The Wild Ass's Skin

by Honoré de Balzac

  A little further on, marvelling at the delicate miniatures, the blue and gold curlicues that adorned some missal, he forgot the tumult of the ocean. Rocked in the cradle of peaceful thoughts, he threw in his lot once more with learning and science, envying the luxurious life of monks, without any worries, without any pleasures, lying in a cell contemplating through the Gothic window the fields, woods, and vineyards of his monastery. In front of some Teniers he put on a soldier’s paletot or the rags of a working-man. He wished he might wear the dirty, smoky cap of the Flemish, become drunk with beer, play cards with them, smile at a plump and attractive peasant-girl. He shivered as he looked at Mieris’s snow scenes, and fought when he saw a battle scene by Salvator Rosa.* He stroked a tomahawk from Illinois and felt the scalping-knife of a Cherokee take the skin off the top of his head. In wonderment at the sight of a rebec,* he entrusted it to the hands of a châtelaine and savoured her tuneful singing and declared his love for her in the evening beside a Gothic fireplace in the half-light in which her consenting look could scarcely be seen. He clutched at all the pleasures, seized upon all the pain, took possession of all theories of existence, and so dispersed his life and his feelings in the images depicted by these plastic, empty objects that the sound of his steps echoed in his head like a distant echo from another world, like the sounds of Paris heard from the towers of Notre Dame.

  As he went up the inner stairs which led to the rooms on the first floor, he saw votive shields, panoplies, carved tabernacles, wooden figures on the walls and on every step. Pursued by the strangest of forms, by marvellous creations bestriding the frontiers of life and death, he walked as in the enchantment of a dream. Indeed, doubting his very existence, he resembled these curious objects, neither completely dead, nor completely alive. When he went into the new showrooms, daylight was beginning to fade; but one scarcely needed light for the wealth of gold and silver piled up inside.

  Every extravagance of those who had dissipated their fortune and died in attic rooms after owning several millions was in this vast bazaar of human follies. A desk that had cost a hundred thousand francs and been bought back for a five-franc piece lay next to a secret lock whose price in the old days would have sufficed for a king’s ransom. There human genius appeared in all its petty pomp and in all the glory of its gigantic triviality. An ebony table, truly the icon of artists, sculpted after the design of Jean Goujon,* and which once had taken many years to work, had perhaps been acquired for the price of firewood. Precious coffers and pieces of furniture that were the handiwork of magicians were piled up higgledy-piggledy.

  ‘You have millions here,’ exclaimed the young man when he arrived in the last room of a succession of apartments gilded and carved by artists from the last century.

  ‘You could say billions,’ replied the stout, fresh-cheeked lad. ‘But that’s nothing—wait till you go up to the third floor!’

  The stranger followed his guide and reached a fourth gallery where, one by one, there passed before his weary eyes several pictures by Poussin, some ravishing landscapes by Claude Lorrain, a Gerard Dow* which resembled a page of Sterne, some Rembrandts, some Murillos, some Velasquez, as dark and vivid as a poem by Lord Byron. Then some ancient bas-reliefs, some agate goblets, some marvellous onyxes. Enough works altogether to discourage a man from working, an accumulation of masterpieces that would give you a distaste for the arts and destroy all your enthusiasm. He came to a virgin by Raphael, but he was tired of Raphael.* A portrait by Correggio which cried out to be looked at did not get a glance. A priceless vase of antique porphyry circled with scenes of the most grotesquely licentious of Roman priapic celebrations, pleasures fit for any Corinna,* merited scarcely a smile. He was choking beneath the debris of fifty past centuries now vanished, he was sick of all humanity’s ideas, smothered by the surfeit of luxury and the arts, oppressed by these recurring forms which, like monsters springing up beneath his feet, engendered by some evil spirit, were delivering him up to an endless struggle.

  Resembling in its caprices modern chemistry, which reduces all creation to a single gas, does not the soul make terrible poisons by the rapid concentration of its pleasures, its forces, or its ideas? Do not many men perish in the lightning action of some kind of moral acid suddenly spreading into their innermost being?

  ‘What does this box contain?’ he asked, as they reached a large room. In this last glorious treasure-house of human effort, originality, riches, he pointed to a large square trunk made of mahogany, hanging from a nail by a silver chain.

  ‘Ah, Monsieur has the key to that,’ said the stout lad with an air of mystery. ‘If you wish to see the portrait, by all means I’ll venture to ask Monsieur.’

  ‘Venture!’ the young man replied. ‘Is your master a prince?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered the boy.

  They looked at each other for a moment, both equally surprised. Interpreting the stranger’s silence as a wish, the apprentice left him alone in the room.

  Have you ever plunged into the immensity of time and space by reading the geological tracts of Cuvier?* Transported by his genius, have you hovered over the limitless abyss of the past, as if held aloft by a magician’s hand? As they discover, from strata to strata and from layer to layer, deep in the quarries of Montmartre or the schists of the Urals, these creatures whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, it will strike terror into your soul to see many millions of years, many thousands of races forgotten by the feeble memory of mankind and by the indestructible divine tradition, and whose piles of ashes on the surface of our globe form the two feet of soil which gives us our bread and our flowers.

  Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our age? Of course Lord Byron has set down in fine words certain of our souls’ longings; but our immortal naturalist has reconstructed whole worlds out of bleached bones. Like Cadmus,* he has rebuilt great cities from teeth, repopulated thousands of forests with all the mysteries of zoology from a few pieces of coal, discovered races of giants in the foot of a mammoth. These figures rise up and tower high above us, furnishing whole regions in accordance with their colossal stature. Cuvier is a poet with numbers, he is sublime in the way he places noughts after a seven. He brings the void to life again, without uttering abracadabras, he excavates a fragment of gypsum, spies a footprint and shouts: ‘Look!’ And suddenly the marbles are teeming with creatures, the dead come to life again, the world turns!

  After innumerable dynasties of giant creatures, after endless generations of fish and families of molluscs, man finally arrives, the degenerate product of a grandiose type, his mould perhaps broken by his Creator. Fired by his retrospection, these timid humans, born but yesterday, can now leap across chaos, sing an endless hymn, and configure the history of the universe in a sort of retrograde Apocalypse. In the presence of this awesome resurrection, brought about by the voice of a single man, the crumb we have been offered in this nameless universe, common to every sphere and which we call TIME, this minute of life inspires us with pity. We wonder, crushed as we are beneath so many universes in ruins, what use are our glories, our hates, our loves; we wonder if, in order to become some intangible point in the future, the burden of living must be borne? Uprooted from our present life, we feel dead—until our valet comes in and says: ‘The Countess replies that she is expecting Monsieur’s visit!’

  The sight of these wonders, of all known creation, that had just been revealed to the young man, produced in him that depression that is occasioned in philosophers by the sight of the unknown creations of science, and he desired more earnestly than ever to die. He collapsed on to a curule chair,* allowing his eyes to wander through the fantasmagoria of this panorama of the past. The pictures became illuminated, the virgins’ faces smiled at him, and the statues took on deceptively lifelike colours. In the darkness, the feverish torment fermenting in his shattered brain caused the works of art to start dancing, they moved and whirled before his eyes. Each idol grinned at him, the faces in the paintings closed their
lids to rest their eyes. Each shape shook itself, jerked around, or gravely left its place—lightly, gracefully, suddenly—according to its own custom, character, or structure. It was a weird Sabbath worthy of the fantastical scenes witnessed by Doctor Faust on the Brocken.* But these optical illusions born of fatigue, caused by the tension of the ocular forces or by the tricks of the half-light, had not the power to frighten the stranger. The terrors of life held no sway over a soul already so familiar with the terrors of death. He even encouraged, in a sort of mocking complicity, the strangeness of this galvanism of the mind, connecting its marvels with the last thoughts which gave him the feeling of being still alive. Silence reigned so profoundly around him, that very soon he drifted off into a sweet reverie, a succession of impressions that grew darker and darker, from one shade to the next, while, as if by magic, the light slowly dimmed.

  A fading light in the sky gleamed red one last time as it struggled against the oncoming night. He raised his head, saw a skeleton in the dim light tilting its skull doubtfully from right to left, as if to say: ‘The dead don’t want you yet!’ As he passed his hand across his brow to banish sleepiness, the young man could distinctly feel a cool breeze caused by something hairy brushing against his cheeks and he shivered. There was a dull thud on the windowpane, and he imagined that the cold caress, worthy of the mysteries of the tomb, must have been made by a bat. For a moment still, in the dim reflection of the setting sun he could see ghostly shadows surrounding him. Then this still life vanished altogether in the blackness.

  Night, the hour of death, had suddenly arrived. There elapsed, from that moment, a certain length of time during which he had no clear perception of earthly things, either because he was deep in a profound reverie or because he had yielded to the sleepiness caused by his tiredness and by the multitude of thoughts tearing him apart. All at once he thought he could hear a terrifying voice calling to him, and he shuddered, as when in the middle of a very bad nightmare we are precipitated headlong into a deep abyss. He shut his eyes, the rays of a dazzling light blinded him; he saw a reddish orb shining in the heart of the darkness, in the centre of which stood a little old man turning the beam of a lamp upon him. He had not heard him arrive, nor speak, nor move.

  This apparition had something magical about it. The most intrepid man, thus taken by surprise as he slept, would no doubt have trembled at the sight of this person who seemed to have risen out of a neighbouring sarcophagus. The singular youthfulness which seemed to inhabit the unmoving eyes of this ghost prevented the stranger from believing him to be supernatural. Nevertheless, in the rapid interval that separated his sleeping from his real life, he remained in the state of doubt recommended by Descartes* and was then, despite himself, in the power of those inexplicable hallucinations, mysteries that our pride would have us deny or which our powerless science tries vainly to analyse.

  Imagine a little old man, thin and bony, dressed in a black velvet robe tied around the waist with a large silk cord. Tightly pressed to his head so as to frame his forehead was a velvet skullcap, also black, from which long strands of white hair fell down each side of his face. His dressing-gown covered his body like a vast shroud, so that nothing human was visible but his narrow, pale face. Had it not been for his emaciated arm, which resembled a stick with a piece of cloth on it and which the old man was holding up in order to shine the full light of the lamp upon him, this face would have looked as though it was hanging in mid-air. A grey, pointed beard concealed the chin of this strange creature, and gave him the appearance of one of those Judaic heads which serve as models for artists when they want to portray Moses.*

  This man’s lips were bloodless, and so thin that you had to concentrate hard to work out where the line of the mouth was in his white face. His wide wrinkled forehead, his pale hollow cheeks, the unblinking severity of his little green eyes devoid of lashes and eyebrows, might have led the stranger to believe that the Man Weighing Gold by Gerard Dow had stepped out of its frame. An inquisitor’s cunning, indicated by the wavy lines of wrinkles and by the circular folds drawn across his temples, suggested a profound understanding of life.

  Impossible to deceive this man who seemed to have a gift for discovering the secret thoughts of the most guarded of human beings. The customs of all the nations on earth and their combined wisdom were encapsulated in his inscrutable face, just as the products of the entire world had accumulated in his dusty showrooms. You might have read in it the clear serenity of an omniscient God, or the arrogance of a man who has seen it all. A painter would, with two different expressions and two different strokes of his brush, have made of this face a fine painting of God the Father or the sly mask of Mephistopheles, for there was at one and the same time a supreme strength in his brow and a sinister mocking expression around his mouth. Crushing all human misery by some mighty power, this man had surely eradicated all earthly joys.

  The man who was doomed to die shivered at the realization that this old ghoul inhabited a sphere remote from the world, where he lived alone, with nothing to delight him, because he had no more illusions, with no pain either, because he no longer had any pleasure. The old man remained there, fixed, unshakeable, like a star in the centre of a nebula of light. His green eyes, filled with an unperturbed mocking look that was hard to define, seemed to light up the world of the mind, just as his lamp illuminated this mysterious gallery.

  Such was the strange spectacle that met the young man the moment he opened his eyes, after being lulled by thoughts of death and fantastic images. If his head was still spinning and he allowed himself momentarily to be overcome by childish belief, such as we may have when listening to our nurse’s fairytales, we must attribute this confusion to the veil spread over his life and his reason by these meditations, to his nervous excitation, and to the violent drama whose scenes had just lavished upon him the dread delights that are contained in a grain of opium. This vision took place on the Quai Voltaire in the nineteenth century, a time and a place where magic ought to be impossible. Living next to the house where the god of French unbelief had breathed his last, this disciple of Gay-Lussac and Arago,* deriding the shell games played by those in power, was surely only obeying those poetic obsessions which we often have when we seek to escape desperate truths, as if we wished to test the might of God. He shivered then before the light and this old man, and was agitated by the inexplicable feeling of some strange power; but that emotion was similar to the one we have all experienced when confronted by Napoleon, or when we find ourselves in the presence of some great man of illustrious genius arrayed in glory.

  ‘Would Monsieur care to see the painting of Jesus Christ by Raphael?’ the old man asked politely in a voice whose clear, clipped tone had something metallic in it. And he placed the lamp on the shaft of a broken column so that the mahogany box got all the light.

  At the hallowed names of Christ and Raphael, the young man showed some curiosity, which was no doubt expected by the antique-seller, who then pressed a spring. Suddenly the mahogany panel slid along a groove, dropped silently, and displayed the canvas for the admiring stranger. At the sight of this immortal creation, he forgot the fantastic objects in the shop, the visions he had had in his sleep. He became human again, he recognized in the old man a creature of flesh and blood, very much alive, in no way fantasmagorical, and he again lived in the real world. Tender solicitude, the sweet serenity of the divine face, immediately flowed into him. Fragrance pouring forth from the heavens dissolved the infernal torment that was burning him to the marrow. The head of the Saviour of mankind seemed to stand out against the black background; a halo of bright light glittered around his hair, from where the light shone; beneath his brow, beneath the flesh, was an eloquent certainty which flowed forth from his every feature. The cherry-red lips had just pronounced the word of life, and the spectator sought its holy echo in the air, beseeching the silence for his enthralling parables, listening for it in the future, finding it in the teaching of the past. The Gospel was translated throug
h the calm simplicity of those eyes inviting adoration in which troubled souls found refuge. Indeed the entire catholic religion could be read in the smooth, magnificent smile which seemed to express the precept in which it is all contained: ‘Love one another!’ This painting inspired a prayer, recommended forgiveness, stifled egotism, revived all dormant virtues. Partaking of the privileges of the magic of music, the art of Raphael threw you under the imperious spell of memories, and its triumph was complete; you forgot the person who had painted it. The dazzling light was still working upon this marvel; at times it seemed that the Saviour’s head was stirring, from a long way away, in the centre of a nimbus.

  ‘I covered this canvas with gold coins,’ the antique seller said coldly.

  ‘Well, death it is then!’ cried the young man, coming out of a reverie. His last thought had brought him back to his inevitable fate, causing him by imperceptible steps to renounce a hope to which he had been clinging.

  ‘Ah, so I had good reason to be wary of you,’ replied the old man seizing the two hands of the young man and squeezing his wrists in one of his, in a vice-like grip.

  The stranger smiled sadly at this misapprehension and muttered: ‘Ah, Monsieur, fear not, it’s my life I mean, not yours. Why should I not admit to an innocent deception?’ he went on, after looking at the anxious old man. ‘As I waited for nightfall, in order to drown without any fuss, I came in to look at your treasures. Who would not forgive a man of learning and poetry this final pleasure?’