The Wild Ass's Skin (Oxford World's Classics)

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘The death penalty is going to be abolished, so they say, in honour of the July Revolution,’ Taillefer replied, raising his eyebrows with an expression of sophistry and stupidity.

  ‘But do you not see them sometimes in your dreams?’ pursued Raphael.

  ‘There’s a statute of limitation!’ said the wealthy murderer.

  ‘And on his tomb’, cried Émile sardonically, ‘the stonemason will carve out the words “You who pass by, shed a tear”. Oh,’ he went on, ‘I would definitely give a hundred sous to the mathematician who could prove to me by an algebraic equation that hell exists.’

  And he threw a coin into the air shouting, ‘Heads God exists!’

  ‘Don’t look,’ said Raphael, catching the coin. ‘How do we know? Chance is such a joker.’

  ‘Alas,’ said Émile, making a face like a sad clown. ‘I can’t see what position can be taken between the geometry of the unbeliever and the pope’s Paternoster. Bah! Have another drink. Trinc is, I think, the oracle of the divine bottle* and serves as the conclusion to Pantagruel.’

  ‘To the Paternoster,’ said Raphael, ‘we owe our arts, monuments, perhaps our sciences. And a still greater blessing, our modern governments, in which our vast and fertile society is marvellously represented by five hundred brains, where opposing forces neutralize each other by leaving all power to Civilization, that gigantic queen who replaces the ancient and terrible figure of the king, a kind of phoney destiny created by man to stand between him and God. In the presence of so many works accomplished by religion, atheism seems nothing but a sterile skeleton, don’t you think?’

  ‘I am thinking of the rivers of blood spilt by catholicism,’ said Émile coldly. ‘It has taken and used our veins and our hearts to make another Flood. But it’s of no consequence. Every thinking man must march under the banner of Christ. He alone has consecrated the triumph of spirit over matter, He alone has poetically revealed the intermediate world separating us from God.’

  ‘Do you really think that?’ Raphael went on, throwing him an indefinable, drunken smile. ‘Well, so as not to compromise ourselves, let us drink the famous toast “Diis ignotis”.’*

  And they emptied their goblets of science, carbonic acid gas, perfume, poetry, and scepticism.

  ‘If the gentlemen would care to go into the drawing-room, coffee will be served,’ said the maitre d’hôtel.

  * * *

  At that moment almost all the guests were wallowing in that delightful limbo where the light of reason has gone out, and the body, set free of its tyrannical master, abandons itself to the delirious joys of liberty. Some who had reached a state of extreme inebriation remained depressed and painfully anxious to snatch at any idea that might convince them of their own existence; others deep in the marasma produced by a sluggish digestion were quite devoid of movement. Some speechifiers, nothing daunted, were still uttering vague words whose meaning escaped them. Some refrains from songs could be heard, like the artificial, soulless tunes ground out by some mechanical musical box over and over again. Silence and noise had joined forces in the oddest way. However, when they heard the sonorous voice of a footman, who, in the absence of the maître d’hôtel was announcing new delights, the guests rose and were borne along, supported or carried by one another. Then the whole group remained spellbound for a moment, stock-still on the threshold. The excessive delights of the feast paled before the tantalizing spectacle offered by the host to tease the most voluptuous of their senses. Beneath the lighted candles of a golden candelabra, around a table laden with silver gilt, a group of women appeared suddenly before the stupefied guests whose eyes lit up like so many diamonds. The ornaments were rich, but richer by far were these dazzling beauties before whom all the marvels of this palace were as nothing. The passionate look in the eyes of these girls, dazzling as fairies, was more intense than the light flooding the room, which brought out the satiny sheen on the draperies, the whiteness of the marble statues, and the delicate curves of the bronzes. Senses were aroused by the sight of their tossing hair and their poses, so variously, so differently attractive. It was like a hedge in blossom mixed with rubies, sapphire, and coral; a string of black necklaces on snow-white throats, flimsy scarves floating like the flames of beacons, saucy turbans, modestly provocative tunics.

  This seraglio offered up seductions to every eye, to delight every man’s fantasy. One dancer, in a delicious pose, seemed to be nude under her undulating folds of cashmere. Here a diaphanous gauze, there a shimmering silk concealed or revealed mysterious perfections. Small, slender feet invited love while fresh, rosy mouths remained silent. Dainty, respectable girls, falsely virginal, their pretty hair giving off a religious innocence, looked like airy apparitions that could be blown away with one puff of breath. Then proud aristocratic beauties, indolent, but slim, willowy and graceful, bent their heads as if they still could buy themselves the protection of kings. An English rose, a pale, chaste, ethereal figure, wafted down out of the mists of Ossian,* resembled the angel of melancholy, or Remorse fleeing from Crime. Nor was there lacking in this dangerous company the Parisienne whose beauty resides in her indescribable grace, proud of her toilette and her wit, yet armed with that omnipotent frailty, pliant but obstinate, a siren without a heart and without passion, yet capable of feigning the treasures of passion and counterfeiting the voice of feeling. There were also Italian girls, serene in countenance but serious about their pleasures; well-endowed, finely built Norman women; black-haired women from the South with wide-set eyes. You would have thought they were beauties from Versailles, assembled by Lebel,* who set their sexual traps early in the morning, and arrived like a bevy of oriental slaves wakened by the voice of the merchant for departure at dawn. They stood around, rather abashed and undecided, and then, buzzing like bees in a hive, hurried to the table. This timid hesitancy, both reproachful and coquettish, was either a calculated means of seduction or involuntary modesty. Perhaps an intuition, which women don’t ever completely discard, was telling them to clothe themselves in the cloak of virtue to add charm and spice to the prodigalities of vice. So the plot hatched by old Taillefer seemed bound to fail. These uninhibited gentlemen were immediately subjugated to that majestic power with which women are invested. A murmur of admiration ran through the company like sweet music. Desire had not kept pace with drunkenness; instead of a whirlwind of passion, the guests, caught in a moment of weakness, abandoned themselves to a voluptuous ecstasy. The artists, for ever in thrall to the voice of poetry, were content to study the delicate shades which distinguished these choice beauties from one another. A man of philosophical leanings, struck by a thought which might have been due to some emanation of carbonic acid from the champagne he had drunk, shuddered as he thought of the evils that had brought these women here, women who formerly had merited perhaps only the purest homage. Each no doubt had some terrible tragedy to recount. Almost all brought with them stories from hell, and had a past full of unfaithful men, broken promises, pleasures paid for by poverty.

  The guests approached them politely and conversations as varied as their personalities began. Groups formed. You might have thought it was a polite drawing-room, where after dinner young girls and women go around assisting the guests by offering coffee, liqueurs, and sweets for those having difficulty with their wayward digestion. But soon laughter broke out, the noise increased, voices were raised. The orgy, quelled for the time being, threatened periodically to break out again. These alternating silences and noise bore some fleeting resemblance to a Beethoven symphony.*

  Seated upon a comfortable divan, the two friends first watched the arrival of a tall, well-proportioned girl, superb in stature, with a rather irregular but striking, passionate face that captured hearts with its marked contrasts. Her black hair, in lascivious curls, looked as if it had already suffered in the frays of love, falling in soft ringlets onto her wide shoulders which held out promising vistas to the beholder. Long dark tresses half concealed a queenly neck on which light played at interva
ls, revealing the subtlety of its pretty contours. The warm, vivid tones of her bright colours stood out against her matt-white skin. Her eyes, protected by long lashes, emitted bold flames, sparks of love! Her red, moist mouth and parted lips invited kisses. This girl had a firm but supple and voluptuous waist; her breasts, her arms, were well developed like those of the beautiful figures of Caracci.* Nevertheless she looked lissom, lithe, and her strength suggested the agility of a panther, just as the male elegance of her figure promised a greedy sensuality.

  Although this girl surely could giggle and frolic with the best of them, her eyes and her smile struck terror into the heart. Like a seer possessed by demons, she occasioned wonderment rather than pleasure. All manner of expressions went over her mobile face, like flashes of lightning. More sophisticated individuals might have found her fascinating, but a young man would have thought her formidable. She was like a colossal statue fallen from the heights of a Greek temple, sublime at a distance, but coarse seen close to. Nonetheless, her overwhelming beauty would arouse the impotent, her voice charm the deaf, her looks put life into old bones. So Émile compared her vaguely to a Shakespearean tragedy, a kind of admirable arabesque where joy howls, where love has something savage about it, where the magic of grace and the fire of happiness succeed the bloody tumults of rage; a monster who can bite as well as caress, laugh like a devil, improvise in a single embrace all the seductions of womankind, except the sighs of melancholy and the enchanting modesty of virgins; then immediately fly into a fury, tear at her breasts, shatter her passion and her lover; finally, to destroy herself, like a nation in revolt.

  Dressed in red velvet, carelessly she trampled underfoot a few flowers that had already fallen from her companions’ heads and haughtily held out a silver tray to the two friends. Proud of her beauty and proud too of her vices perhaps, she displayed one lily-white arm, which was vividly set off by the red velvet. She was like the queen of delights, an image of human pleasure, the pleasure that dissipates the treasure amassed by three generations, which laughs at corpses, makes fun of ancestors, dissolves pearls and thrones, transforms young men into old, and often old men into young; an image of the delights permitted only to giants who are tired of power, worn out by ideas, or for whom war has become a game.

  ‘What do you call yourself?’ enquired Raphael.

  ‘Aquilina.’

  ‘Oho, so you come straight from Venice Preserved,’* cried Émile.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Just as the popes give themselves new names as they rise above mankind, I took another name when I rose above all other women.’

  ‘So have you got as your protector a noble and terrifying conspirator who loves you and will die for you?’ said Émile, revived by this poetic apparition.

  ‘I did have,’ she replied. ‘But the guillotine was my rival. So I always put a few pieces of scarlet cloth in my dress so that I am not carried away by my pleasures.’

  ‘Oh, if you allow her to tell the tale of the four young men of La Rochelle, she’ll go on for ever. Be quiet, Aquilina! Haven’t all women got a lover to lament? But not all of them have been so lucky as to lose them to the scaffold. Oh, wouldn’t I like to think of mine lying in a grave at Clamart* rather than in a rival’s bed.’

  These words were uttered in a gentle and melodious voice by the most unspoilt, prettiest, sweetest little creature ever to emerge from a magic egg beneath the wave of a fairy’s wand. She had arrived with a soft step, and had a delicate face, slender waist, ravishingly modest blue eyes, and a fresh, pure forehead. An innocent water-nymph escaping from her spring was not more timid, more pure, or more naive than that young girl, who seemed not a day over sixteen, ignorant of evil, love, and the storms of life, and to have just come from a church where she had prayed to the angels to obtain her recall to heaven before her allotted time. Only in Paris does one come across these creatures with innocent faces, in whom lurk the deepest depravity, the most refined of vices, beneath a face as sweet and delicate as a daisy.

  Initially taken in by the celestial promises written in the sweet face of this young girl, Émile and Raphael accepted the coffee she poured out in the cups given them by Aquilina and began to ask her questions. She succeeded in transfiguring herself, in the eyes of the two poets, into the sinister allegory of a form of human life that was beyond understanding. In contrast to the hard and passionate expression of her imposing companion, she became the very picture of cold corruption, voluptuously cruel, wild enough to commit a crime, and strong enough to laugh about it; some kind of devil without a heart, who punishes rich, tender souls for feeling the emotions she is deprived of, can always produce a smile to sell her favours and tears to weep over the coffin of her victim, but is delighted to read the will, come the evening. A poet would have admired the beautiful Aquilina; the whole world would shrink away from the touching Euphrasie;* one was the soul of vice—the other was vice without a soul.

  ‘I’d love to know’, said Émile to this pretty creature, ‘if you ever think of the future.’

  ‘The future,’ she laughed. ‘What do you mean by the future? Why should I think about something that doesn’t yet exist? I never look at what is behind or in front of me. Is it not already more than enough to cope with one day at a time? Anyway we all know that the future means the poorhouse.’

  ‘How can you see the poorhouse from here and not try to avoid it?’ cried Raphael.

  ‘What is so frightening about the poorhouse?’ asked the formidable Aquilina. ‘When we are neither mothers nor wives, when old age puts black stockings on our legs and wrinkles on our foreheads, withers everything we have about us that is female and dries up the delight in the eyes of our admirers, what could we possibly need? No ornaments then, but only clay walking on two legs, cold, wizened, decomposed, producing the rustle of dead leaves. The prettiest clothes will become our rags, the amber that used to spread delight throughout the boudoir will take on an odour of death and smell of skeletons; then if there is still a heart in this clay, all of you will make fun of it, you won’t even allow us our memories. So whether we are, at that stage in our lives, living in a rich mansion looking after our dogs or in the poorhouse sorting rags, is not our life exactly the same? Whether we hide our white hair under a kerchief with red and blue squares or under lace caps, sweep the roads with a broom or the steps of the Tuileries with our satin skirts, sit at gilded firesides or keep warm by the ashes of an earthenware brazier, go to a public execution at the Place de Grève or visit the Opéra, is it so very different?’

  ‘Aquilina mia, you have never reasoned so well in the midst of your despair,’ said Euphrasie. ‘Yes, cashmere, lace, perfumes, gold, silk, luxury, everything that glitters, everything that charms, is only really pretty on the young. Time alone will put an end to our follies, but happiness absolves us. You are laughing at my words,’ she cried, throwing a venomous glance at the two friends, ‘but am I not right? I’d rather die of pleasure than of disease. I have neither the longing for eternal life nor any great respect for humankind, seeing what God has made of it. Give me millions, I will squander them and not keep a penny for next year. I live to please and reign supreme, that is what each beat of my heart demands. Society approves; does it not provide ceaselessly for my enjoyment? Why does God give me every morning the money I spend each evening? Why do you build poorhouses for us? Since He has not placed us between good and evil to choose what harms or bores us, I should be a real fool not to enjoy myself.’

  ‘And what about the others?’ said Émile.

  ‘The others? Well let them look after themselves! I’d rather laugh at their suffering than cry over mine. I defy a man to cause me the slightest pain.’

  ‘How you must have suffered, that you think in this way,’ said Raphael.

  ‘I was abandoned for the sake of an inheritance!’ she said, adopting an attitude that showed all her charms to advantage. ‘And yet I had spent nights and days working to provide food for my lover. I no longer want to be the dupe of a smile,
a promise, and I am determined to make of my life one long round of pleasure.’

  ‘But’, cried Raphael, ‘doesn’t happiness come from the soul?’

  ‘Well,’ said Aquilina, ‘is it nothing to find oneself admired, flattered, to outdo all other women, even the most virtuous of them, crushing them with our beauty and riches? Anyway, we live more fully in one day than a respectable matron does in ten years, and there’s an end to it.’

  ‘A woman without virtue, is she not odious?’ said Émile to Raphael.

  Euphrasie threw them a venomous glance, and replied with her inimitable irony:

  ‘Virtue! We leave that to the ugly and the hunchbacks. Where would the poor girls be without that?’

  ‘Be quiet!’ cried Émile. ‘And don’t speak of things you know nothing about.’

  ‘Oh, so I don’t know anything about it?’ went on Euphrasie. ‘To give oneself your whole life long to someone you detest, to raise children who abandon you, and thank them when they wring your heart: these are the virtues you dictate to your women. And more than this, as a reward for her self-effacement you come and make her suffer by seeking to seduce her; if she resists, you compromise her. A fine life that is! We do better to stay free, love those who we find lovable, and die young.’

  ‘Don’t you fear paying the price for all that one day?’

  ‘Well,’ she replied, ‘instead of pain mixed with pleasure my life will be divided in two halves: a youth which will be most certainly full of pleasure, and an unknown, uncertain old age during which I shall suffer at my ease.’

  ‘She has not been in love,’ said Aquilina, in a deep voice. ‘She has never journeyed hundreds of miles for a mere glance or refusal; her life has never hung by a hair, nor has she tried to stab one man after another to save her sovereign lord, her god. For her, all love has meant is a handsome colonel.’