferings, seemingly 
 impatient of the most harmless chat. He saw how he had 
 shunned the ephemeral intimacies that travelers are so ready 
 to establish no doubt because they feel sure of never meet- 
 ing each other again and how he had taken little heed of 
 those about him. He saw himself like the rocks without, 
 unmoved by the caresses or the stormy surgings of the waves. 
 
 Then, by a gift of insight seldom accorded, he read the 
 thoughts of those about him. The light of a candle revealed 
 the sardonic profile and yellow cranium of an old man ; he 
 remembered now that he had won from him, and had never 
 proposed that the other should have his revenge ; a little 
 further on he saw a pretty woman, whose lively advances he 
 had met with frigid coolness ; there was not a face there that 
 did not reproach him with some wrong done, inexplicably to 
 all appearance, but the real offence in every case lay in some 
 mortification, some invisible hurt dealt to self-love. He had 
 unintentionally jarred on all the small susceptibilities of the 
 circle round about him. 
 
 His guests on various occasions, and those to whom he had 
 loaned his horses, had taken offence at his luxurious ways ;
 
 THE AGONY. 249 
 
 their ungraciousness had been a surprise to him ; he had 
 spared them further humiliation of that kind, and they had 
 considered that he looked down upon them, and had accused 
 him of haughtiness ever since. He could read their inmost 
 thoughts as he fathomed their natures in this way. Society 
 with its polish and varnish grew loathsome to him. He was 
 envied and hated for his wealth and superior ability ; his 
 reserve baffled the inquisitive ; his humility seemed like 
 haughtiness to these petty superficial natures. He guessed the 
 secret unpardonable crime which he had committed against 
 them ; he had overstepped the limits of the jurisdiction of 
 their mediocrity. He had resisted their inquisitorial tyranny ; 
 he could dispense with their society; and all of them, there- 
 fore, had instinctively combined to make him feel their power, 
 and to take revenge upon this incipient royalty by submitting 
 him to a kind of ostracism, and so teaching him that they in 
 their turn could do without him. 
 
 Pity came over him, first of all, at this aspect of mankind, 
 but very soon he shuddered at the thought of the power that 
 came thus, at will, and flung aside for him the veil of flesh 
 under which the moral nature is hidden away. He closed his 
 eyes, so as to see no more. A black curtain was drawn all at 
 once over this unlucky phantom show of truth ; but still he 
 found himself in the terrible loneliness that surrounds every 
 power and dominion. Just then a violent fit of coughing seized 
 him. Far from receiving one single word indifferent and 
 meaningless, it is true, but still containing, among well-bred 
 people brought together by chance, at least, some pretence 
 of civil commiseration he now heard hostile ejaculations and 
 muttered complaints. Society there assembled disdained any 
 pantomime on his account, perhaps because he had gauged its 
 real nature too well. 
 
 "His complaint is contagious." 
 
 " The president of the club ought to forbid him to enter 
 the salon."
 
 250 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 "It is contrary to all rules and regulations to cough in that 
 way ! " 
 
 "When a man is as ill as that, he ought not to come to 
 take the waters ' 
 
 " He will drive me away from the place." 
 
 Raphael rose and walked about the room to screen himself 
 from their unanimous execrations. He thought to find a 
 shelter, and went up to a young lady who sat doing nothing, 
 minded to address some pretty speeches to her ; but as he 
 came towards her, she turned her back upon him, and pre- 
 tended to be watching the dancers. Raphael feared lest he 
 might have made use of the talisman already that evening ; 
 and feeling that he had neither the wish nor the courage to 
 break into the conversation, he left the salon and took refuge 
 in the billiard-room. No one there greeted him, nobody 
 spoke to him, no one sent so much as a friendly glance in his 
 direction. His turn of mind, naturally meditative, had dis- 
 covered instinctively the general grounds and reasons for the 
 aversions he inspired. This little world was obeying, uncon- 
 sciously perhaps, the sovereign law which rules over polite 
 society ; its inexorable nature was becoming apparent in its 
 entirety to Raphael's eyes. A glance into the past showed it 
 to him, as a type completely realized in Fcedora. 
 
 He would no more meet with sympathy here for his bodily 
 ills than he had received it at her hands for the distress in his 
 heart. The fashionable world expels every suffering creature 
 from its midst, just as the body of a man in robust health 
 rejects any germ of disease. The world holds suffering and 
 misfortune in abhorrence ; it dreads them like the plague ; 
 it never hesitates between vice and trouble, for vice is a 
 luxury. Ill-fortune may possess a majesty of its own, but 
 society can belittle it and make it ridiculous by an epigram. 
 Society draws caricatures, and in this way flings in the teeth 
 of fallen kings the affronts which it fancies it has received 
 from them ; society, like the Roman youth at the circus, never
 
 THE AGONY. 251 
 
 shows mercy to the fallen gladiator ; mockery and money are 
 its vital necessities. "Death to the weak!" That is the 
 oath taken by this kind of equestrian order, instituted in their 
 midst by all the nations of the world ; everywhere it makes 
 for the elevation of the rich, and its motto is deeply graven 
 in hearts that wealth has turned to stone, or that have been 
 reared in aristocratic prejudices. 
 
 Assemble a collection of school-boys together. That will 
 give you a society in miniature, a miniature which represents 
 life more truly, because it is so frank and artless ; and in it 
 you will always find poor isolated beings, relegated to some 
 place in the general estimation between pity and contempt, 
 on account of their weakness and suffering. To these the 
 Evangel promises heaven hereafter. Go lower yet in the 
 scale of organized creation. If some bird among its fellows 
 in the court-yard sickens, the others fall upon it with their 
 beaks, pluck out its feathers, and kill it. The whole world, 
 in accordance with its charter of egotism, brings all its 
 severity to bear upon wretchedness that has the hardihood to 
 spoil its festivities, and to trouble its joys. 
 
 Any sufferer in mind or body, any helpless or poor man, 
 is a pariah. He had better remain in his solitude ; if he 
 crosses the boundary-line, he will find winter everywhere ; 
 he will find freezing cold in other men's looks, manners, 
 words, and hearts ; and lucky indeed is he if he does not 
 receive an insult where he expected that sympathy would be 
 expended upon him. Let the dying keep to their bed of 
 neglect, and age sit lonely by its fireside. Portionless maids, 
 freeze and burn in your solitary attics. If the world tolerates 
 misery of any kind, it is to turn it to account for its own pur- 
 poses, to make some use of it, saddle and bridle it, put a bit 
 in its mouth, ride it about, and get some fun out of it. 
 
 Crotchety spinsters, ladies' companions, put a cheerful face 
 upon it, endure the humors of your so-called benefactress, 
 carry her lapdogs for her ; you have an English poodle for
 
 252 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 your rival, and you must seek to understand the moods of 
 your patroness, and amuse her, and keep silence about your- 
 selves. As for you, unblushing parasite, uncrowned king of 
 unliveried servants, leave your real character at home, let 
 your digestion keep pace with your host's, laugh when he 
 laughs, mingle your tears with his, and find his epigrams 
 amusing ; if you want to relieve your mind about him, wait 
 till he is ruined. That is the way the world shows its respect 
 for the unfortunate ; it persecutes them, or slays them ; it 
 deprives them of their manhood, or humbles them in the 
 dust. 
 
 Such thoughts as these welled up in Raphael's heart with 
 the suddenness of poetic inspiration. He looked around 
 him, and felt the influence of the forbidding gloom that 
 society breathes out in order to rid itself of the unfortunate ; 
 it nipped his soul more effectually than the east wind grips the 
 body in December. He locked his arms over his chest, set 
 his back against the wall, and fell into a deep melancholy. 
 He mused upon the meagre happiness that this depressing way 
 of living can give. What did it amount to? Amusement 
 with no pleasure in it, gaiety without gladness, joyless 
 festivity, fevered dreams empty of all delight, firewood or 
 ashes on the hearth without a spark of flame in them. 
 When he raised his head he found himself alone, all the 
 billiard players had gone. 
 
 " I have only to let them know my power to make them 
 worship my coughing fits," he said to himself, and wrapped 
 himself against the world in the cloak of his contempt. 
 
 Next day the resident doctor came to call upon him, and 
 took an anxious interest in his health. Raphael felt a thrill 
 of joy at the friendly words addressed to him. The doctor's 
 face, to his thinking, wore an expression that was kind and 
 pleasant ; the pale curls of his wig seemed redolent of philan- 
 thropy ; the square cut of his coat, the loose folds of his 
 trousers, his big Quaker-like shoes, everything about him
 
 THE AGONY. 253 
 
 down to the powder shaken from his queue and dusted in 
 a circle upon his slightly stooping shoulders, revealed an 
 apostolic nature, and spoke of Christian charity and of the 
 self-sacrifice of a man, who, out of sheer devotion to his 
 patients, had compelled himself to learn to play whist and 
 tric-trac so well that he never lost money to any of them. 
 
 " My Lord Marquis," said he, after a long talk with 
 Raphael, " I can dispel your uneasiness beyond all doubt. I 
 know your constitution well enough by this time to assure you 
 that the doctors in Paris, whose great abilities I know, are 
 mistaken as to the nature of your complaint. You can live as 
 long as Methuselah, my Lord Marquis, accidents only excepted. 
 Your lungs are as sound as a blacksmith's bellows, your 
 stomach would put an ostrich to the blush ; but if you persist 
 in living at a high altitude, you are running the risk of prompt 
 interment in consecrated soil. A few words, my Lord Marquis, 
 will make my meaning clear to you. 
 
 " Chemistry," he began, " has shown us that man's breath- 
 ing is a real process of combustion, and the intensity of its 
 action varies according to the abundance or scarcity of the 
 phlogistic element stored up by the organism of each indi- 
 vidual. In your case, the phlogistic or inflammatory element 
 is abundant ; if you will permit me to put it so, you generate 
 superfluous oxygen, possessing as you do the inflammatory 
 temperament of a man destined to experience strong emotions. 
 While you breathe the keen, pure air that stimulates life in 
 men of lymphatic constitution, you are accelerating an expen- 
 diture of vitality already too rapid. One of the conditions 
 of existence for you is the heavier atmosphere of the plains 
 and valleys. Yes, the vital air for a man consumed by his 
 genius lies in the fertile pasture-lands of Germany, at Toplitz 
 or Baden-Baden. If England is not obnoxious to you, its 
 misty climate would reduce your fever; but the situation of 
 our baths, a thousand feet above the level of the Mediterra- 
 nean, is dangerous for you. That is my opinion at least," 
 17
 
 254 THE WILD ASS' SKIM. 
 
 he said, with a deprecatory gesture, " and I give it in oppo- 
 sition to our interests, for, if you act upon it, we shall unfor- 
 tunately lose you." 
 
 But for these closing words of his, the affable doctor's 
 seeming good-nature would have completely won Raphael 
 over ; but he was too profoundly observant not to under- 
 stand the meaning of the tone, the look and gesture that 
 accompanied that mild sarcasm, riot to see that the little 
 man had been sent on this errand, no doubt, by a flock of 
 his rejoicing patients. The florid-looking idlers, tedious 
 old women, nomad English people, and fine ladies who had 
 given their husbands the slip, and were escorted hither by 
 their lovers one and all were in a plot to drive away a 
 wretched, feeble creature about to die, who seemed unable 
 to hold out against a daily renewed persecution ! Raphael 
 accepted the challenge ; he foresaw some amusement to be 
 derived from their manoeuvres. 
 
 "As you would be so grieved at losing me," said he to 
 the doctor, " I will endeavor to avail myself of your good 
 advice without leaving the place. I will set about having 
 a house built to-morrow, and the atmosphere within it shall 
 be regulated by your instruction." 
 
 The doctor understood the sarcastic smile that lurked 
 about Raphael's mouth, and took his leave without finding 
 another word to say. 
 
 The Lake of Bourget lies seven hundred feet above the 
 Mediterranean, in a great hollow among the jagged peaks of 
 the hills ; it sparkles there, the bluest drop of water in the 
 world. From the summit of the Cat's Tooth the lake below 
 looks like a stray turquoise. This lovely sheet of water is 
 about twenty-seven miles round, and in some places is nearly 
 five hundred feet deep. 
 
 Under the cloudless sky, in your boat in the midst of the 
 great expanse of water, with only the sound of the oars in 
 your ears, only the vague outline of the hills on the horizon
 
 THE AGONY. 255 
 
 before you ; you admire the glittering snows of the French 
 Maurienne ; you pass now by masses of granite clad in the 
 velvet of green turf or in low-growing shrubs, now by pleasant 
 sloping meadows ; there is always a wilderness on the one 
 hand and fertile lands on the other, and both harmonies and 
 dissonances compose a scene for you where everything is at once 
 small and vast, and you feel yourself to be a poor onlooker at 
 a grand banquet. The configuration of the mountains brings 
 about misleading optical conditions and illusions of perspec- 
 tive ; a pine-tree a hundred feet in height looks to be a mere 
 reed ; wide valleys look as narrow as meadow paths. The 
 lake is the only one where the confidences of heart and heart 
 can be exchanged. There one can love ; there one can medi- 
 tate. Nowhere on earth will you find a closer understanding 
 between the water, the sky, the mountains, and the fields. 
 There is a balm there for all the agitations of life. The place 
 keeps the secrets of sorrow to itself, the sorrow that grows less 
 beneath its soothing influence ; and to love, it gives a grave 
 and meditative cast, deepening passion and purifying it. A 
 kiss there becomes something great. But beyond all things 
 it is a lake for memories ; it aids them by lending to them 
 the hues of its own waves ; it is a mirror in which everything is 
 reflected. Only here, with this lovely landscape all round 
 him, could Raphael endure the burden laid upon him ; here 
 he could remain as a languid dreamer, without a wish of his 
 own. 
 
 He went out upon the lake after the doctor's visit, and was 
 landed at a lonely point on the pleasant slope where the village 
 of Saint-Innocent is situated. The view from this promon- 
 tory, as one may call it, comprises the heights of Bugey with 
 the Rhone flowing at their foot, and at the end of the lake ; 
 but Raphael liked to look at the opposite shore from thence, 
 at the melancholy looking Abbey of Haute-Combe, the bury- 
 ing-place of the Sardinian kings, who lie prostrate there before 
 the hills, like pilgrims come at last to their journey's end.
 
 256 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 The silence of the landscape was broken by the even rhythm 
 of the strokes of the oar ; it seemed to find a voice for the 
 place, in monotonous cadences like the chanting of monks. 
 The Marquis was surprised to find visitors to this usually lonely 
 part of the lake ; and as he mused, he watched the people 
 seated in the boat, and recognized in the stern the elderly 
 lady who had spoken so harshly to him the evening before. 
 
 No one took any notice of Raphael as the boat passed, 
 except the elderly lady's companion, a poor old maid of noble 
 family, who bowed to him, and whom it seemed to him that 
 he saw for the first time. A few seconds later he had already 
 forgotten the visitors, who had rapidly disappeared behind 
 the promontory, when he heard the fluttering of a dress, and 
 the sound of light footsteps not far from him. He turned 
 about and saw the companion ; and, guessing from her em- 
 barrassed manner that she wished to speak with him, he walked 
 towards her. 
 
 She was somewhere about thirty-six years of age, thin and 
 tall, reserved and prim, and, like all old maids, seemed puzzled 
 to know which way to look, an expression no longer in keep- 
 ing with her measured, springless, and hesitating steps. She 
 was both young and old at the same time, and, by a certain 
 dignity in her carriage, showed the high value which she set 
 upon her charms and perfections. In addition, her movements 
 were all demure and discreet, like those of women who are 
 accustomed to take great care of themselves, no doubt because 
 they desire not to be cheated of love, their destined end. 
 
 "Your life is in danger, sir; do not come to the Club 
 again ! " she said, stepping back a pace or two from Raphael, 
 as if her reputation had been already compromised. 
 
 "But, mademoiselle," said Raphael, smiling, "please ex- 
 plain yourself more clearly, since you have condescended 
 
 so far " 
 
 "Ah," she answered, "unless I had had a very strong 
 motive, I should never have run the risk of offending the
 
 THE AGONY. 257 
 
 Countess, for if she ever came to know that I had warned 
 you " 
 
 " And who would tell her, mademoiselle ? " cried Raphael. 
 
 "True," the old maid answered. She looked at him, 
 quaking like an owl out in the sunlight. " But think of your- 
 self," she went on; "several young men, who want to drive 
 you away from the baths, have agreed to pick a quarrel with 
 you, and to force you into a duel." 
 
 The elderly lady's voice sounded in the distance. 
 
 " Mademoiselle," began the Marquis, " my gratitude " 
 
 But his protectress had fled already ; she had heard the voice 
 of her mistress squeaking afresh among the rocks. 
 
 "Poor girl ! unhappiness always understands and helps the 
 unhappy," Raphael thought, and sat himself down at the foot 
 of a tree. 
 
 The key of every science is, beyond cavil, the mark of 
 interrogation ; we owe most of our greatest discoveries to a 
 Why ? and all the wisdom in the world, perhaps, consists in 
 asking Wherefore? in every connection. But, on the other 
 hand, this acquired prescience is the ruin of our illusions. 
 
 So Valentin, having taken the old maid's kindly action for 
 the text of his wandering thoughts, without the deliberate 
 promptings of philosophy, must find it full of gall and worm- 
 wood. 
 
 " It is not at all extraordinary that a gentlewoman's gentle- 
 woman should take a fancy to me," said he to himself. " I 
 am twenty-seven years old, and I have a title and an income 
 of two hundred thousand a year. But that her mistress, who 
 hates water like a rabid cat for it would be hard to give the 
 palm to either in that matter that her mistress should have 
 brought her here in a boat ! Is not that very strange and 
 wonderful ? Those two women came into Savoy to sleep like 
 marmots ; they ask if day has dawned at noon ; and to think 
 that they could get up this morning before eight o'clock to 
 take their chance in running after me ! "
 
 258 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 Very soon the old maid and her elderly innocence became 
 in his eyes, a fresh manifestation of that artificial, malicious 
 little world. It was a paltry device, a clumsy artifice, a piece 
 of priest's or woman's craft. Was the duel a myth, or did 
 they merely want to frighten him ? But these petty creatures, 
 impudent and teasing as flies, had succeeded in wounding his 
 vanity, in rousing his pride, and exciting his curiosity. 
 Unwilling to become their dupe, or to be taken for a coward, 
 and even diverted perhaps by the little drama, he went to the 
 Club that very evening. 
 
 He stood leaning against the marble chimney-piece, and 
 stayed there quietly in the middle of the principal salon, 
 doing his best to give no one any advantage over him ; but 
 he scrutinized the faces about him, and gave a certain vague 
 offence to those assembled, by his inspection. Like a dog 
 aware of his strength, he awaited the contest on his own 
 ground, without unnecessary barking. Towards the end of 
 the evening he strolled into the card-room, walking between 
 the door and another that opened into the billiard-room, 
 throwing a glance from time to time over a group of young 
 men that had gathered there. He heard his name mentioned 
 after a turn or two. Although they lowered their voices, 
 Raphael easily guessed that he had become the topic of their de- 
 bate, and he ended by catching a phrase or two spoken aloud. 
 
 "You?" 
 
 "Yes, I." 
 
 " I dare you to do it ! " 
 
 " Let us make a bet on it ! ! ' 
 
 "Oh, he will do it." 
 
 Just as Valentin, curious to learn the matter of the 
 wager, came up to pay closer attention to what they were 
 saying, a tall, strong, good-looking young fellow, who, how- 
 ever, possessed the impertinent stare peculiar to people who 
 have material force at their back, came out of the billiard- 
 room.
 
 THE AGONY. 259 
 
 "I am deputed, sir," he said coolly, addressing the Mar- 
 quis, " to make you aware of something which you do not 
 seem to know ; your face and person generally are a source 
 of annoyance to every one here, and to me in particular. 
 You have too much politeness not to sacrifice yourself to the 
 public good, and I beg that you will not show yourself in the 
 Club again." 
 
 "This sort of joke has been perpetrated before, sir, in gar- 
 rison towns at the time of the Empire ; but nowadays it is 
 exceedingly bad form," said Raphael drily. 
 
 "I am not joking," the young man answered; " and I 
 repeat it : your health will be considerably the worse for a 
 stay here ; the heat and light, the air of the salon, and the 
 company are all bad for your complaint." 
 
 " Where did you study medicine? " Raphael inquired. 
 
 " I took my bachelor's degree on Lepage's shooting-ground 
 in Paris, and was made a doctor at Cerizier's, the king of 
 foils." 
 
 "There is one last degree left for you to take," said Val- 
 entin ; " study the ordinary rules of politeness, and you will 
 be a perfect gentleman." 
 
 The young men all came out of the billiard-room just then, 
 some disposed to laugh, some silent. The attention of other 
 players was drawn to the matter ; they left their cards to 
 watch a quarrel that rejoiced their instincts. Raphael, alone 
 among this hostile crowd, did his best to keep cool, and not 
 to put himself in any way in the wrong ; but his adversary 
 having ventured a sarcasm containing an insult couched in 
 unusually keen language, he replied gravely 
 
 " We cannot box men's ears, sir, in these days, but I am at 
 a loss for any word by which to stigmatize such cowardly 
 behavior as yours." 
 
 "That's enough, that's enough. You can come to an 
 explanation to-morrow," several young men exclaimed, inter- 
 posing between the two champions.
 
 260 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 Raphael left the room in the character of aggressor, after 
 he had accepted a proposal to meet near the Chateau de 
 Bordeau, in a little sloping meadow, not very far from the 
 newly made road, by which the man who came off victorious 
 could reach Lyons. Raphael must now either take to his bed 
 or leave the baths. The visitors had gained their point. At 
 eight o'clock next morning his antagonist, followed by two 
 seconds and a surgeon, arrived first on the ground. 
 
 " We shall do very nicely here ; glorious weather for a 
 duel," he cried gaily, looking at the blue vault of sky above, 
 at the waters of the lake, and the rocks, without a single 
 melancholy presentiment or doubt of the issue. " If I wing 
 him," he went on, " I shall send him to bed for a month; 
 eh, doctor? " 
 
 "At the very least," the surgeon replied; "but let that 
 willow twig alone, or you will weary your wrist, and then you 
 will not fire steadily. You might kill your man then instead 
 of wounding him." 
 
 The noise of a carriage was heard approaching. 
 
 "Here he is," said the seconds, who soon descried a 
 caleche coming along the road ; it was drawn by four horses, 
 and there were two postilions. 
 
 " What a queer proceeding ! " said Valentin's antagonist ; 
 "here he comes post-haste to be shot." 
 
 The slightest incident about a duel, as about a stake at 
 cards, makes an impression on the minds of those deeply 
 concerned in the results of the affair ; so the young man 
 awaited the arrival of the carriage with a kind of uneasiness. 
 It stopped in the road ; old Jonathan laboriously descended 
 from it, in the first place, to assist Raphael to alight ; he 
 supported him with his feeble arms, and showed him all the 
 minute attentions that a lover lavishes upon his mistress. 
 Both became lost to sight in the footpath that lay between the 
 high-road and the field where the duel was to take place ; 
 they were walking slowly, and did not appear again for some
 
 THE AGONY. 261 
 
 time after. The four onlookers at this strange spectacle felt 
 deeply moved by the sight of Valentin as he leaned on his 
 servant's arm ; he was wasted and pale ; he limped as if he 
 had the gout, went with his head bowed down, and said not a 
 word. You might have taken them for a couple of old men, 
 one broken with years, the other worn out with thought ; the 
 elder bore his age visibly written in his white hair, the 
 younger was of no age. 
 
 "I have not slept all night, sir; " so Raphael greeted his 
 antagonist. 
 
 The icy tone and terrible glance that went with the words 
 made the real aggressor shudder; he knew that he was in the 
 wrong, and felt in secret ashamed of his behavior. There 
 was something strange in Raphael's bearing, tone and gesture ; 
 the Marquis stopped, and every one else was likewise silent. 
 The uneasy and constrained feeling grew to a height. 
 
 " There is yet time," he went on, " to offer me some slight 
 apology ; and offer it you must, or you will die, sir ! You 
 rely even now on your dexterity, and do not shrink from an 
 encounter in which you believe all the advantage to be upon 
 your side. Very good, sir ; I am generous, I am letting you 
 know my superiority beforehand. I possess a terrible power. 
 I have only to wish to do so, and I can neutralize your skill, 
 dim your eyesight, make your hand and pulse unsteady, and 
 even kill you outright. I have no wish to be compelled to 
 exercise my power ; the use of it costs me too dear. You 
 would not be the only one to die. So if you refuse to apolo- 
 gize to me, no matter what your experience in murder, your 
 ball will go into the waterfall there, and mine will speed 
 straight to your heart though I do not aim it at you." 
 
 Confused voices interrupted Raphael at this point. All the 
 time that he was speaking, the Marquis had kept his intolera- 
 bly keen gaze fixed upon his antagonist; now he drew him- 
 self up and showed an impassive face, like that of a dangerous 
 madman.
 
 262 7W WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 " Make him hold his tongue," the young man had said to 
 one of his seconds; "that voice of his is tearing the heart 
 out of me." 
 
 " Say no more, sir; it is quite useless," cried the seconds 
 and the surgeon, addressing Raphael. 
 
 "Gentlemen, I am fulfilling a duty. Has this young 
 gentleman any final arrangements to make ? " 
 
 "That is enough; that will do." 
 
 The Marquis remained standing steadily, never for a 
 moment losing sight of his antagonist ; and the latter seemed, 
 like a bird before a snake, to be overwhelmed by a well-nigh 
 magical power. He was compelled to endure that homicidal 
 gaze ; he met and shunned it incessantly. 
 
 "I am thirsty; give me some water " he said again to 
 
 the second. 
 
 "Are you nervous?" 
 
 "Yes," he answered. "There is a fascination about that 
 man's glowing eyes." 
 
 "Will you apologize? " 
 
 "It is too late now." 
 
 The two antagonists were placed at fifteen paces distant 
 from each other. One of them had a brace of pistols at hand, 
 and, according to the programme prescribed for them, each 
 was to fire twice when and how he pleased, but after the signal 
 had been given by the seconds. 
 
 " What are you doing, Charles ?" exclaimed the young man 
 who acted as second to Raphael's antagonist ; " you are put- 
 ting in the ball before the powder !" 
 
 " I am a dead man," he muttered, by way of answer ; " you 
 have put me facing the sun " 
 
 "The sun lies behind you," said Valentin sternly and 
 solemnly, while he coolly loaded his pistol without heeding 
 the fact that the signal had been given, or that his antagonist 
 was carefully taking aim. 
 
 There was something so appalling in this supernatural uncon-
 
 VALENTIN HURRIEDLY SOUGHT THE WILD ASS- SKIN TO 
 SEE WHAT ANOTHER MAN'S LIFE HAD COST HIM.
 
 THE AGONY. 263 
 
 cern, that it affected the two postilions, brought thither by a 
 cruel curiosity. Raphael was either trying his power or play- 
 ing with it, for he talked to Jonathan, and looked towards 
 him as he received his adversary's fire. Charles' bullet broke 
 a branch of willow, and ricocheted over the surface of the 
 water; Raphael fired at random, and shot his antagonist 
 through the heart. He did not heed the young man as he 
 dropped ; he hurriedly sought the Wild Ass' Skin to see what 
 another man's life had cost him. The talisman was no larger 
 than a small oak-leaf. 
 
 "What are you gaping at, you postilions over there? Let 
 us be off," said the Marquis. 
 
 That same evening he crossed the French border, immedi- 
 ately set out for Auvergne, and reached the springs of Mont 
 Dore. As he traveled, there surged up in his heart, all at 
 once, one of those thoughts that come to us as a ray of sun- 
 light pierces through the thick mists in some dark valley a sad 
 enlightenment, a pitiless sagacity that lights up the accom- 
 plished fact for us, that lays our errors bare, and leaves us with- 
 out excuse in our own eyes. It suddenly struck him that the 
 possession of power, no matter how enormous, did not bring 
 with it the knowledge how to use it. The sceptre is a play- 
 thing for a child, an axe for a Richelieu, and for a Napoleon 
 a lever by which to move the world. Power leaves us just as 
 it finds us ; only great natures grow greater by its means. 
 Raphael had had everything in his power, and he had done 
 nothing. 
 
 At the springs of Mont Dore he came again in contact with 
 a little world of people, who invariably shunned him with the 
 eager haste that animals display when they scent afar off one 
 of their own species lying dead, and flee away. The dislike 
 was mutual. His late adventure had given him a deep distaste 
 for society ; his first care, consequently, was to find a lodging 
 at some distance from the neighborhood of the springs. In- 
 stinctively he felt within him the need of close contact with
 
 264 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 nature, of natural emotions, and of the vegetative life into 
 which we sink so gladly among the fields. 
 
 The day after he arrived he climbed the Pic de Sancy, not 
 without difficulty, and visited the higher valleys, the skyey 
 nooks, undiscovered lakes, and peasants' huts about Mont 
 Dore, a country whose stern and wild features are now begin- 
 ning to tempt the brushes of our artists, for sometimes wonder- 
 fully fresh and charming views are to be found there, affording 
 a strong contrast to the frowning brows of those lonely hills. 
 
 Barely a league from the village Raphael discovered a nook 
 where nature seemed to have taken a pleasure in hiding away 
 all her treasures like some glad and mischievous child. At 
 the first sight of this unspoiled and picturesque retreat, he 
 determined to take up his abode in it. There, life must 
 needs be peaceful, natural, and fruitful, like the life of a plant. 
 
 Imagine for yourself an inverted cone of granite hollowed 
 out on a large scale, a sort of basin with its sides divided up 
 by queer winding paths. On one side lay level stretches with 
 no growth upon them, a bluish uniform surface, over which 
 the rays of the sun fell as upon a mirror ; on the other lay 
 cliffs split open by fissures and frowning ravines ; great blocks 
 of lava hung suspended from them, while the action of rain 
 slowly prepared their impending fall ; a few stunted trees, tor- 
 mented by the wind, often crowned their summits; and here 
 and there in some sheltered angle of their ramparts a clump 
 of chestnut-trees grew tall as cedars, or some cavern in the 
 yellowish rock showed the dark entrance into its depths, set 
 about by flowers and brambles, decked by a little strip of 
 green turf. 
 
 "At the bottom of this cup, which perhaps had been the 
 crater of an old-world volcano, lay a pool of water as pure and 
 bright as a diamond. Granite boulders lay around the deep 
 basin, and willows, mountain-ash trees, yellow-flag lilies, and 
 numberless aromatic plants bloomed about it, in a realm of 
 meadow as fresh as an English bowling-green. The fine soft
 
 THE AGONY. 265 
 
 grass was watered by the streams that trickled through the 
 fissures in the cliffs ; the soil was continually enriched by the 
 deposits of loam which storms washed down from the heights 
 above. The pool might be some three acres in extent ; its 
 shape was irregular, and the edges were scalloped like the hem 
 of a dress ; the meadow might be an acre or two acres in 
 extent. The cliffs and the water approached and receded 
 from each other ; here and there, there was scarcely width 
 enough for the cows to pass between them. 
 
 After a certain height the plant life ceased. Aloft in air 
 the granite took upon itself the most fantastic shapes, and 
 assumed those misty tints that give to high mountains a dim 
 resemblance to clouds in the sky. The bare, bleak cliffs, with 
 the fearful rents in their sides, pictures of wild and barren 
 desolation, contrasted strongly with the pretty view of the 
 valley ; and so strange were the shapes they assumed, that one 
 of the cliffs had been called "The Capuchin," because it was 
 so like a monk. Sometimes these sharp-pointed peaks, these 
 mighty masses of rock, and airy caverns were lighted up one 
 by one, according to the direction of the sun or the caprices 
 of the atmosphere ; they caught gleams of gold, dyed them- 
 selves in purple, took a tint of glowing rose-color, or turned 
 dull and gray. Upon the heights a drama of color was always 
 to be seen, a play of ever-shifting iridescent hues like those on 
 a pigeon's breast. 
 
 Oftentimes at sunrise or at sunset a ray of bright sunlight 
 would penetrate between two sheer surfaces of lava, that might 
 have been split apart by a hatchet, to the very depths of that 
 pleasant little garden, where it would play in the waters of the 
 \ ol, like a beam of golden light which gleams through the 
 chinks of a shutter into a room in Spain, that has been care- 
 fully darkened for a siesta. When the sun arose above the 
 old crater that some antediluvian revolution had filled with 
 water, its rocky sides took warmer tones, the extinct volcano 
 glowed again, and its sudden heat quickened the sprouting
 
 266 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 seeds and vegetation, gave color to the flowers, and ripened 
 the fruits of this forgotten corner of the earth. 
 
 As Raphael readied it, he noticed several cows grazing in 
 the pasture-land ; and when he had taken a few steps towards 
 the water, he saw a little house built of granite and roofed 
 with shingle in the spot where the meadow-land was at its 
 widest. The roof of this little cottage harmonized with every- 
 thing about it ; for it had long been overgrown with ivy, moss, 
 and flowers of no recent date. A thin smoke, that did not 
 scare the birds away, went up from the dilapidated chimney. 
 There was a great bench at the door between huge honey- 
 suckle bushes, that were pink with blossom and full of scent. 
 The walls could scarcely be seen for branches of vine and 
 sprays of rose and jessamine that interlaced and grew entirely 
 as chance and their own will bade them ; for the inmates of 
 the cottage seemed to pay no attention to the growth which 
 adorned their house, and to take no care of it, leaving to it 
 the fresh capricious charm of nature. 
 
 Some clothes spread out on the gooseberry bushes were dry- 
 ing in the sun. A cat was sitting on a machine for stripping 
 hemp; beneath it lay a newly scoured brass caldron, among 
 a quantity of potato-parings. On the other side of the house 
 Raphael saw a sort of barricade of dead thorn-bushes, meant 
 no doubt to keep the poultry from scratching up the vegeta- 
 bles and pot-herbs. It seemed like the end of the earth. 
 The dwelling was like some bird's-nest ingeniously set in a 
 cranny of the rocks, a clever and at the same time a careless 
 bit of workmanship. A simple and kindly nature lay round 
 about it ; its rusticity was genuine, but there was a charm like 
 that of poetry in it ; for it grew and throve at a thousand 
 miles' distance from our elaborate and conventional poetry. 
 It was like none of our conceptions ; it was a spontaneous 
 growth, a masterpiece due to chance. 
 
 As Raphael reached the place, the sunlight fell across it 
 from right to left, bringing out all the colors of its plants and
 
 THE AGONY. 267 
 
 trees ; the yellowish or gray bases of the crags, the different 
 shades of the green leaves, the masses of flowers, pink, blue, 
 or white, the climbing plants with their bell-like blossoms, 
 and the shot velvet of the mosses, the purple-tinted blooms 
 of the heather, everything was either brought into relief or 
 made fairer yet by the enchantment of the light or by the 
 contrasting shadows ; and this was the case most of all with 
 the sheet of water, wherein the house, the trees, the granite 
 peaks, and the sky were all faithfully reflected. Everything 
 had a radiance of its own in this delightful picture, from the 
 sparkling mica stone to the bleached tuft of grass hidden 
 away in the soft shadows ; the spotted cow with its glossy 
 hide, the delicate water-plants that hung down over the pool 
 like fringes in a nook where blue or emerald colored insects 
 were buzzing about, the roots of trees like a sand-besprinkled 
 shock of hair above grotesque faces in the flinty rock surface, 
 all these things made a harmony for the eye. 
 
 The odor of the tepid water, the scent of the flowers, and 
 the breath of the caverns which filled the lonely place, gave 
 Raphael a sensation that was almost enjoyment. Silence 
 reigned in majesty over these woods, which possibly are 
 unknown to the tax-collector; but the barking of a couple 
 of dogs broke the stillness all at once ; the cows turned their 
 heads towards the entrance of the valley, showing their moist 
 noses to Raphael, stared stupidly at him, and then fell to 
 browsing again. A goat and her kid, that seemed to hang on 
 the side of the crags in some magical fashion, capered and 
 leaped to a slab of granite near to Raphael, and stayed there 
 a moment, as if to seek to know who he was. The yapping 
 of the dogs brought out a plump child, who stood agape, and 
 next came a white-haired old man of middle height. Both 
 of these two beings were in keeping with the surroundings, 
 the air, the flowers, and the dwelling. Health appeared to 
 overflow in this fertile region ; old age and childhood thrived 
 there. There seemed to be, about all these types of exist-
 
 268 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 ence, the freedom and carelessness of the life of primitive 
 times, a happiness of use and wont that gave the lie to our 
 philosophical platitudes, and wrought a cure of all its swelling 
 passions in the heart. 
 
 The old man belonged to the type of model dear to the 
 masculine brush of Schnetz. The countless wrinkles upon his 
 brown face looked as if they would be hard to the touch ; the 
 straight nose, the prominent cheek-bones, streaked with red 
 veins like a vine-leaf in autumn, the angular features, all were 
 characteristics of strength, even where strength existed no 
 longer. The hard hands, now that they toiled no longer, 
 had preserved their scanty white hair ; his bearing was that 
 of an absolutely free man ; it suggested the thought that, had 
 he been an Italian, he would have perhaps turned brigand, for 
 the love of the liberty so dear to him. The child was a reg- 
 ular mountaineer, with the black eyes that can face the sun 
 without flinching, a deeply-tanned complexion, and rough 
 brown hair. His movements were like a bird's swift, deci- 
 ded, and unconstrained ; his clothing was ragged ; the white, 
 fair skin showed through the rents in his garments. There 
 they both stood in silence, side by side, both obeying the 
 same impulse ; in both faces were clear tokens of an abso- 
 lutely identical and idle life. The old man had adopted the 
 child's amusements, and the child had fallen in with the old 
 man's humor; there was a sort of tacit agreement between two 
 kinds of feebleness, between failing powers well-nigh spent 
 and powers just about to unfold themselves. 
 
 Very soon a woman who seemed to be about thirty years old 
 appeared on the threshold of the door, spinning as she came. 
 She was an Auvergnate, a high-colored, comfortable-looking, 
 straightforward sort of person, with white teeth; her cap and 
 dress, the face, full figure, and general appearance were of 
 the Auvergne peasant stamp. So was her dialect ; she was a 
 thorough embodiment of her district ; its hard-working ways, 
 its thrift, ignorance, and heartiness all met in her.
 
 THE AGONY. 269 
 
 She greeted Raphael, and they began to talk. The dogs 
 quieted down ; the old man went and sat on a bench in the 
 sun ; the child followed his mother about whenever she went, 
 listening without saying a word, and staring at the stranger. 
 
 " You are not afraid to live here, good woman ? " 
 
 "What should we be afraid of, sir? When we bolt the 
 door, whoever could get inside? Oh, no, we aren't afraid at 
 all. And besides," she said, as she brought the Marquis into 
 the principal room in the house, "what should thieves come 
 to take from us here ? ' ' 
 
 She designated the room as she spoke ; the smoke-blackened 
 walls, with some brilliant pictures in blue, red and green, an 
 " End of Credit," a Crucifixion, and the " Grenadiers of the 
 Imperial Guard," for their sole ornament ; the furniture here 
 and there, the old wooden four-post bedstead, the table with 
 crooked legs, a few stools, the chest that held the bread, the 
 flitch that hung from the ceiling, a jar of salt, a stove, and 
 on the mantel-shelf a few discolored yellow plaster figures. 
 As he went out again Raphael noticed a man half-way up the 
 crags, leaning on a hoe, and watching the house with interest. 
 
 "That's my man, sir," said the Auvergnate, unconsciously 
 smiling in peasant fashion ; " he is at work up there." 
 
 " And that old man is your father ? " 
 
 "Asking your pardon, sir, he is my man's grandfather. 
 Such as you see him, he is a hundred and two, and yet quite 
 lately he walked over to Clermont with our little chap ! Oh, 
 he has been a strong man in his time ; but he does nothing 
 now but sleep and eat and drink. He amuses himself with 
 the little fellow. Sometimes the child trails him up the 
 hillsides, and he will just go up there along with him. 
 
 Valentin made up his mind immediately. He would live 
 between this child and old man, breathe the same air, eat 
 their bread, drink the same water, sleep with them, make 
 the blood in his veins like theirs. It was a dying man's 
 fancy. For him the prime model, after which the customary 
 18
 
 270 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 existence of the individual should be shaped, the real formula 
 for the life of a human being, the only true and possible life, 
 the life-ideal, was to become one of the oysters adhering to 
 this rock, to save his shell a day or two longer by paralyzing 
 the power of death. One profoundly selfish thought took 
 possession of him, and the whole universe was swallowed up 
 and lost in it. For him the universe existed no longer ; the 
 whole world had come to be within himself. For the sick, 
 the world begins at their pillow and ends at the foot of the 
 bed ; and this country-side was Raphael's sick bed. 
 
 Who has not, at some time or other in his life, watched the 
 comings and goings of an ant, slipped straws into a yellow 
 slug's one breathing-hole, studied the vagaries of a slender 
 dragon-fly, pondered admiringly over the countless veins in 
 an oak-leaf, that bring the colors of a rose window in some 
 Gothic cathedral into contrast with the reddish background? 
 Who has not looked long in delight at the effects of sun and 
 rain on a roof of brown tiles, at the dewdrops, or at the 
 variously shaped petals of the flower-cups ? Who has not 
 sunk into these idle, absorbing meditations on things without, 
 that have no conscious end, yet lead to some definite thought 
 at last? Who, in short, has not led a lazy life, the life of 
 childhood, the life of the savage without his labor? This life 
 without a care or a wish, Raphael led for some days' space. 
 He felt a distinct improvement in his condition, a wonderful 
 sense of ease, that quieted his apprehensions and soothed his 
 sufferings. 
 
 He would climb the'crags, and then find a seat high up on 
 some peak whence he could see a vast expanse of distant 
 country at a glance, and he would spend whole days in this 
 way, like a plant in the sun, or a hare in its form. And at 
 last, growing familiar with the appearance of the plant-life 
 about him, and of the changes in the sky, he minutely noted 
 the progress of everything working around him in the water, 
 or in the air. He tried to share the secret impulses of nature,
 
 THE AGONY. 271 
 
 sought by passive obedience to become a part of it, and to 
 lie within the conservative and despotic jurisdiction that regu- 
 lates instinctive existence. He no longer wished to steer his 
 own course. 
 
 Just as criminals in olden times were safe from the pursuit 
 of justice, if they took refuge under the shadow of the altar, 
 so Raphael made an effort to slip into the sancturary of life. 
 He succeeded in becoming an integral part of the great and 
 mighty fruit-producing organization ; he had adapted himself 
 to the inclemency of the air, and dwelt in every cave among 
 the rocks. He had learned the ways and habits of growth of 
 every plant, had studied the laws of the watercourses and 
 their beds, and had come to know the animals ; he was at last so 
 perfectly at one with this teeming earth, that he had in some 
 way discerned its mysteries and caught the spirit of it. 
 
 The infinitely varied forms of every natural kingdom were, 
 to his thinking, only developments of one and the same sub- 
 stance, different combinations brought about by the same im- 
 pulse, endless emanations from a measureless Being which 
 was aching, thinking, moving, and growing, and in harmony 
 with which he longed to grow, to move, to think, and act. 
 He had fancifully blended his life with the life of the crags ; 
 he had deliberately planted himself there. During the earliest 
 days of his sojourn in these pleasant surroundings, Valentin 
 tasted all the pleasures of childhood again, thanks to the strange 
 hallucination of apparent convalescence, which is not unlike 
 the pauses of delirium that nature mercifully provides for 
 those in pain. He went about making trifling discoveries, 
 setting to work on endless things, and finishing none of them; 
 the evening's plans were quite forgotten in the morning ; he 
 bad no cares, he was happy ; he thought himself saved. 
 
 One morning he had lain in bed till noon, deep in the 
 dreams between sleep and waking, which give to realities a 
 fantastic appearance, and make the wildest fancies seem solid 
 facts ; while he was still uncertain that he was not dreaming
 
 272 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 yet, he suddenly heard his hostess giving a report of his health 
 to Jonathan, for the first time. Jonathan came to inquire 
 after him daily ; and the Auvergnate, thinking no doubt that 
 Valentin was still asleep, had not lowered the tones of a voice 
 developed in mountain air. 
 
 "No better and no worse," she said. "He coughed all 
 last night again fit to kill himself. Poor gentleman, he coughs 
 and spits till it is piteous. My husband and I often wonder 
 to each other where he gets the strength from to cough like 
 that. It goes to your heart. What a cursed complaint it is ! 
 He has no strength at all. I am always afraid I shall find him 
 dead in his bed some morning. He is every bit as pale as a 
 waxen Christ. Dame ! I watch him as he dresses ; his poor 
 body is as thin as a nail. And he does not feel well now; but 
 no matter. It's all the same ; he wears himself out with run- 
 ning about as if he had health and to spare. All the same, 
 he is very brave, for he never complains at all. But really he 
 would be better under the earth than on it, for he is enduring 
 the agonies of Christ. I don't wish that myself, sir; it is 
 quite against our interests; but even if he didn't pay us what 
 he does, I should be just as fond of him ; it is not our own 
 interest that is our motive." 
 
 "Ah, mon Dieu ! " she continued, "Parisians are the 
 people for these dogs' diseases. Where did he catch it, now? 
 Poor young man ! And he is so sure that he is going to get 
 well! That fever just gnaws him, you know; it eats him 
 away ; it will be the death of him. He has no notion what- 
 ever of that ; he does not know it, sir ; he sees nothing 
 
 You mustn't cry about him, M. Jonathan ; you must remem- 
 ber that he will be happy, and will not suffer any more. You 
 ought to make a novena for him ; I have seen wonderful 
 cures come of a nine days' prayer, and I would gladly pay 
 for a wax taper to save such a gentle creature, so good he is, 
 a paschal lamb " 
 
 As Raphael's voice had grown too weak to allow him to
 
 THE AGONY. 273 
 
 make himself heard, he was compelled to listen to this hor- 
 rible statement. His irritation, however, drove him out of 
 bed at length, and he appeared upon the threshold. 
 
 "Old scoundrel!" he shouted to Jonathan; "do you 
 mean to put me to death?" 
 
 The peasant woman took him for a ghost, and fled. 
 
 " I forbid you to have any anxiety whatever about my 
 health," Raphael went on. 
 
 "Yes, my Lord Marquis," said the old servant, wiping 
 away his tears. 
 
 " And for the future you had very much better not come 
 here without my orders." 
 
 Jonathan meant to be obedient, but in the look full of pity 
 and devotion that he gave the Marquis before he went, 
 Raphael read his own death-warrant. Utterly disheartened, 
 brought all at once to a sense of his real position, Valentin sat 
 down on the threshold, locked his arms across his chest, and 
 bowed his head. Jonathan turned to his master in alarm, 
 with "My Lord " 
 
 "Go away, go away," cried the invalid. 
 
 In the hours of the next morning, Raphael climbed the 
 crags, and sat down in a mossy cleft in the rocks, whence he 
 could see the narrow path along which the water for the 
 dwelling was carried. At the base of the hill he saw Jonathan 
 in conversation with the Auvergnate. Some malicious power 
 interpreted for him all the woman's head-shakings, melancholy 
 gestures, and garrulous forebodings, and filled the breeze 
 and the silence with her ominous words. Thrilled with 
 horror, he took refuge among the highest summits of the 
 mountains, and stayed there till the evening; but yet he 
 could not drive away the gloomy presentiments awakened 
 within him in such an unfortunate manner by a cruel solici- 
 tude on his account. 
 
 The Auvergne peasant herself suddenly appeared before 
 him like a shadow in the dusk; a perverse freak of the poet
 
 274 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 within him found a vague resemblance between her black and 
 white striped petticoat and the bony frame of a spectre. 
 
 "The damp is falling now, sir," said she. "If you stop 
 out there, you will go off just like rotten fruit. You must 
 come in. It isn't healthy to breathe the damp, and you have 
 taken nothing since the morning, besides." 
 
 "God's thunder! old witch," he cried; "let me live 
 after my own fashion, I tell you, or I shall be off altogether. 
 It is quite bad enough to dig my grave every morning ; you 
 
 might let it alone in the evenings at least " 
 
 "Your grave, sir! I dig your grave! and where may 
 your grave be? I want to see you as old as father there, and 
 not in your grave by any manner of means. The grave ! that 
 
 comes soon enough for us all ; in the grave " 
 
 "That is enough," said Raphael. 
 "Take my arm, sir." 
 "No." 
 
 The feeling of pity in others is very difficult for a man to 
 bear, and it is hardest of all when the pity is deserved. 
 Hatred is a tonic it quickens life and stimulates revenge ; 
 but pity is death to us it makes our weakness weaker still. 
 It is as if distress simpered ingratiatingly at us ; contempt 
 lurks in the tenderness, or tenderness in an affront. In the 
 centenarian Raphael saw triumphant pity, a wondering pity 
 in the child's eyes, an officious pity in the woman, and in her 
 husband a pity that had an interested motive ; but no matter 
 how the sentiment declared itself, death was always its import. 
 A poet makes a poem of everything ; it is tragical or joy- 
 ful, as things happen to strike his imagination ; his lofty soul 
 rejects all half-tones ; he always prefers vivid and decided 
 colors. In Raphael's soul this compassion produced a terrible 
 poem of mourning and melancholy. When he had wished to 
 live in close contact with nature, he had of course forgotten 
 how freely natural emotions are expressed. He would think 
 himself quite alone under a tree, whilst he struggled with an
 
 THE AGONY, 275 
 
 obstinate coughing fit, a terrible combat from which he never 
 issued victorious without utter exhaustion afterwards ; and 
 then he would meet the clear, bright eyes of the little boy, 
 who occupied the post of sentinel, like a savage in a bent of 
 grass ; the eyes scrutinized him with a childish wonder, in 
 which there was as much amusement as pleasure, and an 
 indescribable mixture of indifference and interest. The awful 
 Brother, you must die, of the Trappists seemed constantly 
 legible in the eyes of the peasants with whom Raphael was 
 living ; he scarcely knew which he dreaded most, their unfet- 
 tered talk or their silence ; their presence became torture. 
 
 One morning he saw two men in black prowling about in 
 his neighborhood, who furtively studied him and took obser- 
 vations. They acted as though they had come there for a 
 stroll, and asked him a few indifferent questions, to which he 
 returned short answers. He recognized them both. One 
 was the cure and the other the doctor at the springs ; Jona- 
 than had no doubt sent them, or the people in the house had 
 called them in, or the scent of an approaching death had 
 drawn them thither. He beheld his own funeral, heard the 
 chanting of the priests, and counted the tall wax candles ; 
 and all that lovely fertile nature around him, in whose lap he 
 had thought to find life once more, he saw no longer, save 
 through a veil of crape. Everything that but lately had 
 spoken of length of days to him, now prophesied a speedy 
 end. He set out the next day for Paris, not before he had 
 been inundated with cordial wishes, which the people of the 
 house uttered in melancholy and wistful tones for his benefit. 
 
 He traveled through the night, and awoke as they passed 
 through one of the pleasant valleys of the Bourbonnais. View 
 after view swam before his gaze, and passed rapidly away like 
 the vague pictures of a dream. Cruel nature spread herself 
 out before his eyes with tantalizing grace. Sometimes the 
 Allier, a liquid shining riband, meandered through the distant 
 fertile landscape ; then followed the steeples of hamlets,
 
 276 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 hiding modestly in the depths of a ravine with its yeiiow 
 cliffs ; sometimes, after the monotony of vineyards, the water- 
 mills of a little valley would be suddenly seen ; and every- 
 where there were pleasant chateaux, hillside villages, roads 
 with their fringes of queenly poplars ; and the Loire itself, at, 
 last, with its wide sheets of water sparkling like diamonds 
 amid its golden sands. Attractions everywhere, without end ! 
 This nature, all astir with a life and gladness like that of 
 childhood, scarcely able to contain the impulses and sap of 
 June, possessed a fatal attraction for the darkened gaze of the 
 invalid. He drew the blinds of his carriage windows, and 
 betook himself again to slumber. 
 
 Towards evening, after they had passed Cesne, he was 
 awakened by lively music, and found himself confronted with 
 a village fair. The horses were changed near the market- 
 place. Whilst the postilions were engaged in making the 
 transfer, he saw the people dancing merrily, pretty and attrac- 
 tive girls with flowers about them, excited youths, and finally 
 the jolly wine-flushed countenances of the old peasants. Chil- 
 dren prattled, old women laughed and chatted ; everything 
 spoke in one voice, and there was a holiday gaiety about 
 everything, down to their clothing and the tables that were 
 set out. A cheerful expression pervaded the square and the 
 church, the roofs and windows ; even the very doorways of 
 the village seemed likewise to be in holiday trim. 
 
 Raphael could not repress an angry exclamation, nor yet a 
 wish to silence the fiddles, annihilate the stir and bustle, stop 
 the clamor, and disperse the ill-timed festival ; like a dying 
 man, he felt unable to endure the slightest sound, and he 
 entered his carriage much annoyed. When he looked out 
 upon the square from the window, he saw that all the happi- 
 ness was scared away ; the peasant women were in flight, and 
 the benches were deserted. Only a blind musician, on the 
 scaffolding of the orchestra, went on playing a shrill tune on 
 his clarionette. That piping of his, without dancers to it, and
 
 THE AGONY. 277 
 
 the solitary old man himself, in the shadow of the lime-tree, 
 with his curmudgeon's face, scanty hair, and ragged clothing, 
 was like a fantastic picture of Raphael's wish. The heavy 
 rain was pouring in torrents ; it was one of those thunder- 
 storms that June brings about so rapidly, to cease as suddenly. 
 The thing was so natural that, when Raphael had looked out 
 and seen some pale clouds driven by a gust of wind, he did 
 not think of looking at the piece of skin. He lay back again 
 in the corner of his carriage, which was very soon rolling upon 
 its way. 
 
 The next day found him back in his home again, in his 
 own room, beside his own fireside. He had had a large fire 
 lighted ; he felt cold. Jonathan brought him some letters ; 
 they were all from Pauline. He opened the first one without 
 any eagerness, and unfolded it as if it had been the gray- 
 paper form of application for taxes made by the revenue col- 
 lector. He read the first sentence : 
 
 " Gone ! This really is a flight, my Raphael. How is it? 
 No one can tell me where you are. And who should know if 
 not I." 
 
 He did not wish to learn any more. He calmly took up 
 the letters and threw them in the fire, watching with dull and 
 lifeless eyes the perfumed paper as it was twisted, shriveled, 
 bent, and devoured by the capricious flames. Fragments that 
 fell among the ashes allowed him to see the beginning of a 
 sentence, or a half-burnt thought or word ; he took a pleasure 
 in deciphering them a sort of mechanical amusement. 
 
 " Sitting at your door expected Caprice I obey Rivals 
 I, never! thy Pauline love no more of Pauline? If 
 you had wished to leave me forever, you would not have de- 
 serted me Love eternal To die " 
 
 The words caused him a sort of remorse ; he seized the 
 tongs, and rescued a last fragment of the letter from the 
 flames. 
 
 " I have murmured," so Pauline wrote, " but I have never
 
 278 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 complained, my Raphael ! If you have left me so far behind 
 you, it was doubtless because you wished to hide some heavy 
 grief from me. Perhaps you will kill me one of these days, 
 but you are too good to torture me. So do not go away from 
 me like this. There ! I can bear the worst of torment, if 
 only I am at your side. Any grief that you could cause me 
 would not be grief. There is far more love in my heart for 
 you than I have ever yet shown you. I can endure any- 
 thing, except this weeping far away from you, this ignorance 
 of your " 
 
 Raphael laid the scorched scrap on the mantel-piece, then 
 all at once he flung it in the fire. This bit of paper was too 
 clearly a symbol of his own love and luckless existence. 
 
 "Go and find M. Bianchon," he told Jonathan. 
 
 Horace came and found Raphael in bed. 
 
 " Can you prescribe a draught for me some mild opiate 
 which will always keep me in a somnolent condition, a draught 
 that will not be injurious although taken constantly." 
 
 " Nothing is easier," the young doctor replied ; " but you 
 will have to keep on your feet for a few hours daily, at any 
 rate, so as to take your food." 
 
 "A few hours!" Raphael broke in; " no, no ! I only 
 wish to be out of bed for an hour at most." 
 
 " What is your object ? " inquired Bianchon. 
 
 "To sleep; for so one keeps alive, at any rate," the 
 patient answered. " Let no one come in, not even Mile. 
 Pauline de Vitschnau ! " he added to Jonathan, as the doctor 
 was writing out his prescription. 
 
 "Well, M. Horace, is there any hope? " the old servant 
 asked, going as far as the flight of steps before the door, with 
 the young doctor. 
 
 " He may live for some time yet, or he may die to-night. 
 The chances of life and death are evenly balanced in his case. 
 I can't understand it at all," said the doctor, with a doubtful 
 gesture. " His mind ought to be diverted."
 
 THE AGONY. 279 
 
 " Diverted ! Ah, sir, you don't know him ! He killed a 
 man the other day without a word ! Nothing can divert 
 him ! " 
 
 For some days Raphael lay plunged in the torpor of this 
 artificial sleep. Thanks to the material power that opium 
 exerts over the immaterial part of us, this man with the power- 
 ful and active imagination reduced himself to the level of 
 those sluggish forms of animal life that lurk in the depths 
 of forests, and take the form of vegetable refuse, never stir- 
 ring from their place to catch their easy prey. He had dark- 
 ened the very sun in heaven ; the daylight never entered his 
 room. About eight o'clock in the evening he would leave his 
 bed, with no very clear consciousness of his own existence ; 
 he would satisfy the claims of hunger and return to bed imme- 
 diately. One dull blighted hour after another only brought 
 confused pictures and appearances before him, and lights and 
 shadows against a background of darkness. He lay buried in 
 deep silence; movement and intelligence were completely 
 annihilated for him. He woke later than usual one evening, 
 and found that his dinner was not ready. He rang for 
 Jonathan. 
 
 " You can go," he said. " I have made you rich ; you 
 shall be happy in your old age ; but I will not let you muddle 
 away my life any longer. Miserable wretch ! I am hungry 
 where is my dinner ? How is it ?- Answer me ! " 
 
 A satisfied smile stole over Jonathan's face. He took a 
 candle that lit up the great dark rooms of the mansion with 
 its flickering light ; brought his master, who had again become 
 an automaton, into a great gallery, and flung a door suddenly 
 open. Raphael was all at once dazzled by a flood of light 
 and amazed by an unheard-of scene. 
 
 His chandeliers had been filled with wax-lights ; the rarest 
 flowers from his conservatory were carefully arranged about 
 the room ; the table sparkled with silver, gold, crystal, and 
 porcelain ; a royal banquet was spread the odors of the
 
 280 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 tempting dishes tickled the nervous fibres of the palate. 
 There sat his friends ; he saw them among beautiful women in 
 full evening dress, with bare necks and shoulders, with flowers 
 in their hair; fair women of every type, with sparkling eyes, 
 attractively and fancifully arrayed. One had adopted an 
 Irish jacket, which displayed the alluring outlines of her 
 form; one wore the " basquina " of Andalusia, with its 
 wanton grace ; here was a half-clad Dian the huntress, there 
 the costume of Mile, dela Valliere, amorous and coy ; and all 
 of them alike were given up to the intoxication of the moment. 
 
 As Raphael's death-pale face showed itself in the doorway, a 
 sudden outcry broke out, as vehement as the blaze of this im- 
 provised banquet. The voices, perfumes, and lights, the 
 exquisite beauty of the women, produced their effect upon his 
 senses, and awakened his desires. Delightful music, from 
 unseen players in the next room, drowned the excited tumult 
 in a torrent of harmony the whole strange vision was com- 
 plete. 
 
 Raphael felt a caressing pressure of his own hand, a woman's 
 white, youthful arms were stretched out to grasp him, and the 
 hand was Aquilina's. He knew now that this scene was not 
 a fantastic illusion like the fleeting pictures of his disordered 
 dreams; he uttered a dreadful cry, slammed the door, and 
 dealt his heartbroken old servant a blow in the face. 
 
 "Monster!" he cried, "so you have sworn to kill me! " 
 and trembling at the risks he had just now run, he summoned 
 all his energies, reached his room, took a powerful sleeping 
 draught, and went to bed. 
 
 " The devil ! " cried Jonathan, recovering himself. "And 
 M. Bianchon most certainly told me to divert his mind." 
 
 It was close upon midnight. By that time, owing to one 
 of those physical caprices that are the marvel and the despair 
 of science, Raphael, in his slumber, became radiant with 
 beauty. A bright color glowed on his pale cheeks. There 
 was an almost girlish grace about the forehead in which his
 
 THE AGONY. 281 
 
 genius was revealed. Life seemed to bloom on the quiet face 
 that lay there at rest. His sleep was sound ; a light, even 
 breath was drawn in between the red lips ; he was smiling 
 he had passed no doubt through the gate of dreams, into a 
 noble life. Was he a centenarian now? Did his grandchil- 
 dren come to wish him length of days? Or, on a rustic 
 bench set in the sun and under the trees, was he scanning, 
 like the prophet on the mountain-heights, a promised land, a 
 fer-off time of blessing. 
 
 " Here you are ! " 
 
 The words, uttered in silver tones, dispelled the shadowy 
 faces of his dreams. He saw Pauline, in the lamplight, sitting 
 upon the bed ; Pauline grown fairer yet through sorrow and 
 separation. Raphael remained bewildered by the sight of her 
 face, white as the petals of some water flower, and the shadow 
 of her long, dark hair about it seemed to make it whiter still. 
 Her tears had left a gleaming trace upon her cheeks, and 
 hung there yet, ready to fall at the least movement. She looked 
 like an angel fallen from the skies, or a spirit that a breath 
 might waft away, as she sat there all in white, with her head 
 bowed, scarcely creasing the quilt beneath her weight. 
 
 "Ah, I have forgotten everything ! " she cried, as Raphael 
 opened his eyes. "I have no voice left except to tell you, 
 ' I am yours.' There is nothing in my heart but love. Angel 
 of my life, you have never been so beautiful before ! Your 
 
 eyes are blazing But come, I can guess it all. You have 
 
 been in search of health without me ; you were afraid of me 
 well " 
 
 "Go! go! leave me," Raphael uttered at last. "Why 
 do you not go ? If you stay, I shall die. Do you want to 
 see me die? " 
 
 " Die?" she echoed. " Can you die without me? Die? 
 But you are young ; and I love you ! Die ? " she asked, in a 
 deep, hollow voice. She seized his hands with a frenzied 
 movement. " Cold ! " she wailed. " Is it all an illusion ? "
 
 282 THE WILD ASS' SKIN. 
 
 Raphael drew the little bit of skin from under his pillow ; it 
 was as tiny and as fragile as a periwinkle-petal. He showed 
 it to her. 
 
 " Pauline ! " he said, " fair image of my fair life, let us say 
 good-bye." 
 
 "Good-bye?" she echoed, looking surprised. 
 
 " Yes. This is a talisman that grants all my wishes, and 
 that represents my span of life. See here, this is all that 
 remains of it. If you look at me any longer, I shall die " 
 
 The young girl thought that Valentin had grown light- 
 headed ; she took the talisman and went to fetch the lamp. 
 By its tremulous light which she shed over Raphael and the 
 talisman, she scanned her lover's face and the last morsel of 
 the magic skin. As Pauline stood there, in all the beauty of 
 love and terror, Raphael was no longer able to control his 
 thoughts ; memories of tender scenes, and of passionate and 
 fevered joys, overwhelmed the soul that had so long lain dor- 
 mant within him, and kindled a fire not quite extinct. 
 
 " Pauline ! Pauline ! Come to me " 
 
 A dreadful cry came from the girl's throat, her eyes dilated 
 with horror, her eyebrows were distorted and drawn apart by 
 an unspeakable anguish ; she read in Raphael's eyes the vehe- 
 ment desire in which she had once exulted, but as it grew she 
 felt a light movement in her hand, and the skin contracted. 
 She did not stop to think ; she fled into the next room, and 
 locked the door. 
 
 "Pauline! Pauline!" cried the dying man, as he rushed 
 after her ; "I love you, I adore you, I want you, Pauline ! I 
 must curse you if you will not open the door for me. I wish 
 to die in your arms ! ' ' 
 
 With unnatural strength, the last effort of ebbing life, he 
 broke down the door, and saw his mistress writhing upon a 
 sofa. Pauline had vainly tried to pierce her heart, and now 
 thought to find a rapid death by strangling herself with her 
 shawl.
 
 THE AGONY. 283 
 
 " If I die, he will live," she said, trying to tighten the 
 knot that she had made. 
 
 In her struggle with death her hair hung loose, her shoul- 
 ders were bare, her clothing was disordered, her eyes were 
 bathed in tears, her face was flushed and drawn with the 
 horror of despair ; yet as her exceeding beauty met Raphael's 
 intoxicated eyes, his delirium grew. He sprang towards her 
 like a bird of prey, tore away the shawl, and tried to take 
 her in his arms. 
 
 The dying man sought for words to express the wish that 
 was consuming his strength ; but no sounds would come 
 except the choking death-rattle in his chest. Each breath he 
 drew sounded hollower than the last, and seemed to come 
 from his very entrails. At the last moment, no longer able to 
 utter a sound, he set his teeth in Pauline's breast. Jonathan 
 appeared, terrified by the cries he had heard, and tried to 
 tear away the dead body from the grasp of the girl who was 
 crouching with it in a corner. 
 
 " What do you want? " she asked. " He is mine ; I have 
 killed him. Did I not foresee how it would be ? " 
 
 EPILOGUE. 
 
 "And what became of Pauline? " 
 
 " Pauline ? Ah ! Do you sometimes spend a pleasant winter 
 evening by your own fireside, and give yourself up luxuriously 
 to memories of love or youth, while you watch the glow of 
 the fire where the logs of oak are burning ? Here, the fire 
 outlines a sort of chessboard in red squares, there it has a 
 sheen like velvet ; little blue flames start up and flicker and 
 play about in the glowing depths of the brasier. A mysteri- 
 ous artist comes and adapts that flame to his own ends ; by a 
 secret of his own he draws a visionary face in the midst of 
 those flaming violet and crimson hues, a face with unimagina-
 
 284 THE WILD ASS' SJT7M 
 
 ble delicate outlines, a fleeting apparition which no chance 
 will ever bring back again. It is a woman's face, her hair is 
 blown back by the wind, her features speak of a rapture of 
 delight ; she breathes fire in the midst of the fire. She 
 smiles, she dies, you will never see her any more. Farewell, 
 flower of the flame ! Farewell, essence incomplete and un- 
 foreseen, come too early or too late to make the spark of 
 some glorious diamond." 
 
 "But, Pauline." 
 
 "You do not see, then? I will begin again. Make way! 
 make way ! She comes, she is here, the queen of illusions, a 
 woman fleeting as a kiss, a woman bright as lightning, issuing 
 in a blaze like lightning from the sky, a being uncreated, of 
 spirit and love alone. She has wrapped her shadowy form in 
 flame, or perhaps the flame betokens that she exists but for a 
 moment. The pure outlines of her shape tell you that she comes 
 from heaven. Is she not radiant as an angel ? Can you not 
 hear the beating of her wings in space ? She sinks down beside 
 you more lightly than a bird, and you are entranced by her 
 awful eyes ; there is a magical power in her light breathing that 
 draws your lips to hers ; she flies and you follow ; you feel the 
 earth beneath you no longer. If you could but once touch that 
 form of snow with your eager, deluded hands, once twine the 
 golden hair around your fingers, place one kiss on those shining 
 eyes ! There is an intoxicating vapor around, and the spell 
 of a siren music is upon you. Every nerve in you is quiver- 
 ing ; you are filled with pain and longing. O joy for which 
 there is no name ! You have touched the woman's lips, and 
 you are wakened at once by a horrible pang. Oh ! ah ! yes, 
 you have struck your head against the corner of the bedpost, 
 you have been clasping its brown mahogany sides, and chilly 
 gilt ornaments; embracing a piece of metal, a brazen cupid." 
 
 "But how about Pauline, sir?" 
 
 "What, again? Listen. One lovely morning at Tours a 
 young man, who held the hand of a pretty woman in his,
 
 THE AGONY. 285 
 
 went on board the " Ville d' Angers." Thus united they both 
 looked and wondered long at a white form that rose elusively 
 out of the mists above the broad waters of the Loire, like 
 some child of the sun and the river, or some freak of air and 
 cloud. This translucent form was a sylph or a naiad by turns; 
 she hovered in the air like a word that haunts the memory, 
 which seeks in vain to grasp it ; she glided among the islands, 
 she nodded her head here and there among th'e tall poplar 
 trees ; then she grew to a giant's height ; she shook out the 
 countless folds of her drapery to the light ; she shot light 
 from the aureole that the sun had lit about her face ; she 
 hovered above the slopes of the hills and their little hamlets, 
 and seemed to bar the passage of the Chateau d'Usse. You 
 might have thought that La dame des belles cousines* sought 
 to protect her country from modern intrusion. 
 
 "Well, well, I understand. So it went with Pauline. But 
 how about Fredora ? " 
 
 " Oh ! Foedora, you are sure to meet with her! She was 
 at the Bouffons last night, and she will go to the opera this 
 evening, and if you like to take it so, she is society." 
 
 * The lady with pretty cousins.
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 (V Elixir dc longue Vie.} 
 To THE READER. 
 
 AT the very outset of the writer's literary career, a friend, 
 long since dead, gave him the subject of this study. Later on 
 he found the same story in a collection published about the 
 beginning of the present century. To the best of his belief, 
 it is some stray fancy of the brain of Hoffmann, of Berlin ; 
 probably it appeared in some German almanac, and was 
 omitted in the published editions of his collected works. The 
 " Comedie Humaine " is sufficiently rich in original creations 
 for the author to own to this innocent piece of plagiarism ; 
 when, like the worthy La Fontaine, he has told unwittingly, 
 and after his own fashion, a tale already related by another. 
 This is not one of the hoaxes in vogue in the year 1830, when 
 every author wrote his "tale of horror" for the amusement 
 of young ladies. When you have read the account of Don 
 Juan's decorous parricide, try to picture to yourself the part 
 which would be played under very similar circumstances by 
 honest folk who, in this nineteenth century, will take a man's 
 money and undertake to pay him a life annuity on the faith 
 of a chill, or let a house to an ancient lady for the term of 
 her natural life? Would they be for resuscitating their 
 clients? I should dearly like a connoisseur in consciences to 
 consider how far there is a resemblance between a Don Juan 
 and fathers who marry their children to great expectations. 
 Does humanity, which, according to certain philosophers, is 
 making progress, look OH the art of waiting for dead men's 
 shoes as a step in the right direction ? To this art we owe sev- 
 (286)
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 287 
 
 eral honorable professions, which open up ways of living on 
 death. There are people who rely entirely on an expected 
 demise ; who brood over it, crouching each morning upon a 
 corpse, that serves again for their pillow at night. To this 
 class belong bishops' coadjutors, cardinals' supernumeraries, 
 tontiniers,* and the like. Add to the list many delicately 
 scrupulous persons eager to buy landed property beyond their 
 means, who calculate with dry logic and in cold blood the 
 probable duration of the life of a father or of a stepmother, 
 some old man or woman of eighty or ninety, saying to them- 
 selves, " I shall be sure to come in for it in three years' time, 
 
 and then " A murderer is less loathsome to us than a 
 
 spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad im- 
 pulse ; he may be penitent and amend ; but a spy is always a 
 spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad ; his 
 vileness pervades every moment of his life. Then what must 
 it be to live when every moment of your life is tainted with 
 murder ? And have we not just admitted that a host of 
 human creatures in our midst are led by our laws, customs, 
 and usages to dwell without ceasing on a fellow-creature's 
 death. There are men who put the weight of a coffin into 
 their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for 
 their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think 
 of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage ; who 
 are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistible 
 charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed 
 with a "Good-night, father ! " Hourly they meet the gaze 
 of eyes that they would fain close forever, eyes that still open 
 each morning to the light, like Belvidero's in this study. 
 God alone knows the number pf those who are parricides in 
 thought. Picture to yourself the state of mind of a man 
 who must pay a life annuity to some old woman whom he 
 scarcely knows; both live in the country with a brook between 
 them, both sides are free to hate cordially, without offending 
 
 * Possessors of Tontine Annuities on Survivorships.
 
 288 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 against the social conventions that require two brothers to 
 wear a mask if the older will succeed to the entail, and the 
 other to the fortune of a younger son. The whole civilization 
 of Europe turns upon the principle of hereditary succession 
 as upon a pivot ; it would be madness to subvert the prin- 
 ciple ; but could we not, in an age that prides itself upon its 
 mechanical inventions, perfect this essential portion of the 
 social machinery? 
 
 If the author has preserved the old-fashioned style of 
 address "To the Reader" before a work wherein he en- 
 deavors to represent all literary forms, it is for the purpose, of 
 making a remark that applies to several of the studies, and 
 very specially to this. Every one of his compositions has 
 been based upon ideas more or less novel, which, as it seemed 
 to him, needed literary expression ; he can claim priority for 
 certain forms and for certain ideas which have since passed 
 into the domain of literature, and have there, in some 
 instances, become common property ; so that the date of the 
 first publication of each study cannot be a matter of indiffer- 
 ence to those of his readers who would fain do him justice. 
 
 Reading brings us unknown friends, and what friend is like 
 a reader ! We have friends in our own circle who read noth- 
 ing of ours. The author hopes to pay his debt, by dedica- 
 ting this work Diis ignotis. 
 
 ONE winter evening, in a princely palace at Ferrara, Don 
 Juan Belvidero was giving a banquet to a prince of the house 
 of Este. A banquet in those times was a marvelous spectacle 
 which only royal wealth or the power of a mighty lord could 
 furnish forth. Seated about a table lit up with perfumed 
 tapers, seven laughter-loving women were interchanging sweet 
 talk. The white marble of the noble works of art about 
 them stood out against the red stucco walls, and made strong 
 contrasts with the rich Turkey carpets. Clad in satin, glit-
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 289 
 
 taring with gold, and covered with gems less brilliant than 
 their eyes, each told a tale of energetic passions as diverse as 
 their styles of beauty. They differed neither in their ideas 
 nor in their language ; but the expression of their eyes, their 
 glances, occasional gestures, or the tones of their voices sup- 
 plied a commentary, dissolute, wanton, melancholy, or satir- 
 ical, to their words. 
 
 One seemed to be saying "The frozen heart of age might 
 kindle at my beauty." 
 
 Another " I love to lounge upon cushions, and think with 
 rapture of my adorers." 
 
 A third, a neophyte at these banquets, was inclined to blush. 
 " I feel remorse in the depths of my heart ! lam a Catholic, 
 and afraid of hell. But I love you, I love you so that I can 
 sacrifice my hereafter to you." 
 
 The fourth drained a cup of Chian wine. " Give me a 
 joyous life ! " she cried ; "I begin life afresh each day with 
 the dawn. Forgetful of the past, with the intoxication of 
 yesterday's rapture still upon me, I drink deep of life a 
 whole lifetime of pleasure and of love ! " 
 
 The woman who sat next to Juan Belvidero looked at him 
 with a feverish glitter in her eyes. She was silent. Then 
 " I should need no hired bravo to kill my lover if he forsook 
 me ! " she cried at last, and laughed, but the marvelously 
 wrought comfit box in her fingers was crushed by her con- 
 vulsive clutch. 
 
 "When are you to be Grand Duke?" asked the sixth. 
 There was the frenzy of a Bacchante in her eyes, and her 
 teeth gleamed between the lips parted with a smile of cruel 
 glee. 
 
 "Yes, when is that father of yours going to die?" asked 
 the seventh, throwing her bouquet at Don Juan with bewitch- 
 ing playfulness. It was a childish girl who spoke, and the 
 speaker was wont to make sport of sacred things. 
 
 "Oh ' don't talk about it," cried Don Juan, the young
 
 290 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 and handsome giver of the banquet. " There is but one 
 eternal father, and, as ill luck will have it, he is mine." 
 
 The seven Ferrarese, Don Juan's friends, the prince him- 
 self, gave a cry of horror. Two hundred years later, in the 
 days of Louis XV., people of taste would have laughed at this 
 witticism. Or was it, perhaps, that at the outset of an orgy 
 there is a certain unwonted lucidity of mind ? Despite the 
 taper light, the clamor of the senses, the gleam of gold and 
 silver, the fumes of wine, and the exquisite beauty of the 
 women, there may perhaps have been in the depths of the 
 revelers' hearts some struggling glimmer of reverence for 
 things divine and human, until it was drowned in glowing 
 floods of wine? Yet even then the flowers had been crushed, 
 eyes were growing dull, and drunkenness, in Rabelais' phrase, 
 had "taken possession of them down to their sandals." 
 
 During that brief pause a door opened ; and as once the 
 Divine presence was revealed at Belshazzar's feast, so now it 
 seemed to be manifest in the apparition of an old white-haired 
 servant, who tottered in, and looked sadly from under knitted 
 brows at the revelers. He gave a withering glance at the 
 garlands, the golden cups, the pyramids of fruit, the dazzling 
 lights of the banquet, the flushed scared faces, the hues of the 
 cushions pressed by the white arms of the women. 
 
 " My Lord, your father is dying ! " he said ; and at those 
 solemn words, uttered in hollow tones, a veil of crape seemed 
 to be drawn over the wild mirth. 
 
 Don Juan rose to his feet with a gesture to his guests that 
 might be rendered by, " Excuse me; this kind of thing does 
 not happen every day." 
 
 Does it so seldom happen that a father's death surprises 
 youth in the full-blown splendor of life, in the midst of the 
 mad riot of an orgy ? Death is as unexpected in his caprice 
 as a courtesan in her disdain ; but death is truer death has 
 never forsaken any man. 
 
 Don Juan closed the door of the banqueting-hall ; and as
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 291 
 
 he went down the long gallery, through the cold and darkness, 
 he strove to assume an expression in keeping with the part he 
 had to play ; he had thrown off his mirthful mood, as he had 
 thrown down his table-napkin, at the first thought of this role. 
 The night was dark. The mute servitor, his guide to the 
 chamber where the dying man lay, lighted the way so dimly 
 that death, aided by cold, silence, and darkness, and it may 
 be by a reaction of drunkenness, could send some sober 
 thoughts through the spendthrift's soul. He examined his 
 life, became thoughtful, like a man involved in a lawsuit on 
 his way to the court. 
 
 Bartolommeo Belvidero, Don Juan's father, was an old man 
 of ninety, who had devoted the greatest part of his life to 
 business pursuits. He had acquired vast wealth in many a 
 journey in magical Eastern lands, and knowledge, so it was 
 said, more valuable than the gold and diamonds, which had 
 almost ceased to have any value for him. 
 
 " I would give more to have a tooth in my head than for a 
 ruby," he would say at times with a smile. The indulgent 
 father loved to hear Don Juan's story of this and that wild 
 freak of youth. " So long as these follies amuse you, dear 
 boy " he would say laughingly, as he lavished money on his 
 son. Age never took such pleasure in the sight of youth ; 
 the fond father did not remember his own decaying powers 
 while he looked on that brilliant young life. 
 
 Bartolommeo Belvidero, at the age of sixty, had fallen in 
 love with an angel of peace and beauty. Don Juan had been 
 the sole fruit of this late and short-lived love. For fifteen 
 years the widower had mourned the loss of his beloved Juana ; 
 and to this sorrow of age, his son and his numerous house- 
 hold had attributed the strange habits that he had contracted. 
 He had shut himself up in the least comfortable wing of his 
 palace, and very seldom left his apartments ; even Don Juan 
 himself must first ask permission before seeing his father. If 
 this hermit, unbound by vows, came or went in his palace or
 
 292 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 in the streets of Ferrara, he walked as if he were in a dream, 
 wholly engrossed, like a man at strife with a memory, or a 
 wrestler with some thought. 
 
 The young Don Juan might give princely banquets, the 
 palace might echo with clamorous mirth, horses pawed the 
 ground in the courtyards, pages quarrelled and flung dice 
 upon the stairs, but Bartolommeo ate his seven ounces of 
 bread daily and drank water. A fowl was occasionally 
 dressed for him, simply that the black poodle, his faithful 
 companion, might have the bones. Bartolommeo never com- 
 plained of the noise. If huntsmen's horns and baying dogs 
 disturbed his sleep during his illness, he only said, "Ah! 
 Don Juan has come back again." Never on earth has there 
 been a father so little exacting and so indulgent ; and, in 
 consequence, young Belvidero, accustomed to treat his father 
 unceremoniously, had all the faults of a spoiled child. He 
 treated old Bartolommeo as a wilful courtesan treats an elderly 
 adorer; buying indemnity for insolence with a smile, selling 
 good-humor, submitting to be loved. 
 
 Don Juan, beholding scene after scene of his younger 
 years, saw that it would be a difficult task to find his father's 
 indulgence at fault. Some newborn remorse stirred the 
 depths of his heart ; he felt almost ready to forgive this father 
 now about to die for having lived so long. He had an acces- 
 sion of filial piety, like a thief's return in thought to honesty 
 at the prospect of a million adroitly stolen. 
 
 Before long Don Juan had crossed the lofty, chilly suite of 
 rooms in which his father lived ; the penetrating influences 
 of the damp, close air, the mustiness diffused by old tapestries 
 and presses thickly covered with dust had passed into him, 
 and now he stood in the old man's antiquated room, in the 
 repulsive presence of the death-bed, beside a dying fire. A 
 flickering lamp on a Gothic table sent broad uncertain shafts 
 of light, fainter or brighter, across the bed, so that the dying 
 man's face seemed to wear a different look at every moment.
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE 293 
 
 The bitter wind whistled through the crannies of the ill- 
 fitting casements; there was a smothered sound of snow lash- 
 ing the windows. The harsh contrast of these sights and 
 sounds with the scenes which Don Juan had just quitted was 
 so sudden that he could not help shuddering. He turned 
 cold as he came towards the bed ; the lamp flared in a sudden 
 vehement gust of wind and lighted up his father's face ; the 
 features were wasted and distorted ; the skin that cleaved to 
 their bony outlines had taken wan, livid hues, all the more 
 ghastly by force of contrast with the white pillows on which 
 he lay. The muscles about the toothless mouth had con- 
 tracted with pain and drawn apart the lips ; the moans that 
 issued between them with appalling energy found an accom- 
 paniment in the howling of the storm without. 
 
 In spite of every sign of coming dissolution, the most strik- 
 ing thing about the dying face was its incredible power. It 
 was no ordinary spirit that wrestled there with death. The 
 eyes glared with strange fixity of gaze from the cavernous 
 sockets hollowed by disease. It seemed as if Bartolommeo 
 sought to kill some enemy sitting at the foot of his bed by 
 the intent gaze of dying eyes. That steady remorseless look 
 was the more appalling because the head that lay upon the 
 pillow was passive and motionless as a skull upon a doctor's 
 table. The outlines of the body, revealed by the coverlet, 
 were no less rigid and stiff; he lay there as one dead, save for 
 those eyes. There was something automatic about the moan- 
 ing sounds that came from the mouth. Don Juan felt some- 
 thing like shame that he must be brought thus to his father's 
 bedside, wearing a courtesan's bouquet, redolent of the fra- 
 grance of the banqueting-chamber and the fumes of wine. 
 
 "You were enjoying yourself!" the old man cried as he 
 saw his son. 
 
 Even as he spoke the pure high notes of a woman's voice, 
 sustained by the sound of the viol on which she accompanied 
 her song, rose above the rattle of the storm against the case-
 
 294 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 ments, and floated up to the chamber of death. Don Juan 
 stopped his ears against the barbarous answer to his father's 
 speech. 
 
 " I bear you no grudge, my child," Bartolommeo went on. 
 
 The words were full of kindness, but they hurt Don Juan ; 
 he could not pardon this heart-searching goodness on his 
 father's part. 
 
 " What a remorseful memory for me ! " he cried, hypocrit- 
 ically. 
 
 "Poor Juanino," the dying man went on in a smothered 
 voice, " I have always been so kind to you, that you could 
 not surely desire my death? " 
 
 " Oh, if it were only possible to keep you here by giving 
 up a part of my own life ! " cried Don Juan. 
 
 ("We can always say this sort of thing," the spendthrift 
 thought ; " it is as if I laid the whole world at my mistress' 
 feet.") 
 
 The thought had scarcely crossed his mind when the old 
 poodle barked. Don Juan shivered ; the response was so in- 
 telligent that he fancied the dog must have understood him. 
 
 " I was sure that I could count on you, my son ! " cried 
 the dying man. " I shall live. So be it ; you shall be satis- 
 fied. I shall live, but without depriving you of a single day 
 of your life." 
 
 "He is raving," thought Don Juan. Aloud he added, 
 "Yes, dearest father, yes; you shall live, of course, as long 
 as I live, for your image will be forever in my heart." 
 
 " It is not that kind of life that I mean," said the old noble, 
 summoning all his strength to sit up in bed ; for a thrill of 
 doubt ran through him, one of those suspicions that come 
 into being under a dying man's pillow. "Listen, my son," 
 he went on, in a voice grown weak with that last effort," I 
 have no more wish to give up life than you to give up wine 
 and mistresses, horses and hounds, and hawks and gold " 
 
 "lean well believe it," thought the son; and he knelt
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 295 
 
 down by the bed and kissed Bartolommeo's cold hands. "But, 
 father, my dear father," he added aloud, " we must submit to 
 the will of God." 
 
 " I am God ! " muttered the dying man. 
 
 " Do not blaspheme ! " cried the other, as he saw the men- 
 acing expression on his father's face. " Beware what you 
 say ; you have received extreme unction, and I should be in- 
 consolable if you were to die before my eyes in mortal sin." 
 
 "Will you listen to me?" cried Bartolommeo, and his 
 mouth twitched. 
 
 Don Juan held his peace ; an ugly silence prevailed. Yet 
 above the muffled sound of the beating of the snow against 
 the windows rose the sounds of the beautiful voice and the 
 viol in unison, far off and faint as the dawn. The dying man 
 smiled. 
 
 "Thank you," he said, "for bringing those singing voices 
 and the music, a banquet, young and lovely women with 
 fair faces and dark tresses, all the pleasures of life ! Bid 
 them wait for me; for I am about to begin life anew." 
 
 " The delirium is at its height," said Don Juan to himself. 
 
 "I have found out a way of coming to life again," the 
 speaker went on. " There, just look in that table drawer, 
 press the spring hidden by the griffin, and it will fly open." 
 
 " I have found it, father." 
 
 " Well, then, now take out a little phial of rock crystal." 
 
 "I have it." 
 
 " I have spent twenty years in " but even as he spoke 
 
 the old man felt how very near the end had come, and sum- 
 moned all his dying strength to say, "As soon as the breath 
 is out of me, rub me all over with that liquid, and I shall 
 come to life again." 
 
 " There is very little of it," his son remarked. 
 
 Though Bartolommeo could no longer speak, he could still 
 hear and see. When those words dropped from Don Juan, 
 his head turned with appalling quickness, his neck was twisted
 
 296 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 like the throat of some marble statue which the sculptor has 
 condemned to remain stretched out forever, the wide eyes had 
 come to have a ghastly fixity. 
 
 He was dead, and in death he lost his last and sole illusion. 
 
 He had sought a shelter in his son's heart, and it had 
 proved to be a sepulchre, a pit deeper than men dig for their 
 dead. The hair on his head had risen and stiffened with 
 horror, his agonized glance still spoke. He was a father rising 
 in just anger from his tomb, to demand vengeance at the 
 throne of God. 
 
 "There! it is all over with the old man!" cried Don 
 Juan. 
 
 He had been so interested in holding the mysterious phial 
 to the lamp, as a drinker holds up the wine-bottle at the end 
 of a meal, that he had not seen his father's eyes fade. The 
 cowering poodle looked from his master to the elixir, just as 
 Don Juan himself glanced again and again from his father to 
 the flask. The lamplight flickered. There was a deep silence ; 
 the viol was mute. Juan Belvidero thought that he saw his 
 father stir, and trembled. The changeless gaze of those ac- 
 cusing eyes frightened him ; he closed them hastily, as he 
 would have closed a loose shutter swayed by the wind of an 
 autumn night. He stood there motionless, lost in a world of 
 thought. 
 
 Suddenly the silence was broken by a shrill sound like the 
 creaking of a rusty spring. It startled Don Juan ; he all but 
 dropped the phial. A sweat, colder than the blade of a 
 dagger, issued through every pore. It was only a piece of 
 clockwork, a wooden cock that sprang out and crowed three 
 times, an ingenious contrivance by which the learned of that 
 epoch were wont to be awakened at the appointed hour to 
 begin the labors of the day. Through the windows there 
 came already a flush of dawn. The thing, composed of wood, 
 and cords, and wheels, and pulleys, was more faithful in its 
 service than he in his duty to Bartolommeo he, a man with
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 297 
 
 that pecular piece of human mechanism within him, that we 
 call a heart. 
 
 Don Juan the sceptic shut the flask again in the secret 
 drawer in the gothic table he meant to run no more risks of 
 losing the mysterious liquid. 
 
 Even in that solemn moment he heard the murmur of a 
 crowd in the gallery, a confused sound of voices, of stifled 
 laughter and light footfalls, and the rustling of silks the 
 sounds of a band of revelers struggling for gravity. The 
 door opened, and in came the Prince and Don Juan's friends, 
 the seven courtesans, and the singers, disheveled and wild like 
 dancers surprised by the dawn, when the tapers that have 
 burned through the night struggle with the sunlight. 
 
 They had come to offer the customary condolence to the 
 young heir. 
 
 "Oho! is poor Don Juan really taking this seriously?" 
 said the Prince in Brambilla's ear. 
 
 "Well, his father was very good," she returned. 
 
 But Don Juan's night-thoughts had left such unmistakable 
 traces on his features, that the crew was awed into silence. 
 The men stood motionless. The women, with wine-parched 
 lips and cheeks marbled with kisses, knelt down and began a 
 prayer. Don Juan could scarce help trembling when he saw 
 splendor and mirth and laughter and song and youth and 
 beauty and power bowed in reverence before death. But 
 in those times, in that adorable Italy of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, religion and revelry went hand in hand ; and religious 
 excess became a sort of debauch, and a debauch a religious 
 rite ! 
 
 The Prince grasped Don Juan's hand affectionately, then 
 when all faces had simultaneously put on the same grimace 
 half-gloomy, half-indifferent the whole masque disappeared, 
 and left the chamber of death empty. It was like an allegory 
 of life. 
 
 As they went down the staircase, the Prince spoke to Riva-
 
 298 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 barella : ''Now, who would have taken Don Juan's impiety 
 for a boast ? He loves his father." 
 
 " Did you see that black dog? " asked La Brambilla. 
 
 " He is enormously rich now," sighed Bianca Cavatolino. 
 
 " What is that to me? " cried the proud Veronese (she who 
 had crushed the comfit-box). 
 
 "What does it matter to you, forsooth?" cried the Duke. 
 "With his money he is as much a prince as I am." 
 
 At first Don Juan was swayed hither and thither by count- 
 less thoughts, and wavered between two decisions. He took 
 counsel with the gold heaped up by his father, and returned 
 in the evening to the chamber of death, his whole soul brim- 
 ming over with hideous selfishness. He found all his house- 
 hold busy there. " His lordship " was to lie in state to-mor- 
 row ; all Ferrara would flock to behold the wonderful spec- 
 tacle ; and the servants were busy decking the room and the 
 couch on which the dead man lay. At a sign from Don Juan 
 all his people stopped, dumbfounded and trembling. 
 
 " Leave me alone here," he said, and his voice was changed," 
 "and do not return till I leave the room." 
 
 When the footsteps of the old servitor, who was the last to 
 go, echoed but faintly along the paved gallery, Don Juan 
 hastily locked the door, and, sure that he was quite alone, 
 " Let us try," he said to himself. 
 
 Bartolommeo's body was stretched on a long table. The 
 embalmers had laid a sheet over it, to hide from all eyes the 
 dreadful spectacle of a corpse so wasted and shrunken that it 
 seemed like a skeleton, and only the face was uncovered. 
 This mummy-like form lay in the middle of the room. The 
 limp clinging linen conformed itself to the outlines it shrouded 
 so sharp, bony, and thin. Large violet patches had already 
 begun to spread over the face; the embalmer's work had not 
 been finished too soon. 
 
 Don Juan, strong as he was in his scepticism, felt a tremor 
 as he opened the magic crystal flask. When he stood over
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 299 
 
 that face, he was trembling so violently that he was actually 
 obliged to wait for a moment. But Don Juan had acquired 
 an early familiarity with evil ; his morals had been corrupted 
 by a licentious court, a reflection worthy of the Duke of 
 Urbino crossed his mind, and it was a keen sense of curiosity 
 that goaded him into boldness. The devil himself might 
 have whispered the words that were echoing through his brain, 
 Moisten one of the eyes with the liquid ! He took up a linen 
 cloth, moistened it sparingly with the precious fluid, and 
 passed it lightly over the right eyelid of the corpse. The eye 
 unclosed. 
 
 "Aha ! " said Don Juan. He gripped the flask tightly, as 
 we clutch in dreams the branch from which we hang sus- 
 pended over a precipice. 
 
 For the eye was full of life. It was a young child's eye 
 set in a death's head ; the light quivered in the depths of its 
 youthful liquid brightness. Shaded by the long dark lashes, 
 it sparkled like the strange lights that travelers see in lonely 
 places in winter nights. That eye seemed as if it would fain 
 dart fire at Don Juan ; he saw it thinking, upbraiding, con- 
 demning, uttering accusations, threatening doom ; it cried 
 aloud, and gnashed upon him. All anguish that shakes hu- 
 man souls was gathered there ; supplications the most tender, 
 the wrath of kings, the love in a girl's heart pleading with 
 the headsman ; then, and after all these, the deeply searching 
 glance a man turns on his fellows as he mounts the last step 
 of the scaffold. Life so dilated in this fragment of life that 
 Don Juan shrank back ; he walked up and down the room, he 
 dared not meet that gaze, but he saw nothing else. The ceil- 
 ing and the hangings, the whole room was sown with living 
 points of fire and intelligence. Everywhere those gleaming 
 eyes haunted him. 
 
 " He might very likely have lived another hundred years," 
 he cried involuntarily. Some diabolical influence had drawn 
 him to his father, and again he gazed at that luminous spark.
 
 300 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 The eyelid closed and opened again abruptly ; it was like a 
 woman's sign of assent. It was an intelligent movement. 
 If a voice had cried, " Yes ! " Don Juan could not have been 
 more startled. 
 
 "What is to be done ? " he thought. 
 
 He nerved himself to try to close the white eyelid. In 
 vain. 
 
 "Kill it? That would perhaps be parricide," he debated 
 with himself. 
 
 "Yes," the eye said, with a strange sardonic quiver of 
 the lid. 
 
 "Aha ! " said Don Juan to himself, " here is witchcraft at 
 work!" And he went closer to crush the thing. A great 
 tear trickled over the hollow cheeks, and fell on Don Juan's 
 hand. 
 
 " It is scalding ! " he cried. He sat down. This struggle 
 exhausted him ; it was as if, like Jacob of old, he was 
 wrestling with an angel. 
 
 At last he rose. "So long as there is no blood " 
 
 he muttered. 
 
 Then, summoning all the courage needed for a coward's 
 crime, he extinguished the eye, pressing it with the linen 
 cloth, turning his head away. A terrible groan startled him. 
 It was the poor poodle, who died with a long-drawn howl. 
 
 " Could the brute have been in the secret? " thought Don 
 Juan, looking down at the faithful creature. 
 
 Don Juan Belvidero was looked upon as a dutiful son. He 
 reared a white marble monument on his father's tomb, and 
 employed the greatest sculptors of the time upon it. He did 
 not recover perfect ease of mind till the day when his father 
 knelt in marble before religion, and the heavy weight of the 
 stone had sealed the mouth of the grave in which he had laid 
 the one feeling of remorse that sometimes flitted through his 
 soul in moments of physical weariness.
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 301 
 
 He had drawn up a list of the wealth heaped up by the old 
 merchant in the East, and he became a miser ; had he not to 
 provide for a second lifetime? His views of life were the 
 more profound and penetrating; he grasped its significance, 
 as a whole, the better, because he saw it across a grave. All 
 men, all things, he analyzed once and for all ; he summoned 
 up the past, represented by its records ; the present in the 
 law, its crystallized form ; the future, revealed by religion. 
 He took spirit and matter, and flung them into his crucible, 
 and found nothing. Thenceforward he became DON JUAN. 
 
 At the outset of his life, in the prime of youth and the 
 beauty of youth, he knew the illusions of life for what they 
 were ; he despised the world, and made the utmost of the 
 world. His felicity could not have been of the bourgeois 
 kind, rejoicing in periodically recurrent boiled meat, in the 
 comforts of a warming-pan, a lamp of a night, and a new pair 
 of slippers once a quarter. Nay, rather he seized upon exist- 
 ence as a monkey snatches a nut, and after no long toying 
 with it, proceeds deftly to strip off the mere husks to reach 
 the savory kernel within. 
 
 Poetry and the sublime transports of passion scarcely 
 reached ankle-depth with him now. He in nowise fell into 
 the error of strong natures who flatter themselves now and 
 again that little souls will believe in a great soul, and are 
 willing to barter their own lofty thoughts of the future for 
 the small change of our life-annuity ideas. He, even as 
 they, had he chosen, might well have walked with his feet 
 on the earth and his head in the skies ; but he liked better 
 to sit on earth, to wither the soft, fresh, fragrant lips of a 
 woman with kisses, for, like death, he devoured everything 
 without scruple as he passed ; he would have full fruition ; 
 he was an Oriental lover, seeking prolonged pleasures easily 
 obtained. He sought nothing but a woman in women, and 
 cultivated cynicism, until it became with him a habit of mind. 
 When his mistress, from the couch on which she lay, soared 
 20
 
 302 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 and was lost in regions of ecstatic bliss, Don Juan followed 
 suit, earnest, expansive, serious as any German student. But 
 he said " I," while she, in the transports of intoxication, said 
 " We." He understood to admiration the art of abandoning 
 himself to the influence of a woman ; he was always clever 
 enough to make her believe that he trembled like some boy 
 fresh from college before his first partner at a dance, when 
 he asks her, "Do you like dancing?" But, no less, he 
 could be terrible at need, could unsheath a formidable 
 sword and make short work of commandants. Banter 
 lurked beneath his simplicity, mocking laughter behind his 
 tears for he had tears at need, like any woman nowadays 
 who says to her husband, " Give me a carriage, or I shall 
 go into a consumption." 
 
 For a merchant the world is a bale of goods or a mass 
 of circulating bills ; for most young men it is a woman, and 
 for a woman here and there it is a man ; for a certain order of 
 mind it is a salon, a coterie, a quarter of the town, or some 
 single city ; but Don Juan found his world in himself. 
 
 This model of grace and dignity, this captivating wit, 
 moored his bark by every shore ; but wherever he was led 
 he was never carried away, and was only steered in a course 
 of his own choosing. The more he saw, the more he 
 doubted. He watched men narrowly, and saw how, be- 
 neath the surface, courage was often rashness ; and prudence, 
 cowardice ; generosity, a clever piece of calculation ; justice, 
 a wrong; delicacy, pusillanimity; honesty, a modus vivendi ; 
 and by some strange dispensation of fate, he must see that 
 those who at heart were really honest, scrupulous, just, gen- 
 erous, prudent, or brave were held cheaply by their fellow- 
 men. 
 
 " What a cold-blooded jest ! " said he to himself. " It 
 was not devised by a God." 
 
 From that time forth he renounced a better world, and 
 never uncovered himself when a name was pronounced, and
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 303 
 
 for him the carven saints in the churches became works of art. 
 He understood the mechanism of society too well to clash 
 wantonly with its prejudices ; for, after all, he was not as 
 powerful as the executioner, but he evaded social laws with 
 the wit and grace so well rendered in the scene with M. 
 Dimanche. He was, in fact, Moliere's Don Juan, Goethe's 
 Faust, Byron's Manfred, Mathurin's Melmoth great allegor- 
 ical figures drawn by the greatest men of genius in Europe, to 
 which Mozart's harmonies, perhaps, do no more justice than 
 Rossini's lyre. Terrible allegorical figures that shall endure 
 as long as the principle of evil existing in the heart of man 
 shall produce a few copies from century to century. Some- 
 times the type becomes half-human when incarnate as a 
 Mirabeau, sometimes it is an inarticulate force in a Bonaparte, 
 sometimes it overwhelms the universe with irony as a Rabe- 
 lais; or, yet again, it appears when a Marechal de Richelieu 
 elects to laugh at human beings instead of scoffing at things, 
 or when one of the most famous of our ambassadors goes a 
 step further and scoffs at both men and things. But the pro- 
 found genius of Juan Belvidero anticipated and resumed all 
 these. All things were a jest to him. He was the life of a 
 mocking spirit. All men, all institutions, all realities, all 
 ideas were within its scope. As for eternity, after half an 
 hour of familiar conversation with Pope Julius II. he had said, 
 laughing 
 
 " If it is absolutely necessary to make a choice, I would 
 rather believe in God than in the devil; power combined 
 with goodness always offers more resources than the spirit of 
 evil can boast." 
 
 "Yes; still God requires repentance in this present world 
 
 "So you always think of your indulgences," returned 
 Don Juan Belvidero. " Well, well, I have another life in 
 reserve in which to repent of the sins of my previous 
 existence."
 
 304 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 " Oh, if you regard old age in that light," cried the Pope, 
 " you are in danger of canonization." 
 
 " After your elevation to the Papacy nothing is incredible." 
 And they went to watch the workmen who were building the 
 huge basilica dedicated to Saint Peter. 
 
 " Saint Peter, as the man of genius who laid the foundation 
 of our double power," the Pope said to Don Juan, "deserves 
 this monument. Sometimes, though, at night, I think that a 
 deluge will wipe all this out as with a sponge, and it will be 
 all to begin over again." 
 
 Don Juan and the Pope began to laugh ; they understood 
 each other. A fool would have gone on the morrow to amuse 
 himself with Julius II. in Raphael's studio or at the delicious 
 Villa Madama ; not so Belvidero. He went to see the Pope 
 as pontiff, to be convinced of any doubts that he (Don Juan) 
 entertained. Over his cups the Rovere would have been 
 capable of denying his own infallibility and of commenting 
 on the Apocalypse. 
 
 Nevertheless, this legend has not been undertaken to fur- 
 nish materials for future biographies of Don Juan ; it is in- 
 tended to prove to honest folk that Belvidero did not die in a 
 duel with stone, as some lithographers would have us believe. 
 
 When Don Juan Belvidero reached the age of sixty he 
 settled in Spain, and there in his old age he married a young 
 and charming Andalusian wife. But of set purpose he was 
 neither a good husband nor a good father. He had observed 
 that we are never so tenderly loved as by women to whom we 
 scarcely give a thought. Dona Elvira had been devoutly 
 brought up by an old aunt in a castle a few leagues from San- 
 Lucar in a remote part of Andalusia. She was a model of 
 devotion and grace. Don Juan foresaw that this would be a 
 woman who would struggle long against a passion before 
 yielding, and therefore hoped to keep her virtuous until his 
 death. It was a jest undertaken in earnest, a game of chess 
 which he meant to reserve till his old age. Don Juan had
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 305 
 
 learned wisdom from the mistakes made by his father, Barto- 
 lommeo ; he determined that the least details of his life in old 
 age should be subordinated to one object the success of the 
 drama which was to be played out upon his deathbed. 
 
 For the same reason the largest part of his wealth was 
 buried in the cellars of his palace at Ferrara, whither he sel- 
 dom went. As for the rest of his fortune, it was invested in 
 .a life annuity, with a view to give his wife and children an 
 interest in keeping him alive ; but this Machiavellian piece of 
 foresight was scarcely necessary. His son, young Felipe Bel- 
 videro, grew up as a Spaniard as religiously conscientious as 
 his father was irreligious, in virtue, perhaps, of the old rule, 
 "A miser has a spendthrift son." The Abbot of San-Lucar 
 was chosen by Don Juan to be director of the consciences of 
 the Duchess of Belvidero and her son Felipe. The ecclesi- 
 astic was a holy man, well shaped and admirably well propor- 
 tioned. He had fine dark eyes, a head like that of Tiberius, 
 worn with fasting, bleached by an ascetic life, and, like all 
 dwellers in the wilderness, was daily tempted. The noble 
 lord had hopes, it may be, of despatching yet another monk 
 before his term of life was out. 
 
 But whether because the Abbot was every whit as clever as 
 Don Juan himself, or Dona Elvira possessed more discretion 
 or more virtue than Spanish wives are usually credited with, 
 Don Juan was compelled to spend his declining years beneath 
 his own roof, with no more scandal under it than if he had 
 been an ancient country parson. Occasionally he would take 
 wife and son to task for negligence in the duties of religion, 
 peremptorily insisting that they should carry out to the letter 
 the obligations imposed upon the flock by the Court of Rome. 
 Indeed, he was never so well pleased as when he had set the 
 courtly Abbot discussing some case of conscience with Dona 
 Elvira and Felipe. 
 
 At length, however, despite the prodigious care that the 
 great magnifico, Don Juan Belvidero, took of himself, the
 
 .306 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 days of decrepitude came upon him, and with those days the 
 constant importunity of physical feebleness, an importunity 
 all the more distressing by contrast with the wealth of mem- 
 ories of his impetuous youth and the sensual pleasures of 
 middle age. The unbeliever who in the height of his cynical 
 humor had been wont to persuade others to believe in laws 
 and principles at which he scoffed, must repose nightly upon 
 a perhaps. The great Duke, the pattern of good breeding, 
 the champion of many a carouse, the proud ornament of 
 courts, the man of genius, the graceful winner of hearts that 
 he had wrung as carelessly as a peasant twists an osier withe, 
 was now the victim of a cough, of a ruthless sciatica, of an 
 unmannerly gout. His teeth gradually deserted him, as at the 
 end of an evening the fairest and best-dressed women take 
 their leave one by one till the room is left empty and desolate. 
 The active hands became palsy-stricken, the shapely legs tot- 
 tered as he walked. At last, one night, a stroke of apoplexy 
 caught him by the throat in its icy clutch. After that fatal 
 day he grew morose and stern. 
 
 He would reproach his wife and son with their devotion, cast- 
 ing it in their teeth that the affecting and thoughtful care that 
 they lavished so tenderly upon him was bestowed because they 
 knew that his money was invested in a life annuity. Then 
 Elvira and Felipe would shed bitter tears and redouble their 
 caresses, and the wicked old man's insinuating voice would 
 take an affectionate tone "Ah, you will forgive me, will you 
 not, dear friends, dear wife? I am rather a nuisance. Alas, 
 Lord in heaven, how canst Thou use me as the instrument by 
 which Thou provest these two angelic creatures? I who 
 should be the joy of their lives am become their scourge " 
 
 In this manner he kept them tethered to his pillow, blot- 
 ting out the memory of whole months of fretfulness and un- 
 kindness in one short hour when he chose to display for them 
 the ever-new treasures of his pinchbeck tenderness and 
 charm of manner a system of paternity that yielded him
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 307 
 
 an infinitely better return than his own father's indulgence 
 had formerly gained. At length his bodily infirmities reached 
 a point when the task of laying him in bed became as diffi- 
 cult as the navigation of a felucca in the perils of an intri- 
 cate channel. Then came the day of his death ; and this 
 brilliant sceptic, whose mental faculties alone had survived 
 the most dreadful of all destructions, found himself between 
 his two special antipathies th%$loctor and the confessor. 
 But he was jovial with them. Did he not see a light 
 gleaming in the future beyond the veil ? The pall that is 
 like lead for other men was thin and translucent for him ; 
 the light-footed, irresistible delights of youth danced beyond 
 it like shadows. 
 
 It was on a beautiful summer evening that Don Juan felt 
 the near approach of death. The sky of Spain was serene 
 and cloudless; the air was full of the scent of orange- 
 blossom ; the stars shed clear, pure gleams of light ; nature 
 without seemed to give the dying man assurance of ' resur- 
 rection ; a dutiful and obedient son sat there watching him 
 with loving and respectful eyes. Towards eleven o'clock 
 he desired to be left alone with this single-hearted being. 
 
 "Felipe," said the father, in tones so soft and affection- 
 ate that the young man trembled, and tears of gladness 
 came to his eyes ; never had that stern father spoken his 
 name in such a tone. "Listen, my son," the dying man 
 went on. " I am a great sinner. All my life long, how- 
 ever, I have thought of my death. I was once the friend 
 of the great Pope Julius II. ; and that illustrious Pontiff, 
 fearing lest the excessive excitability of my senses should 
 entangle me in mortal sin between the moment of my death 
 and the time of my anointing with the holy oil, gave me a 
 flask that contains a little of the holy water that once issued 
 from the rock in the wilderness. I have kept the secret of 
 this squandering of a treasure belonging to Holy Church, but
 
 308 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 I am permitted to reveal the mystery in articulo mortis to my 
 son. You will find the flask in a drawer in that Gothic table 
 that always stands by the head of the bed. The precious 
 little crystal flask may be of use yet again for you, dearest 
 Felipe. Will you swear to me, by your salvation, to carry 
 out my instructions faithfully? " 
 
 Felipe looked at his father, and Don Juan was too deeply- 
 learned in the lore of the human countenance not to die in 
 peace with that look as his warrant, as his own father had 
 died in despair at meeting the expression in his son's eyes. 
 
 " You deserved to have a better father," Don Juan went 
 on. " I dare to confess, my child, that while the reverend 
 Abbot of San-Lucar was administering the Viaticum I was 
 thinking of the incompatibility of the coexistence of two 
 powers so infinite as God and the devil " 
 
 "Oh, father !" 
 
 "And I said to myself, when Satan makes his peace he 
 ought surely to stipulate for the pardon of his followers, or he 
 will be the veriest scoundrel. The thought haunted me ; so 
 I shall go to hell, my son, unless you carry out my wishes." 
 
 " Oh, quick; tell me quickly, father." 
 
 "As soon as I have closed my eyes," Don Juan went on, 
 "and that may be in a few minutes, you must take my body 
 before it grows cold and lay it on a table in this room. Then 
 put out the lamp ; the light of the stars should be sufficient. 
 Take off my clothes, reciting Aves and Paters the while, 
 raising your soul to God in prayer, and carefully anoint my 
 lips and eyes with this holy water; begin with the face, and 
 proceed successively to my limbs and the rest of my body ; 
 my dear son, the power of God is so great that you must be 
 astonished at nothing." 
 
 Don Juan felt death so near, that he added in a terrible 
 voice, " Be careful not to drop the flask." 
 
 Then he breathed his last gently in the arms of his son, 
 and his son's tears fell fast over his sardonic, haggard features.
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 309 
 
 It was almost midnight when Don Felipe Belvidero laid his 
 father's body upon the table. He kissed the sinister brow 
 and the gray hair ; then he put out the lamp. 
 
 By the soft moonlight that lit strange gleams across the 
 country without, Felipe could dimly see his father's body, a 
 vague white thing among the shadows. The dutiful son 
 moistened a linen cloth with the liquid, and, absorbed in 
 prayer, he anointed the revered face. A deep silence reigned. 
 Felipe heard faint, indescribable rustlings ; it was the breeze 
 in the tree-tops, he thought. But when he had moistented 
 the right arm, he felt himself caught by the throat, a young, 
 strong hand held him in a tight grip it was his father's hand ! 
 He shrieked aloud ; the flask dropped from his hand and 
 broke in pieces. The liquid evaporated ; the whole house- 
 hold hurried into the room, holding torches aloft. That 
 shriek had startled them, and filled them with as much terror 
 as if the trumpet of the angel sounding on the last day had 
 rung through earth and sky. The room was full of people, 
 and a horror-stricken crowd beheld the fainting Felipe upheld 
 by the strong arm of his father, who clutched him by the 
 throat. They saw another thing, an unearthly spectacle 
 Don Juan's face grown young and beautiful as Antinoiis, with 
 its dark hair and brilliant eyes and red lips, a head that made 
 horrible efforts, but could not move the dead, wasted 
 body. 
 
 An old servitor cried, " A miracle ! a miracle!" and all 
 the Spaniards echoed, " A miracle ! a miracle ! " 
 
 Dona Elvira, too pious to attribute this to magic, sent for the 
 Abbot of San-Lucar; and the Prior beholding the miracle 
 with his own eyes, being a clever man, and withal an Abbot 
 desirous of augmenting his revenues, determined to turn the 
 occasion to profit. He immediately gave out that Don Juan 
 would certainly be canonized ; he appointed a day for the 
 celebration of the apotheosis in his convent, which thencefor- 
 ward, he said, should be called the convent of San Juan of
 
 310 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 Lucar. At these words a sufficiently facetious grimace passed 
 over the features of the late Duke. 
 
 The taste of the Spanish people for ecclesiastical solemnities 
 is so well known that it should not be difficult to imagine the 
 religious pantomime by which the Convent of San-Lucar 
 celebrated the translation of the blessed Don Juan Belvidero 
 to the abbey-church. The tale of the partial resurrection had 
 spread so quickly from village to village, that a day or two 
 after the death of the illustrious nobleman the report had 
 reached every place within fifty miles of San-Lucar, and it 
 was as good as a play to see the roads covered already with 
 crowds flocking in on all sides, their curiosity whetted still 
 further by the prospect of a Te Deum sung by torchlight. 
 The old abbey-church of San-Lucar, a marvelous building 
 erected by the Moors, a mosque of Allah, which for three 
 centuries had heard the name of Christ, could not hold the 
 throng that poured in to see the ceremony. Hidalgos in their 
 velvet mantles, with their good swords at their sides, swarmed 
 like ants, and were so tightly packed in among the pillars 
 that they had not room to bend the knees, which never bent 
 save to God. Charming peasant girls, in the basquina that 
 defines the luxuriant outlines of their figures, lent an arm to 
 white-haired old men. Young men, with eyes of fire, walked 
 beside aged crones in holiday array. Then came couples 
 tremulous with joy, young lovers led thither by curiosity, 
 newly-wedded folk ; children timidly clasping each other by 
 the hand. This throng, so rich in coloring, in vivid con- 
 trasts, laden with flowers, enameled like a meadow, sent up a 
 soft murmur through the quiet night. Then the great door 
 of the church opened. 
 
 Late comers who remained without saw afar, through the 
 three great open doorways, a scene of which the theatrical 
 illusions of modern opera can give but a faint idea. The vast 
 church was lighted up by thousands of candles, offered by 
 saints and sinners alike eager to win the favor of this new can-
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 311 
 
 didate for canonization, and these self-commending illumina- 
 tions turned the great building into an enchanted fairyland. 
 The black archways, the shafts and capitals, the recessed 
 chapels with gold and silver gleaming in their depths, the gal- 
 leries, the Arab traceries, all the most delicate outlines of that 
 delicate sculpture, burned in the excess of light like the fan- 
 tastic figures in the red heart of a brazier. At the further end 
 of the church, above that blazing sea, rose the high altar like 
 a splendid dawn. All the glories of the golden lamps and 
 silver candlesticks, of banners and tassels, of the shrines of 
 the saints and votive offerings, paled before the gorgeous 
 brightness of the reliquary in which Don Juan lay. The 
 blasphemer's body sparkled with gems, and flowers, and 
 crystal, with diamonds and gold, and plumes white as the 
 wings of seraphim ; they had set it up on the altar, where the 
 picture of Christ had stood. All about him blazed a host of 
 tall candles ; the air quivered in the radiant light. The 
 worthy Abbot of San-Lucar, in pontificial robes, with his 
 mitre set with precious stones, his rochet and golden crosier, 
 sat enthroned in imperial state among his clergy in the 
 choir. Rows of impassive aged faces, silver-haired old men 
 clad in fine linen albs, were grouped about him, as the 
 saints who confessed Christ on earth are set by painters, 
 each in his place, about the throne of God in heaven. The 
 precentor and the dignitaries of the chapter, adorned with 
 the gorgeous insignia of ecclesiastical vanity, came and went 
 through the clouds of incense, like stars upon their courses 
 in the firmament. 
 
 When the hour of triumph arrived, the bells awoke the 
 echoes far and wide, and the whole vast crowd raised to 
 God the first cry of praise that begins the Te Deum. A 
 sublime cry ! High, pure notes, the voices of women in 
 ecstasy, mingled in it with the sterner and deeper voices 
 of men ; thousands of voices sent up a volume of sound so 
 mighty, that the straining, groaning organ-pipes could not
 
 312 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 
 
 dominate that harmony. But the shrill sound of children's 
 singing among the choristers, the reverberation of deep bass 
 notes, awakened gracious associations, visions of childhood, 
 and of man in his strength, and rose above that entrancing 
 harmony of human voices blended in one sentiment of love. 
 
 Te Deum laudamus ! 
 
 The chant went up from the black masses of men and 
 women kneeling in the cathedral, like a sudden breaking out 
 of light in darkness, and the silence was shattered as by a 
 peal of thunder. The voices floated up with the clouds of 
 incense that had begun to cast thin bluish veils over the 
 fanciful marvels of the architecture, and the aisles were 
 filled with splendor and perfume and light and melody. 
 Even at the moment when that music of love and thanks- 
 giving soared up to the altar, Don Juan, too well bred not 
 to express his acknowledgments, too witty not to understand 
 how to take a jest, bridled up in his reliquary, and responded 
 with an appalling burst of laughter. Then the devil having 
 put him in mind of the risk he was running of being taken 
 for an ordinary man, a saint, a Boniface, a Pantaleone, he 
 interrupted the melody of love by a yell ; the thousand voices 
 of hell joined in it. Earth blessed, Heaven banned. The 
 church was shaken to its ancient foundations. 
 
 Te Deum laudamus ! cried the many voices. 
 
 " Go to the devil, brute beasts that you are ! Dios ! Dios ! 
 Carajos demonios ! Idiots ! What fools you are with your 
 dotard-God ! " and a torrent of imprecations poured forth like 
 a stream of red-hot lava from the mouth of Vesuvius. 
 
 " Deus Sabaoth ! Sabaoth ! " cried the believers. 
 
 "You are insulting the majesty of hell," shouted Don 
 Juan, gnashing his teeth. In another moment the living arm 
 struggled out of the reliquary, and was brandished over the 
 assembly in mockery and despair. 
 
 "The saint is blessing us," cried the old women, children, 
 lovers, and the credulous among the crowd.
 
 THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. 313 
 
 And note how often we are deceived in the homage we pay ; 
 the great man scoffs at those who praise him, and pays com- 
 pliments now and again to those whom he laughs at in the 
 depths of his heart. 
 
 Just as the Abbot, prostrate before the altar, was chanting 
 " Sancte Johannes ora pro nobis / " he heard a voice exclaim 
 sufficiently distinct : " O coglione / " 
 
 " What can be going on up there?" cried the sub-prior, 
 as he saw the reliquary move. 
 
 " The saint is playing the devil," replied the Abbot. 
 
 Even as he spoke, the living head tore itself away from the 
 lifeless body, and dropped upon the sallow cranium of the 
 officiating priest. 
 
 " Remember Dona Elvira ! " cried the thing, with its teeth 
 set fast in the Abbot's head. 
 
 The Abbot's horror-stricken shriek disturbed the ceremony ; 
 all the ecclesiastics hurried up and crowded about their chief. 
 
 " Idiot, tell us now if there is a God ! " the voice cried, 
 as the Abbot, bitten through the brain, drew his last breath. 
 PARIS, October, 1830.
 
 A STUDY OF WOMAN 
 
 {Etude de Fetnme) 
 Dedicated to the Marquis Jean- Charles di Negro. 
 
 THE Marquise de Listomere is a young woman brought up 
 in the spirit of the Restoration. She has principles, she fasts 
 in season, she takes the sacrament, she goes very much dressed 
 to balls, to the Bouffons, to the opera ; her spiritual director 
 allows her to combine the sacred and the profane. Always 
 on good terms with the church and the world, she is an incarna- 
 tion of the present time, and seems to have taken the word 
 "Legality" for her motto. The Marquise's conduct is marked 
 by exactly enough devotion to enable her, under another 
 Maintenon, to achieve the gloomy piety of the last days of 
 Louis XIV., and enough worldliness to adopt the manners and 
 gallantry of the earlier years of his reign, if they ever could 
 return. 
 
 Just now she is virtuous from interest, or, perhaps, by taste. 
 Married some seven years since to the Marquis de Listomere, 
 a deputy who expects a peerage, she perhaps thinks that her 
 conduct may promote the ambitions of the family. Some 
 women wait to pass judgment on her till Monsieur de Listo- 
 mere is made Pair de France, and till she is six-and-thirty a 
 time of life when most women discover that they are the dupes 
 of social laws. 
 
 The Marquis is an insignificant personage ; he is in favor 
 at court ; his good qualities, like his faults, are negative ; the 
 former can no more give him a reputation for virtue than the 
 latter can give him the sort of brilliancy bestowed by vice. 
 As a deputy he never speaks, but he votes "straight ;" and at 
 (314)
 
 A STUDY OF WOMAN. 315 
 
 home, he behaves as he does in the Chamber. He is con- 
 sidered the best husband in France. Though he is incapable 
 of enthusiasms, he never scolds, unless he is kept waiting. 
 His friends nickname him "Cloudy weather;" and, in fact, 
 there is in him no excessively bright light, and no utter dark- 
 ness. He is exactly like all the ministers that have_succeeded 
 each other in France since the charter. 
 
 A woman with principles could hardly have fallen into 
 better hands. Is it not a great thing for a virtuous woman to 
 have married a man incapable of folly ? Dandies have been 
 known to venture on the impertinence of slightly pressing the 
 Marquise's hand when dancing with her; they met only looks 
 of scorn, and all have experienced that insulting indifference 
 which, like spring frosts, chills the germs of the fairest hopes. 
 Handsome men, witty men, coxcombs, sentimental men who 
 derive nourishment from sucking the knob of their walking- 
 sticks, men of name and men of fame, men of high birth 
 and of low, all have blanched before her. She has won the 
 right of talking as long and as often as she pleases with men 
 whom she thinks intelligent, without being entered in the 
 calendar of scandal. Some coquettes are capable of pursuing 
 this plan for seven years on end, to gratify their fancy at last ; 
 but to ascribe such a covert motive to Madame de Listomere 
 would be to calumniate her. I had been so fortunate as to 
 meet this phoenix of a marquise ; she talks well, I am a good 
 listener. I pleased her, and I go to her evening parties. This 
 was the object of my ambition. 
 
 Neither plain nor pretty, Madame de Listomere has white 
 teeth, a brilliant complexion, and very red lips ; she is tall 
 and well made, has a small, slender foot, which she does not 
 display ; her eyes, far from being dulled, as most eyes are in 
 Paris, have a soft gleam which becomes magical when by 
 chance she is animated. You feel there is a soul under this 
 ill-defined personality. When she is interested in the con- 
 versation, she reveals the grace that lies buried under the
 
 316 A STUDY OF WOMAN. 
 
 prudery of cold demeanor, and then she is charming. She 
 does not crave for success, and she gets it. We always find 
 the thing we do not seek. This statement is too often true 
 not to become a proverb one day. It will be the moral of 
 this tale, which I should not allow myself to relate if it were 
 not at this moment the talk of every drawing-room in Paris. 
 
 One evening, about a month since, the Marquise de Lis- 
 tomere danced with a young man as modest as he is heedless, 
 full of good qualities, but showing only his bad ones; he is 
 impassioned, and laughs at passion ; he has talent, and hides 
 it ; he assumes the savant with aristocrats, and affects to be 
 aristocratic with savants. 
 
 Eugene de Rastignac is one of those very sensible young 
 men who try everything, and seem to sound other men to dis- 
 cover what the future will bring forth. Pending the age when 
 he will be ambitious, he laughs at everything ; he has grace 
 and originality two qualities which are rare, because they 
 exclude each other. Without aiming at success, he talked to 
 Madame de Listomere for about half an hour. While follow- 
 ing the deviations of a conversation which, beginning with 
 William Tell, went on to the duties of woman, he looked at 
 the Marquise more than once in a way to embarrass her ; then 
 he left her, and spoke to her no more all the evening. He 
 danced, sat down to ecarte, lost a little money, and went home 
 to bed. I have the honor of assuring you that this is exactly 
 what happened. I have added, I have omitted nothing. 
 
 The next morning Rastignac woke late, remained in bed, 
 where he gave himself up, no doubt, to some of those morn- 
 ing day-dreams in which a young man glides, like a sylph, 
 behind more than one curtain of silk, wool, or cotton. At 
 such moments, the heavier the body is with sleep, the more 
 nimble is the fancy. Finally Rastignac got up without yawn- 
 ing too much, as so many ill-bred people do, rang for his 
 man-servant, ordered some tea, and drank of it immoderately 
 which will not seem strange to those who like tea ; but, to
 
 A STUDY OF WOMAN. 317 
 
 account for this to those persons who only regard tea as a 
 panacea for indigestion, I will add that Eugene was writing ; 
 he sat at his ease, and his feet were more often on the fire- 
 dogs than in his foot-muff. 
 
 Oh ! to sit with your feet on the polished bar that rests on 
 the two brackets of a fender, and dream of your love affairs 
 while wrapped in your dressing-gown, is so delightful a thing 
 that I deeply regret having no mistress, no fire-dogs, and no 
 dressing-gown. When I shall have all these good things, I 
 shall not write my experiences, I shall take the benefit of 
 them. 
 
 The first letter Eugene had to write was finished in a quarter 
 of an hour. He folded it, sealed it, and left it lying in front 
 of him without any address. The second letter, begun at 
 eleven o'clock, was not finished till noon. The four pages 
 were written all over. 
 
 " That woman runs in my head," said he to himself as he 
 folded the second missive, leaving it there, and intending to 
 address it after ending his involuntary reverie. He crossed 
 the fronts of his flowered dressing-gown, put his feet on a 
 stool, stuffed his hands into the pockets of his red cashmere 
 trousers, and threw himself back in a delicious armchair with 
 deep ears, of which the seat and back were set at the com- 
 fortable angle of a hundred and twenty degrees. He drank 
 no more tea, but remained passive, his eyes fixed on the little 
 gilt fist which formed the knob of his fire-shovel, without 
 seeing the shovel, or the hand, or the gilding. He did not 
 even make up the fire. This was a great mistake ! Is it not 
 an intense pleasure to fidget with the fire when dreaming of 
 women ? Our fancy lends speech to the little blue tongues 
 which suddenly burst up and babble on the hearth. We can 
 find a meaning in the sudden and noisy language of a 
 bourguignon. 
 
 At this word I must pause and insert, for the benefit of the 
 ignorant, an explanation vouchsafed by a very distinguished 
 21
 
 318 A STUDY OF WOMAN.\ 
 
 etymologist, who wishes to remain anonymous. Bourguignon 
 is the popular and symbolical name given, ever since the reign 
 of Charles VI., to the loud explosions which result in the 
 ejection on to a rug or a dress of a fragment of charcoal, the 
 germ of a conflagration. The heat, it is said, explodes a 
 bubble of air remaining in the heart of the wood, in the trail 
 of some gnawing grub. Inde amor, inde Burgundus. We 
 quake as we see the charred pieces coming down like an 
 avalanche when we had balanced them so industriously be- 
 tween two blazing logs. Oh ! making up a wood-fire when 
 you are in love is the material expression of your sentiments. 
 
 It was at this moment that I entered Eugene's room; he 
 started violently, and said 
 
 " So there you are, my dear Horace. How long have you 
 been here?" 
 
 " I have this moment come." 
 
 "Ah!" 
 
 He took the two letters, addressed them, and rang for his 
 servant. 
 
 " Take these two notes." 
 
 And Joseph went without a remark. Excellent servant ! 
 
 And we proceeded to discuss the expedition to the Morea, 
 in which I wanted to be employed as surgeon. Eugene 
 pointed out that I should lose much by leaving Paris, and we 
 then talked of different things. I do not think I shall be 
 blamed for omitting our conversation. 
 
 When Madame de Listomere rose at about two in the after- 
 noon, her maid Caroline handed her a letter, which she read 
 while Caroline was dressing her hair. (An imprudence com- 
 mitted by a great many young wives.) 
 
 "Ah, dear angel of love, my treasure of life and happi- 
 ness! " on reading these words, the Marquise was going to 
 throw the letter into the fire ; but a fancy flashed through her 
 head, which any virtuous woman will understand to a marvel, 
 namely, to see how a man might end who began in this strain,
 
 A STUDY OF WOMAN. 319 
 
 She read on. When she turned her fourth page, she dropped 
 her arms like a person who is tired. 
 
 " Caroline," said she, "go and find out who left this letter 
 for me." 
 
 " Madame, I took it from M. le Baron de Rastignac's man- 
 servant." 
 
 There was a long silence. 
 
 "Will Madame dress now?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " He must be excessively impertinent ! " thought the Mar- 
 quise. I may ask any woman to make her own commentary. 
 
 Madame de Listomere closed hers with a formal resolution 
 to shut her door on Monsieur Eugene, and, if she should meet 
 him in company, to treat him with more than contempt ; for 
 his audacity was not to be compared with any of the other 
 instances which the Marquise had at last forgiven. At first 
 she thought she would keep the letter, but, on due reflection, 
 she burned it. 
 
 " Madame has just received such a flaming love-letter, and 
 she read it ! " said Caroline to the housemaid. 
 
 " I never should have thought it of Madame," said the old 
 woman, quite astonished. 
 
 That evening the Marquise was at the house of the Marquise 
 de Beauseant, where she would probably meet Rastignac. It 
 was a Saturday. The Marquise de Beauseant was distantly 
 related to Monsieur de Rastignac, so the young man could 
 not fail to appear in the course of the evening. At two in 
 the morning, Madame de Listomere, who had stayed so late 
 solely to crush Eugene by her coldness, had waited in vain. 
 A witty writer, Stendahl, has given the whimsical name of 
 crystallization to the process worked out by the Marquise's 
 mind before, during, and after this evening. 
 
 " Four days later Eugene was scolding his man-servant. 
 
 " Look here, Joseph; I shall be obliged to get rid of you, 
 my good fellow."
 
 320 A STUDY OF WOMAN. 
 
 " I beg your pardon, sir ? " 
 
 " You do nothing but blunder. Where did you take the 
 two letters I gave you on Friday ? " 
 
 Joseph was bewildered. Like a statue in a cathedral 
 porch he stood motionless, wholly absorbed in the travail of 
 his ideas. Suddenly he smiled foolishly, and said 
 
 " Monsieur, one was for Madame la Marquise de Listomere, 
 Rue Saint-Dominique, and the other was for Monsieur's 
 lawyer " 
 
 " Are you sure of what you say ? " 
 
 Joseph stood dumbfounded. I must evidently interfere 
 happening to be present at the moment. 
 
 "Joseph is right," said I. Eugene turned round to me. 
 " I read the addresses quite involuntarily, and " 
 
 "And," said Eugene, interrupting me, "was not one of 
 them for Madame de Nucingen ? " 
 
 " No, by all the devils ! And so I supposed, my dear boy, 
 that your heart had pirouetted from the Rue Saint-Lazare to 
 the Rue Saint-Dominique." 
 
 Eugene struck his forehead with the palm of his hand, and 
 began to smile. Joseph saw plainly that the fault was none 
 of his. 
 
 Now, there are certain moral reflections on which all young 
 men should meditate. Mistake the first : Eugene thought it 
 amusing to have made Madame de Listomere laugh at the 
 blunder that had put her in possession of a love-letter which 
 was not intended for her. Mistake the second : He did not 
 go to see Madame de Listomere till four days after the misad- 
 venture, thus giving the thoughts of a virtuous young woman 
 time to crystallize. And there were a dozen more mistakes 
 which must be passed over in silence to give ladies exprofesso 
 the pleasure of deducing them for the benefit of those who 
 cannot guess them. 
 
 Eugene arrived at the Marquise's door; but as he was 
 going in, the porter stopped him, and told him that Madame
 
 A STUDY OF WOMAN. 321 
 
 de Listomere was out. As he was getting into his carriage 
 again, the Marquis came in. 
 
 " Come up, Eugene," said he; " my wife is at home." 
 
 Oh ! forgive the Marquis. A husband, however admir- 
 able, scarcely ever attains to perfection. 
 
 Rastignac as he went upstairs discerned the ten fallacies 
 in worldly logic which stood on this page of the fair book 
 of his life. 
 
 When Madame de Listomere saw her husband come in 
 with Eugene, she could not help coloring. The young Baron 
 observed the sudden flush. If the most modest of men never 
 quite loses some little dregs of conceit, which he can no more 
 get rid of than a woman can throw off her inevitable vani- 
 ties, who can blame Eugene for saying to himself, "What ! 
 this stronghold, too ? " and he settled his head in his cravat. 
 Though young men are not very avaricious, they all love to 
 add a head to their collection of medals. 
 
 Monsieur de Listomere seized on the Gazette de France, 
 which he saw in a corner by the fire-place, and went to the 
 window to form, by the help of the newspaper, an opinion 
 of his own as to the state of France. No woman, not even 
 a prude, is long in embarrassment even in the most difficult 
 situations in which she can find herself; she seems always to 
 carry in her hand the fig-leaf given to her by our mother 
 Eve. And so, when Eugene, having interpreted the orders 
 given to the porter in a sense flattering to his vanity, made 
 his bow to Madame de Listomere with a tolerably deliberate 
 air, she was able to conceal all her thoughts behind one of 
 those feminine smiles, which are more impenetrable than a 
 king's speech. 
 
 "Are you unwell, Madame? You had closed your door." 
 
 " No, Monsieur." 
 
 " You were going out perhaps ? " 
 
 "Not at all." 
 
 "You are expecting somebody ? "
 
 322 A STUDY OF WOMAtf. 
 
 " Nobody." 
 
 "If my visit is ill-timed, you have only the Marquis to 
 blame. I was obeying your mysterious orders when he him- 
 self invited me into the sanctuary." 
 
 " Monsieur de Listomere was not in my confidence. There 
 are certain secrets which it is not always prudent to share with 
 one's husband." 
 
 The firm, mild tone in which the Marquise spoke these 
 words, and the imposing dignity of her glance, were enough 
 to make Rastignac feel that he had been in too much haste to 
 plume himself. 
 
 "I understand, Madame," said he, laughing; "I must 
 therefore congratulate myself all the more on having met 
 Monsieur le Marquis ; he has procured me an opportunity for 
 offering you an explanation, which would be fraught with 
 danger, but that you are kindness itself." 
 
 The Marquise looked at the young Baron with considerable 
 astonishment, but she replied with dignity. 
 
 "On your part, Monsieur, silence will be the best excuse. 
 On my side I promise you to forget entirely a forgiveness 
 you scarcely merit. 
 
 " Forgiveness is needless, Madame, where there has been 
 no offence. The letter you received," he added in an under- 
 tone, " and which you must have thought so unseemly, was 
 not intended for you." 
 
 The Marquise smiled in spite of herself; she wished to 
 appear offended. 
 
 "Why tell a falsehood?" she replied with an air of dis- 
 dainful amusement, but in a very friendly tone. " Now that 
 I have scolded you enough, I am quite ready to laugh at a 
 stratagem not devoid of skill. I know some poor women who 
 would be caught by it. " Good heavens, how he loves me ! " 
 they would say. She forced a laugh, and added with an 
 indulgent air, "If we are to remain friends, let me hear 
 nothing more of mistakes of which I cannot be the dupe."
 
 A STUDY OF WOMAN. 323 
 
 " On my honor, Madame, you are far more so than you 
 fancy," Eugene eagerly replied. 
 
 " What are you talking about ? " asked Monsieur de Listo- 
 mere, who for a minute had been listening to the conver- 
 sation, without being able to pierce the darkness of its 
 meaning. 
 
 "Oh, nothing that will interest you," said Madame de 
 Listomere. 
 
 The Marquis quietly returned to his paper, saying, "I 
 see Madame de Mortsauf is dead ; your poor brother is at 
 Clochegourde no doubt." 
 
 "Do you know, Monsieur," said the Marquise, address- 
 ing Eugene, " that you have just made a very impertinent 
 speech?" 
 
 "If I did not know the strictness of your principles," 
 he replied simply, " I should fancy you either meant to 
 put ideas into my head which I dare not allow myself, or 
 to wring my secret from me ; or perhaps, indeed, you wish 
 to make fun of me." 
 
 The Marquise smiled. This smile put Eugene out of 
 patience. 
 
 " May you always believe, Madame, in the offence I did 
 not commit ! " said he. "And I fervently hope that chance 
 may not lead you to discover in society the person who was 
 intended to read that letter " 
 
 " What ! Still Madame de Nucingen ? " cried Madame de 
 Listomere, more anxious to master the secret than to be 
 revenged on the young man for his retort. 
 
 Eugene reddened. A man must be more than five-and- 
 twenty not to redden when he is blamed for the stupid 
 fidelity which women laugh at only to avoid betraying how 
 much they envy its object. However, he said, calmly 
 enough, "Why not, Madame?" 
 
 These are the blunders we commit at five-and-twenty. 
 This confession agitated Madame de Listomere violently;
 
 324 A STUDY OF WOMAN. 
 
 but Eugene was not yet able to analyze a woman's face 
 as seen in a glimpse, or from one side. Only her lips 
 turned white. She rang to have some wood put on the fire, 
 and so obliged Eugene to rise to take leave. "If that is the 
 case," said the Marquise, stopping Eugene by her cold, pre- 
 cise manner, " you will find it difficult, Monsieur, to explain 
 by what chance my name happened to come to your pen. An 
 address written on a letter is not like the first-come crush hat 
 which a man may heedlessly take for his own on leaving a 
 ball." 
 
 Eugene, put quite out of countenance, looked at the Mar- 
 quise with a mingled expression of stupidity and fatuous- 
 ness ; he felt that he was ridiculous, stammered out some 
 schoolboy speech, and left. A few days later Madame de 
 Listomere had indisputable proof of Eugene's veracity. 
 
 For more than a fortnight she has not gone into society. 
 
 The Marquis tells every one who asks him the reason of this 
 change 
 
 " My wife has a gastric attack." 
 
 I, who attend her, and who know her secret, know that 
 she is only suffering from a little nervous crisis, and takes 
 advantage of it to stay quietly at home. 
 
 PARIS, February, 1839.
 
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