The Wild Ass's Skin

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘“Thank you for the peroration!” she said, stifling a yawn and making it plain by her attitude that she did not wish to see me any more. I was reduced to silence by her last remark. I cast my hatred at her in one look and fled.

  ‘I had to forget Foedora, cure myself of my madness, return to my studious solitude—or die. I therefore imposed a colossal programme of work upon myself; I had to finish my book. I did not leave my garret for a fortnight, but spent every night in pale study. In spite of my determination and the inspiration despair brings, I worked with difficulty, in fits and starts. The muse had left me. I could not banish the brilliant, mocking phantom of Foedora from my mind. Each thought hatched another morbid thought, a desire terrible as remorse. I imitated the anchorite* monks of the Thebaid: not praying as they did, but like them, living in the desert and digging deep into my soul rather than digging out the rocks. If necessary I would have girded my loins with a spiked belt to overcome spiritual pain by means of physical pain.’

  * * *

  ‘One evening Pauline came into my room.

  ‘“You are killing yourself,” she said beseechingly. “You should go out, visit your friends.”

  ‘“Oh Pauline, your prediction is coming true! Foedora is killing me, I want to die. Life is unbearable.”

  ‘“So is there only one woman in the world?” she said, smiling. “Why suffer such an infinite amount of pain when life is so short?”

  ‘I looked at Pauline, taken aback. Then she left me on my own. I had not noticed her going. I had heard her voice, without taking in the meaning of her words. Soon I was obliged to carry the manuscript of my memoirs to my editor. So preoccupied with my passion was I that I did not know how I had managed to live without any money. I only knew that the four hundred and fifty francs which were due to me would be enough to pay my debts. So I went to get my wages. And met Rastignac, who found me changed, thinner.

  ‘“Which hospital have you come from?” he asked.

  ‘“That woman is killing me,” I replied. “I can’t cast her aside nor can I put her out of my mind.”

  ‘“It would be best to kill her, then you perhaps wouldn’t think about her any more,” he laughed.

  ‘“Indeed I’ve thought of that,” I replied. “But if I sometimes refresh my soul by the idea of a crime—rape or murder or both—I find I am incapable of actually doing the deed. The Countess is an admirable monster who would beg for mercy, and not everyone can be an Othello!”*

  ‘“She is just like all the women we cannot have,” interrupted Rastignac.

  ‘“I am going mad,” I cried. “Sometimes I feel a madness roaring through my brain. My ideas are like phantoms—they dance in front of my eyes and I am unable to seize hold of them. I prefer death to a life like this. So I have been desperately searching for the best way to put an end to this struggle. It’s not about the Foedora of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, but about my Foedora, the one in here,” I said tapping my head. “What do you think of opium?”

  ‘“No, no, atrociously painful,” Rastignac answered.

  ‘“Suffocation?”

  ‘“Too common!”

  ‘“The Seine?”

  ‘“The drag-nets and the morgue are a filthy business.”

  ‘“A pistol-shot?”

  ‘“If you miss, you are disfigured for life. Listen,” he continued, “like all young men I have contemplated suicide. Which of us by the time he’s thirty has not two or three times killed himself? I’ve not found anything better than wearing yourself out in a life of pleasure. Plunge into deep dissolution and you will drown either your passion or yourself. Intemperance, dear boy, is the king of all deaths. Does it not command the thunderbolt of apoplexy? Apoplexy is a pistol-shot that never misses. Orgies lavish all kinds of physical pleasures on us, is that not what opium does, but more cheaply? Debauchery makes us drink ourselves into oblivion, and challenges wine to mortal combat. Doesn’t the Duke of Clarence’s malmsey butt* taste better than the mud of the Seine? When we fall nobly under the table, is that not a minor case of asphyxia? If a patrol picks us up, and we are lying on the cold mattress of the lock-up, are we not enjoying the pleasures of the morgue—minus the swollen bellies, turgid, blue, green, plus being conscious of what we are going through? Oh,” he went on, “this slow suicide is not like the death of a bankrupt grocer. Tradesmen have dishonoured the river, throwing themselves into the water to make their debtors feel sorry for them. If I were you I should try to die elegantly. If you want to create a new mode of dying by fighting against life in that way, I’ll second you. I am bored, I am depressed. The Alsatian woman they want me to marry has six toes on her left foot, I can’t live with a woman with six toes! People would get to know about it, I’d become an object of ridicule. She’s only got eighteen thousand francs a year, her fortune is diminishing and her toes are growing. The devil take it! Living a wild life, perhaps we shall encounter happiness along the way!”

  ‘Rastignac swept me off my feet. This plan held out too many attractions, revived too many hopes, in short, it had too poetic a colouring to be displeasing to a poet.

  ‘“What about money?” I said.

  ‘“Have you not got four hundred and fifty francs?”

  ‘“Yes, but I owe my tailor and my landlady.”

  ‘“Pay your tailor? You’ll never get on in the world—you won’t even become a minister.”

  ‘“But what can we do with twenty louis?”

  ‘“Go to the gaming-dens.”

  ‘I shuddered.

  ‘“Oh,” he went on, noticing my scruples. “There you are, wanting to launch yourself into what I call the debauchery system, and you are afraid of a green baize!”

  ‘“Listen,” I replied, “I promised my father never to set foot in a gambling-house. Not only is that promise sacred, but I still feel an unconquerable horror whenever I walk past one. Take my hundred crowns and go there on your own. While you are risking our fortune I shall go and put my affairs in order and come back and wait for you in your lodgings.”

  ‘That, my dear friend, is how I went astray. It’s enough for a young man to meet a woman who does not love him, or even a woman who loves him too much, for his whole life to be turned upside down. Happiness saps our strength, as surely as unhappiness extinguishes our virtues. When I had returned to the hotel Saint-Quentin I spent some time contemplating the garret where I had led the chaste life of a scholar, a life which perhaps would have been honourable and long, and which I should never have abandoned for the passionate life which was leading me into the abyss.

  ‘Pauline came across me in this melancholic mood.

  ‘“Why, what’s the matter?” she said.

  ‘I got up without a word and counted out the money I owed her mother, adding the cost of six months’ lodgings. She looked at me with a kind of horror.

  ‘“I am leaving you, dear Pauline.”

  ‘“I guessed as much,” she cried.

  ‘“Listen, my child, I don’t give up hope of coming back here. Keep my room for six months. If I am not back by about 15 November you will inherit from me. This sealed manuscript”, I said, showing her a packet of papers, “is the copy of my important work on The Will. You must deposit it at the King’s Library. As for all I have left here, you can do with it what you wish.”

  ‘She was throwing me glances that weighed heavily on my heart. Pauline then was like the embodiment of conscience.

  ‘“I shall not have any more lessons,” she said, pointing to the piano.

  ‘I did not answer.

  ‘“Will you write to me?”

  ‘“Farewell, Pauline.”

  ‘I drew her gently towards me, then on her lovely brow, pure as snow which has not yet touched the ground, I placed a brotherly kiss, an old man’s kiss. She ran away. I did not want to see Madame Gaudin. I put my key back in its usual place and left. As I left the Rue de Cluny I heard a woman’s light footstep behind me.

  ‘“I embroidered this purse for you. You wil
l not refuse that too?” said Pauline. I thought I could see by the light of a streetlamp a tear in Pauline’s eye, and I sighed. Both perhaps impelled by the same thought, we went our separate ways, in haste, like people fleeing from the plague. This life of debauchery which I was now about to embrace appeared to me oddly expressed in the room in which now, with a supreme indifference, I awaited Rastignac’s return.

  ‘In the middle of the mantelpiece was a clock on top of which was a Venus astride a tortoise, holding in her arms a half-smoked cigar. Elegant pieces of furniture, love-gifts, were scattered around. A luxurious divan was littered with old socks. The comfortable, well-sprung armchair into which I had sunk bore the scars of an old soldier; its arms were torn, and encrusted on its back were the pomade and old hair-oil left by the heads of all his friends. Opulence and poverty were artlessly wedded here, on the bed, on the walls, everywhere. You would have thought it was a palace in Naples surrounded by beggars. It was the room of a gambler or a rogue, whose luxury is entirely personal to him, who lives on his sensations, and by inconsistencies of taste is not in the least bothered.

  ‘The scene, moreover, did not lack poetry. Life reared its head in its sequins and its rags, surprising and incomplete, as it is in reality, but vivid, bizarre, as at a stopping-place where marauders have pillaged everything that has taken their fancy. A Byron, with pages torn out, had been used to light the young man’s fire, typical of those who gamble away a thousand francs but have no fuel, who run around in a tilbury but don’t own a decent clean shirt. The next day a countess, an actress, or a game of écarté will provide him with a set of clothes fit for a king. Here the candle was stuck into the green casing of a tinderbox, there lay the portrait of a woman stripped of her embossed gold frame. How could a young man naturally eager for passion resist the attractions of a life so rich in contrasts, which affords him the excitement of war in a time of peace?

  ‘I had almost dozed off when Rastignac kicked open the door of his room and cried: “Victory! We can die in comfort!”

  ‘He showed me his hat full of gold coins, placed it on the table, and we danced around it like two cannibals about to devour their prey, howling, stumbling, leaping, punching each other with force enough to kill a rhinoceros, crowing at the thought of all the worldly delights this hat contained.

  ‘“Twenty-seven thousand francs,” Rastignac kept saying, as he added some banknotes to the pile of gold. “This money would be enough for others to live on, but will it be enough for us to die on? Oh yes, we shall expire in a bath of gold. Hurrah!” And we capered around again.

  ‘We shared out our inheritance, piece by piece, beginning with the double napoleons, passing from the big to the little coins, drawing out our delight with cries of: “One for you … one for me!”

  ‘“We shan’t sleep tonight,” cried Rastignac. “Joseph, bring some punch!” He threw some gold coins to his loyal servant.

  ‘“That’s for you,” he said. “That should see you out!”’

  * * *

  ‘The next day I bought furniture at Lesage’s, rented the apartment where you met me in the Rue Taitbout,* and engaged the best decorator to paper it. I bought some horses. I flung myself into a whirlwind of pleasures that were both hollow and real at one and the same time. I gambled, won and lost enormous sums, but at balls, in our friends’ houses, and never in gambling-dens, of which I still retained a holy, primitive horror. Gradually I acquired friends. I owed their attachment to affairs of honour or to that trusting facility with which we confide our secrets as we mix more and more in bad company. But perhaps we only make real friends through shared vices. I risked a few literary compositions which earned me some compliments. The prominent men of commercial literature, not seeing in me a rival to be feared, praised me, not so much for my personal merit, no doubt, but rather to mortify their friends. I became a viveur, to use the picturesque word sanctified by the language of orgy. I made it a point of honour to go all out for an early death, crushing the most dissolute of my companions with my zest and enthusiasm. I was always well turned out and stylish. I was held to be a wit. Nothing in me bore evidence of the dreadful existence which makes a man into a funnel for alcohol, an eating-machine, a stud-horse.

  ‘Soon Debauchery appeared to me in all her terrible majesty and I understood her real nature! Certainly the wise and moral men who label bottles for their heirs cannot in the least conceive either the theory or the normal condition of this liberated life. How can you educate provincials into its poetry, people for whom opium and tea, two delightful stimulants, are nothing but two medicaments? In Paris itself, capital of the intellect, still one comes across half-hearted sybarites. Unable to bear the excesses of pleasure, and worn out after an orgy, do they not leave like good bourgeois folk, who, having heard some new opera by Rossini, say they hate all music? They renounce life, like a sober man who won’t eat another of Ruffec’s pâtés* because the first one gave him indigestion.

  ‘Debauchery is surely an art, like writing poetry, and demands strong-minded people. To seize its mysteries, savour its beauties, a man must in some sense apply himself to conscientious study. Like all fields of knowledge, it first repels you, it bristles with difficulties. Immense obstacles surround the greatest pleasures of mankind; not our individual delights, but the systems that make of our rarest sensations a habit, collect them, make them fertile for us, and create a dramatic life within our own, demanding an exorbitant and immediate dissipation of our strength.

  ‘War, government, the arts, are corruptions as far beyond human reach as is debauchery. All are difficult to attain. But once a man has begun to grapple with these great mysteries, does he not walk through a new world? Generals, ministers, artists, all more or less fall into dissolute ways by needing to find violent distractions from their lives which are so different from the norm. After all, war is the debauchery of the blood, just as politics is the debauchery of interests. All excesses are related. These social monstrosities have the power of the abyss, they pull us towards them just as Saint Helena* attracted Napoleon. They make you dizzy, they fascinate, and we wish to plumb their depths without knowing why. Perhaps the idea of the infinite dwells in these precipices, it may be that they hold some flattering appeal for a man. For does he not then make everything revolve around himself? As a contrast to the paradise of his hours of study and the delights of thinking, the tired artist asks, either like God, to rest on Sunday or, like the devil, to enjoy the sensual delights of hell, in order to counter the activity of his faculties with the activity of his senses.

  ‘Lord Byron could not have relaxed over boston* and gossip as a retired tradesman might. He was a poet, he wanted Greece as his stake in a game against Mahmud.* In war, does not man become an exterminating angel, a kind of executioner, but on a gigantic scale? Do we not need abnormal powers of enchantment to make us accept these atrocious pains, enemies of the frail envelope which surrounds our passions like a hedge of thorns? If a smoker writhes convulsively and suffers a sort of agony after abusing tobacco, has he not been present at delicious feasts in unknown lands? And has Europe, blood up to her ankles, not continually returned to fight wars without taking time to wipe her feet? Mankind en masse has its fits of madness, as nature its periods on heat!

  ‘For the private man, for a Mirabeau* who vegetates in a peaceful reign and dreams of stormy times to come, debauchery contains everything. It is a perpetual embracing of life in all its aspects, or rather, it is like fighting a duel with an unknown power, with a monster. First the monster strikes terror in you, you have to seize it by the horns, with unbelievable exertions. Has nature given you I know not what sort of constricted and lazy stomach? You conquer it, you expand it, you teach it to take your wine; you tame drunkenness, you go without sleep for nights on end, and end up acquiring the constitution of a cavalry officer and creating yourself all over again, as though to revolt against God!

  ‘When man has transformed himself thus, and the young recruit, now an old soldier, has accusto
med himself to face the artillery and his legs the march; when, still not belonging to the monster but neither yet knowing who is master, they roll over one another in the dust, sometimes conquerors, sometimes conquered, in a sphere where all is marvellous, where the soul’s sorrows sleep and only the ghosts of ideas live on. Already this dreadful struggle has become a necessity.

  ‘Like those fabulous creatures who according to legend sold their souls to the devil to obtain the power to do evil, the dissolute man wagers his death for all the delights of life, but abundantly, prolifically! His life, instead of flowing monotonously on and on like a river between two banks, at the back of some lawyer’s office, or behind a counter, boils and rushes along in a torrent. In short, debauchery is surely to the body what mystical pleasures are to the soul. Drunkenness plunges you into dreams whose fantasmagoria are as curious as those of ecstasy. You enjoy hours as delightful as the caprices of a young girl, captivating conversations with friends, words which depict an entire life, joys that are pure and unalloyed, travels which do not tire you, poems flowing forth in a few sentences.

  ‘The brutish satisfaction of the beast into which science has delved to search for a soul, is succeeded by enchanting torpors longed for by men bored with their intelligences. Do they not feel the need for utter repose and is not debauchery a sort of tax levied on genius by evil?

  ‘Look at all great men. If they are not sensual, they are by nature timid. Whether in mockery or jealousy, a power vitiates their body or their soul to neutralize the strivings of their talents. During these hours in drink, men and objects appear before you dressed the way you want them to be. You are king of creation and can make it into anything you wish. While in this perpetual state of delirium, gambling will pour any amount of molten lead into your veins. One day you will belong to the monster. You will then wake up, as I did, in a state of fury. Impotence is sitting by your bedside. If you are an old warrior, tuberculosis will devour you; if a diplomat, an aneurism dangles death in your heart by a thread. Perhaps a lung disease will tell me it’s time to depart, as it once did Raphael d’Urbino,* killed by an excess of loving. This is how I have lived! I arrived either too early or too late in the life of society. No doubt my strength would have put me in dangerous situations if I had not dulled it in this way. Was the universe not cured of Alexander by the cup of Hercules* at the end of an orgy? In short, certain thwarted destinies end in heaven or hell, debauchery or the monastery of Monte San Bernardo.*