The Wild Ass's Skin

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘“Jonathas, you must look after me as if I were a babe in arms.” Yes, Monsieur Porriquet, a babe, a babe in arms, he says:

  ‘“You will attend to all my needs.” So there you have it. I am the master, and he’s like my servant. Why? Oh, that’s a thing nobody in the world knows but him and the good Lord. It’s unconciliable!’

  ‘He must be writing a poem,’ cried the old professor.

  ‘Do you think he’s writing a poem, Monsieur? That must be a terrible burden then! But you know, I don’t think he is. He tells me often that he wants to live like a vergetable, vergetating!*And only yesterday, Monsieur Porriquet, he looked at a tulip and said, as he was getting dressed:

  ‘“This is my life, I am vergetating, my poor Jonathas.” And now other people think he is a monomaniac. It’s unconciliable!’

  ‘It all goes to prove, Jonathas,’ the teacher replied, with an air of authority that made the old servant respect him deeply, ‘that your master is busy with a great work. He is deep in vast meditations and does not wish to be distracted from those by the preoccupations of everyday life. When in the middle of his intellectual pursuits a man of genius forgets everything else. One day the famous Newton …’

  ‘Oh, Newton, yes,’ said Jonathas, ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘Newton, a great mathematician,’ Porriquet continued, ‘spent twenty-four hours with his elbows leaning on the table. Next day, when he came out of his reverie, he thought it was still the day before, as if he had been sleeping … I’ll go to see him, the dear boy, I can perhaps be of some help to him.’

  ‘Hold on,’ cried Jonathas. ‘Even if you were king of France, the old one, I mean, you wouldn’t get in, unless you forced open the doors and walked over my dead body. But Monsieur Porriquet, I am going to run and tell him you are here and I’ll ask him straight out: “Shall I have him go up?” He will say Yes or No. I never say to him, “Do you want, do you wish, does Monsieur desire?” Those words are banned from the conversation. Once I let one slip by mistake. “Do you want to kill me?” he said, very angry.’

  Jonathas left the old teacher in the hall, making a sign to him to remain there. But he came back straight away with a favourable reply and conducted the old schoolmaster through sumptuous apartments, all of whose doors stood open. Porriquet saw his pupil from a long way off sitting by the fireplace. Wrapped in a large-patterned dressing-gown and sitting in a comfortable, well-sprung armchair, Raphael was reading the newspaper. The extreme melancholia he seemed prey to was apparent in the sickly posture of his exhausted body. It was painted all over his brow and on his face, which was pale, like a wilted flower. A sort of effeminate grace attached to him, and also certain characteristics particular to rich people who are not in good health. His hands, like those of a pretty woman, had a soft, delicate whiteness. His fair hair, thinning now, curled around his temples with a studied coquetry. A Greek cap, pulled down by a tassel that was too heavy for the light cashmere of which it was made, hung down one side of his head. He had let fall at his feet the malachite paper-knife, embossed with gold, that he had used to cut open the pages of a book. On his knees was the amber mouthpiece of a magnificent Indian hookah, whose enamelled spirals lay like a serpent across the room and whose fresh perfumes he neglected to suck in. However, the general debility of his young body was belied by his blue eyes, into which the whole of his life seemed to have withdrawn and from which shone an extraordinary intensity of feeling, striking you at once.

  That look was painful to see. Some would read in it the signs of despair; others would guess at an inner struggle as terrible as remorse. It was the desperate look of an impotent man who suppresses all his wishes in the secret places of his heart; or the look of a miser mentally enjoying all the pleasures money could buy, but refusing to buy them so as not to diminish his hoard of wealth; or the look of Prometheus bound, or the fallen Napoleon who learned at the Élysée in 1815 of the strategic error committed by his enemies, and asked for the command of the army for twenty-four hours, but was not granted it. Truly the look of a conqueror and a man who is damned! Or, worse, the look that several months before, Raphael had cast on the Seine and on the last gold coin he had gambled. He was subjecting his will, his intelligence, to the vulgar good sense of an old peasant hardly civilized by fifty years of housekeeping. Almost glad to have become a sort of automaton, he was abdicating his life in order just to survive and stripping his soul bare of all the poetry of desire.

  The better to fight against the cruel power whose challenge he had accepted, he had made himself chaste in the same manner as Origen, by castrating his imagination.* The day after the one when, suddenly being made rich by a will, he had seen the wild ass’s skin shrink, he had found himself at his lawyer’s house. There, a rather fashionable doctor had in all seriousness recounted over dessert how a Swiss had cured himself of consumption. This man had not spoken a word for ten years and had disciplined himself to breathe only six times a minute, in the dense air of a cow-byre, and to observe an extremely light diet.

  ‘I shall be that man!’ Raphael said to himself, wanting at all costs to stay alive. Though in the lap of luxury, he led a life as mechanical as a steam engine. When the old teacher viewed that youthful cadaver, he shuddered. Everything seemed to him artificial in that slight and enfeebled body. When he saw the Marquis with his haunted look and his heavy brow, he could not recognize the boy he remembered with the fresh pink complexion and youthful limbs. If this classicist, a wise critic and arbiter of good taste, had read Lord Byron he would have thought he was looking at Manfred, when he had wished to see Childe Harold.*

  ‘Good-day, Père Porriquet,’ said Raphael to his teacher, pressing the old man’s icy fingers in his hot, moist hand. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I am very well,’ answered the old man, appalled at the touch of this feverish hand. ‘And how are you?’

  ‘Oh, I hope to maintain good health.’

  ‘You are no doubt working on some important book?’

  ‘No,’ Raphael replied, ‘Exegi monumentum,* Père Porriquet. I have finished my life’s work and said goodbye to science for ever. I scarcely know where my manuscript is.’

  ‘Well, I am sure it is well-written,’ his teacher said. ‘I trust you have not adopted the barbaric language of this new school which thinks it can achieve miracles by reinventing Ronsard?’*

  ‘My book is a purely physiological work.’

  ‘Oh, then everything becomes clear,’ the teacher continued. ‘In science, grammar must adapt to the new discoveries. Nonetheless, my child, a clear, harmonious style, the language of Massillon, of Buffon, of the great Racine,* a classical style in other words, never did anyone any harm. But my friend,’ and his teacher broke off, ‘I was forgetting the purpose of my visit. I have a reason for visiting you.’

  Remembering too late the elegant verbosity and the eloquent periphrases to which a long time in teaching had accustomed his master, Raphael almost regretted having let him in. But at the very moment he was about to wish him gone he promptly suppressed the secret desire, and threw a furtive glance at the ass’s skin suspended in front of him and stuck to a white cloth, its fateful contours traced out by a red line exactly framing it.

  Since the fateful orgy, Raphael had stifled every least wish and lived in such a manner as not to cause the least disturbance to the terrible talisman. The ass’s skin was like a fierce tiger with whom he had to live, and never waken its ferocity. So he listened patiently to his old teacher’s long explanations. Porriquet spent an hour recounting all the persecutions he had suffered since the July Revolution. The old man, wanting a strong government, had expressed the patriotic desire that grocers should remain at their shop-counters, that statesmen should be left to manage affairs of state, judges affairs of the courts, and peers of the realm left to the Luxembourg. But one of the Citizen-King’s popular ministers had had him removed from his chair, accusing him of being a follower of Charles.*

  The old man therefore found himself out
of a job, without the means to retire and without anything to live off. Since he was the sole means of support of a poor nephew whose fees he was paying at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, he had come, not so much on his own behalf as for his adopted son, to ask his former pupil to appeal to the new minister, not to reinstate him in his old job but to give him the job of principal in some provincial school.

  Raphael was about to succumb to an unconquerable drowsiness, when the monotonous voice of the old man ceased droning in his ears. Forced out of politeness to look into the white, almost unblinking eyes of this man, so slow and halting in his speech, he was stupefied, mesmerized by an inexplicable inertia.

  ‘Well, my good old Porriquet,’ he replied, without knowing precisely what question he was answering, ‘I can do nothing for you, nothing at all. I very much wish you to succeed.’

  At that moment, without noticing the effect which those banal words, dictated by his selfish concern and indifference, had on the sallow, wrinkled forehead of the old man, Raphael started up like a frightened fawn. He saw a thin white space between the edge of the dark skin and the red line. He let out a yell so terrible that the poor teacher was scared out of his wits.

  ‘Go away you old fool,’ he cried, ‘you will get your job! Couldn’t you have asked me for an income of a thousand crowns for life rather than make me utter a wish that will kill me? Then your visit would have cost me nothing. There are a hundred thousand jobs in France but I only have one life! The life of a man is worth more than all the jobs in the world. Jonathas!’

  Jonathas appeared.

  ‘This is your doing, you triple-dyed imbecile. Why did you suggest I let this person in?’ he said, pointing to the petrified old man. ‘Have I put my soul into your hands only for you to tear it to shreds? You have taken away from me ten years of my life! Another mistake like that and you will conduct me to the dwelling-place I conducted my father to. Would I not have preferred to possess the beautiful Foedora rather than oblige this old carcass, this dreg of humanity? I’ve got enough gold for him. And besides, if all the Porriquets in the world died of hunger, what would I care?’

  Raphael had gone white with anger. A thin foam showed on his trembling lips and the expression in his eyes was murderous. Seeing this, the two old men were seized with a convulsive shaking, like two children who come across a snake. The young man sank into his chair. A kind of reaction set in and tears poured abundantly from his burning eyes.

  ‘Oh my life, my beautiful life,’ he said. ‘No more beneficent thoughts, no more love, nothing!’ He turned to the teacher. ‘The damage is done, my old friend,’ he went on gently. ‘I shall have richly rewarded you for your care for me. And at least my misfortune will have benefited a good and worthy man.’

  There was so much suffering in the tone of these almost unintelligible words that the two old men wept, as you weep when you hear a sentimental tune sung in a foreign tongue.

  ‘He must be epileptic,’ said Porriquet in a whisper.

  ‘I acknowledge your goodness, my friend,’ Raphael continued mildly. ‘You are trying to excuse me. Illness is an accident, but inhumanity would be a vice. But leave me now,’ he added, ‘You will receive your nomination tomorrow or the next day, perhaps even tonight, for Resistance has triumphed over Movement.* Farewell.’

  The old man left, horrified and a prey to real anxiety about Valentin’s mental health. This scene had for him something supernatural about it. He doubted himself and wondered if he had awoken from a bad dream.

  ‘Listen Jonathas,’ the young man went on, addressing himself to his old servant. Try to understand the mission I have entrusted to you!’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur le Marquis.’

  ‘I am like a man not subject to the normal laws of humanity.’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur le Marquis.’

  ‘All the pleasures of life play around my deathbed and dance like beautiful women before my eyes. If I beckon them, I die. Always death is present! Your job is to be the barrier between the world and me.’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur le Marquis,’ said the old manservant, mopping the drops of sweat from his furrowed brow. ‘But if you do not wish to see beautiful women how will you manage tonight at the Italiens? An English family leaving for London has given me the rest of their season ticket, and you have a fine theatre box. Oh, a splendid box, at the front.’

  But Raphael, fallen into a deep trance, was no longer listening.

  Do you see that magnificent carriage? From the outside it looks like a simple brown coupé, but on its panels glitter the arms of an ancient and noble family. When this coupé sweeps past the young shopgirls admire it, covet the yellow satin, the hand-knotted carpet, the smart trimming new as a rice-straw, the soft cushions, and the soundproof glass. Two footmen in livery ride behind this aristocratic carriage. But lying within on the silk cushions is a fevered head, with shadows under the eyes, the head of Raphael, sad and pensive. What a fateful image of wealth! He speeds through Paris like a rocket, arrives at the doors of the Theatre Favart,* the steps are let down, his two footmen support him, and an envious crowd stares at him.

  ‘What’s he done to become so rich?’ asks a poor student of Law, who for lack of a few francs was deprived of the chance to hear the magic harmonies of Rossini. Raphael walked slowly through the corridors of the theatre. He promised himself no pleasure in the delights he had once so coveted.

  While waiting for the second act of Semiramis,* he walked around the foyer, wandered through the halls, not caring about his box which he had not yet entered. Already he no longer felt the pride of ownership. Like all sick people, he thought only about his illness. Leaning on the mantel of the fireplace, in the middle of the foyer where throngs of elegant theatregoers were milling around—young and old, past and present ministers, peers without a peerage and peerages without a peer as created by the Revolution of July, in brief, a whole world of speculators and journalists—Raphael espied, only a few steps away amongst all the other heads, a strange and supernatural figure. He moved forward, looking blatantly at this bizarre creature, in order to study him more closely.

  ‘What a wonderful subject for a painting!’ he thought. The eyebrows, the hair, the Mazarin-style beard* that the stranger sported, rather vainly, were dyed black. But the cosmetic having been applied to hair which was no doubt too white, had turned it an artificial purple colour in shades that varied according to the brightness of the lights. The wrinkles on his flat angular face were larded with thick layers of rouge and white powder, giving him the appearance of slyness and anxiety at one and the same time. The make-up was patchy in some places, which made his decrepitude and the greyness of his complexion all the more obvious. So it was impossible not to laugh at this head, with the pointed chin and jutting-out forehead which somewhat resembled those grotesque wooden figures carved by German shepherds in their leisure time.

  If an observer had studied Raphael and this old Adonis in turn, he would have thought he could see in the Marquis the eyes of a young man beneath the mask of an old man, and in the stranger the dull eyes of an old man beneath a young man’s mask. Valentin tried to recall in what circumstances he had met this wizened little old man with a fashionable cravat, with boots like a man in the prime of life, who was jangling his spurs and crossing his arms for all the world as though he had the energy of exuberant youth to expend. His demeanour had nothing awkward or artificial about it. His elegant costume, carefully buttoned up over a sturdy, if aged, form, gave him the appearance of an old dandy who was still a slave to fashion.

  This puppet, so full of life, had for Raphael all the charm of an apparition and he contemplated him as if he were an old, grimy Rembrandt which had been recently restored, glazed, and framed. The comparison made him hit upon the truth amid the jumble of his memories. He recognized the antique dealer, the man to whom he owed his misfortune. At that moment this fantastic personage emitted a soundless laugh from the bloodless lips stretched over his false dentures. At this laugh, Raphael’s vivid imag
ination saw in him a perfect likeness of Goethe’s Mephistopheles as portrayed by artists.

  A thousand superstitions then seized hold of Raphael’s doughty soul. He believed in the power of the devil, in the magic spells recounted in numerous medieval legends and treated by poets. Rejecting with horror the fate of Faust, he suddenly invoked heaven, having, like the dying, a fervent faith in God and in the Virgin Mary.

  A dazzlingly clear light allowed him to see the heaven of Michelangelo and Sanzio d’Urbino:* clouds, an old man with a white beard, winged heads, a beautiful woman sitting in an aureole. Now he understood; he took to heart these admirable creations whose almost human fantasies explained his adventure and offered him hope once more. But when his eyes again lit on the foyer of the Théâtre des Italiens, instead of the Virgin he saw a ravishingly beautiful girl, the detestable Euphrasie, the dancer with the lithe, light body who, in a dress dazzling with oriental pearls, arrived, impatient with her impatient old cavalier, to show her insolent face and sparkling eyes to the crowd of envious speculators as the living proof of the merchant’s limitless riches that she was squandering.

  Raphael remembered the lighthearted way he had received the old man’s fateful present, and he savoured all the delights of vengeance when he contemplated the deep humiliation of his sublime wisdom, whose downfall had once seemed impossible. The mournful smile of the centenarian was directed at Euphrasie, who answered him fondly. He offered her his desiccated arm, took two or three turns round the foyer, received with delight the passionate glances and the compliments addressed to his mistress by the crowd, and did not hear the jeering laughs and biting mockery of which he was the butt.

  ‘From which cemetery did this young ghoul dig up her corpse?’ cried the most elegant of all the Romantics* present.