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

by Honoré de Balzac

  ‘Aha! La Rochelle,’ replied Euphrasie, ‘love is like the wind, you don’t know where it comes from. And anyway, if you had been loved by a beast, men of wit would fill you with horror.’

  ‘The Civil Code forbids bestiality,’ replied Aquilina, with some irony.

  ‘I thought you made an exception where soldiers are concerned,’ cried Euphrasie with a laugh.

  ‘How fortunate to be able to talk such nonsense!’ cried Raphael.

  ‘Fortunate!’ cried Aquilina, with a pitying, frightened smile, throwing the two friends a terrible look. ‘Oh you don’t know what it is to be condemned to please a man when you have a dead lover who lives on in your heart.’

  To contemplate the drawing-rooms at that moment was like being given a preview of Milton’s Pandemonium.* In the blue flames of the punch the faces of those still capable of drinking took on an infernal aspect. Wild dances, fuelled by an insane energy, were exciting shouts and laughter which broke out like firecrackers. With bodies, collapsing or collapsed, strewn all over the place, the boudoir and one of the small drawing-rooms resembled a battlefield. The atmosphere was heated with the wine, revelry, and talk. Drunkenness, lasciviousness, delirium, disregard for the rest of the world were in every heart, on every face, on the very floor, as was indicated by the general disorder, and their inebriating vapours, visible in the air veiled every eye. There rose, as in the luminous shaft of a sunbeam, a dusty sheen through which shapes of the most capricious kind danced and flitted in a most grotesque conflict. Here and there entwined groups of figures could be mistaken for white marbles, noble masterpieces of sculpture decorating the rooms.

  Although the two friends still retained a sort of deceptive lucidity, a last flicker, an imperfect semblance of life in their ideas and in their organs, it was impossible for them to recognize what was real in this strange fantasy world, what was possible, in the supernatural images which flashed continuously in front of their weary eyes. The sky that oppresses us in our dreams, the fiery charm that faces take on in our visions, and especially that strange sense of agility, shackled by chains, that we experience, in short all the most unaccustomed phenomena of sleep assailed them so completely that they mistook these orgiastic antics for figments of the imagination in a nightmare where movement is noiseless and cries are unheard. At that moment the trusted manservant managed, not without some difficulty, to draw his master into the antechamber and whisper in his ear:

  ‘Monsieur, all the neighbours are at their windows complaining of the noise.’

  ‘If they are afraid of the noise, let them put straw in front of their doors!’ cried Taillefer.

  Raphael suddenly burst out laughing, so unexpectedly, that his friend asked him to explain this brutal delight.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he replied. ‘First I’d have to confess you stopped me on the Quai Voltaire just as I was going to throw myself into the Seine, and you would no doubt like to know the reasons for my suicide. But if I were to add that, by a remarkable stroke of luck, the most poetic ruins of the material world had just been assembled before my eyes in a symbolic translation of human wisdom; while at present the debris of all the intellectual treasures we have ransacked at this table are summed up in these two women, the living, original pictures of human folly; and given that our profound carelessness of men and objects has served as transition to these highly coloured pictures of two systems of existence that are so diametrically opposed, would you be any the wiser? If you were not drunk you might see a philosophical treatise in all this.’

  ‘If you did not have both feet on the ravishing Aquilina whose howls bear some similarity to the roaring of a tempest about to break,’ said Émile, who was himself enjoying twisting and untwisting Euphrasie’s locks without being entirely conscious of this innocent occupation, ‘you would blush at your drunkenness and your badinage. Your two systems can be summed up in a single phrase and reduced to one idea. The trivial round and common task results in a kind of mindless wisdom, by stifling our intelligence with work; whereas life spent in the vacuum of abstraction or the abyss of the moral world leads to a kind of lunatic wisdom. In a word, suppressing feelings in order to live to a ripe old age, or dying young by accepting the martyrdom of passion, that is our destiny. Yet this fate is at odds with the temperament given us by the heartless joker to whom we owe the pattern of all created things.’

  ‘Fool!’ cried Raphael, interrupting him. ‘If you carry on summing up like that you will run into volumes! If I had claimed to formulate these two ideas properly I should have told you that man is corrupted by the exercise of reason and purified by ignorance. But that is to indict society. Yet whether we live with the wise or perish with the mad, is it not the same in the end? The great abstractor of quintessence formerly expressed these two systems in two words: CARYMARY, CARYMARA.’*

  ‘You make me doubt the power of the Almighty, for you are more stupid than he is omnipotent,’ relied Émile. ‘Our friend Rabelais summed up this idea in a word shorter than “Carymary Carymara”: it’s “perhaps”, from which Montaigne took his “What do I know?”* And these last words of moral science are no more than the exclamation of Pyrrho resting between good and evil, like Buridan’s ass* between two measures of oats. But let us leave this eternal discussion which today comes down to a yes and no. What experience did you wish to have by throwing yourself into the Seine? Were you envious of the hydraulic machine* at the Pont Notre Dame?’

  ‘Oh, if you only knew the life I’ve led!’

  ‘Ah,’ exclaimed Émile, ‘I didn’t think you were so common. The phrase is overused. Don’t you know that we all claim to suffer much more than everyone else?’

  ‘Oh!’ cried Raphael.

  ‘What a fool you are with your “Ohs!” Let me see. Do you have a disease of the soul or body that each morning makes you rein back by a contraction of the muscles the horses which will tear you apart in the evening, as was the case with Damiens?* Have you been forced to eat your dog, uncooked, without salt, in your attic room? Have your children ever said: “I’m hungry”? Have you sold your mistress’s hair to go gambling? Have you ever been to a false address to pay a false money-order, drawn on the account of a false uncle, and been afraid of arriving too late? Come on, tell me. If you were throwing yourself into the water for a woman, for an unpaid debt, or out of boredom, I’ll give up on you. Confess, don’t tell falsehoods: I don’t require historical memoirs.* Above all, be as brief as your drunkenness allows: I am a demanding reader and as near sleep as a woman saying vespers.’

  ‘Poor fool,’ said Raphael. ‘Since when is suffering not related to sensibility? When we arrive at a degree of knowledge which allows us to write a natural history of the heart, name the components and classify them into species and subspecies, families, crustaceans, fossils, saurians, microscopics, etcetera … then, my friend, it will be proved that there exist tender hearts, delicate ones, like flowers, and hearts which will break as they do, when lightly crushed, which other hearts made of mineral would not feel at all.’

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, spare us the preamble,’ said Émile, half-mocking, half-pitying, as he took Raphael’s hand.

  THE WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART

  AFTER a moment’s silence Raphael said, with a gesture of indifference:

  ‘I really don’t know if I should attribute to the wine and the punch this clear vision that allows me at present to encompass my whole life like a huge picture, in which faces, colours, shadows, lights, and half-tints are faithfully rendered. This poetical play of my imagination would not surprise me if it were not accompanied by a sort of scornfulness for my sufferings and past pleasures. Seen from a distance my life seems as if it is shrunk by some moral phenomenon. This long, slow suffering, which has lasted ten years, can today be reproduced in a few sentences where pain is nothing but an idea, and pleasure a philosophical reflection. I make judgements, instead of feeling …’

  ‘You are as boring as the preamble to a parliamentary amendment,’
cried Émile.

  ‘That’s possible,’ Raphael went on, without protesting. ‘Therefore, so as not to bore you stiff, I’ll spare you the first seventeen years of my life. Until that age I lived the life of school and college, like you and thousands of others, where non-existent evils and real pleasures are a delight to the memory; our jaded palates today crave Friday’s vegetables* again—just so long as we don’t have to eat them again! A great life, whose works now seem to us contemptible but which taught us to work …’

  ‘Come to the action,’ said Émile, half-exasperated, half-joking.

  ‘When I left school,’ said Raphael, assuming with a sweep of his hand the right to carry on, ‘my father enforced a strict discipline upon me; he made me sleep in a room adjoining his study. I went to bed at nine and got up at five. He wanted me to be a serious student of the law. I continued to go to college and at the same time I was apprenticed to a solicitor, but the rules of time and space were so rigorously applied to my movements, to my work, and at dinner my father required from me such a detailed account of my …’

  ‘What concern is that of mine?’ said Émile.

  ‘Oh go to the devil,’ replied Raphael. ‘How can you imagine what I felt like if I don’t tell you about the invisible factors that influenced my state of mind, caused me to be fearful and left me for a long time in a condition of primitive, youthful innocence? So … until I was twenty-one I was constrained by a despotic rule as harsh as that in a monastery. To show you what I went through, perhaps all I need to do is paint the portrait of my father: a tall, gaunt, thin man of few words, hatchet-faced and with a paper-white complexion, a man as fussy as an old maid, pernickety as a head clerk. His paternal authority hovered over my boyish mischief and my joie de vivre, and locked them up in a leaden dome. If I wanted to show him any loving or affectionate feelings, he treated me as if I were a child about to say something silly. I feared him much more than we used to fear our schoolmasters; as far as he was concerned I was always eight years old. I can see him now in my mind’s eye. In his maroon frock-coat, holding himself straight as an Easter candle, he looked like a soused herring wrapped in the reddish cover of a pamphlet. Nevertheless I loved my father, who was fundamentally a just man. Perhaps we don’t hate strictness when it is justified by a strong character, strict morals, and a judicious dose of goodness.

  ‘Though my father never left me on my own, and until the age of twenty did not give me ten francs to spend—ten francs, for God’s sake, ten wicked francs, an enormous sum for which I longed in vain, dreaming of ineffable delights—he did at least try to organize some entertainment for me. After promising me a treat for several months he took me to the Bouffons, to a concert, to a ball where I hoped to meet a mistress. A mistress! For me that meant independence. But embarrassed and shy, not conversant with the etiquette of salons and not knowing anyone there, I came back with my heart still intact and just as full of longing as ever. Then the next morning, reined in like a cavalry horse by my father, I would return to the solicitor, the law, or the courts. To try to stray from the straight and narrow path traced out for me by my father would have been to expose myself to his anger; the first time I stepped out of line he had threatened to put me on board a ship for the Antilles, as a cabin boy. So I trembled with fear whenever I dared venture forth to a party for an hour or two.

  ‘Imagine the most roving of imaginations, the most susceptible of hearts, the tenderest of souls, the most poetic turn of mind, in the constant presence of the stoniest, most quick-tempered, coldest of characters. In short, marry a young girl to a skeleton and you will have some understanding of my life, from which I can only sketch out for you these curious scenes. My plans to escape melted away when my father appeared, despair was calmed by sleep, desires suppressed, dark melancholia which only music could dispel. I sighed out my sorrow in melodies. Beethoven or Mozart were often my intimate companions. Today I smile when I remember all the prejudices which troubled my conscience at that time of innocence and virtue. Had I set foot in a restaurant, I should have believed myself a ruined creature; my imagination led me to view cafés as dens of vice where men lost their honour and put their fortune on the line. As for risking money at the gambling table, you had to have some in the first place. Oh, even if it sends you to sleep, I must tell you about one of the most disturbing joys of my life, one of those with talons that dig themselves into your heart like a brand into the shoulder of a convict.*

  ‘I was at a ball at the Duke of Navarreins’, my father’s cousin. But so that you can fully appreciate my situation, I have to tell you that I was wearing a worn-out suit, shoes that didn’t fit properly, a coachman’s necktie, and second-hand gloves. I placed myself in a corner in order to be able to eat ices and look at the pretty women in comfort. My father saw me. For some unknown reason—and this trusting behaviour greatly astonished me—he gave me his purse and his keys to look after. Ten steps away from me some men were playing cards. I heard the chink of gold. I was twenty, and wished to spend a whole day, as you do at that age, enjoying myself. It was a libertinage of spirit such as you would not find in the caprices of a courtesan or in the thoughts of a young girl. For a year I had been dreaming of being smartly dressed, driving in a carriage with a beautiful woman by my side, playing the great lord, dining at Véry’s, going to the theatre every evening, planning not to return to my father’s house until the following day, when I should present him with an intrigue more complicated than you find in The Marriage of Figaro* and which he would have found it impossible to unravel. I had reckoned all these pleasures would cost fifty crowns. Was I not still as charmingly innocent as a boy playing truant? So I went into a side-room and, alone, with eager eyes and trembling fingers, I counted out my father’s money: a hundred crowns! This sum of money caused the allure of an escapade to dance before my eyes, like Macbeth’s witches around the cauldron, except that they were enticing, pulsating, exciting! I turned into a determined rogue. Without paying attention to either the ringing in my ears or the rapid beating of my heart, I took two twenty-franc coins—and I can still see them today! Their dates were rubbed out and the face of Bonaparte grimaced up at me. I put the purse back in my pocket and returned to the gaming table, holding the two gold coins in my damp palm, and stalked around the players like a hawk above a chicken-run. Prey to an inexpressible anguish, I threw a quick, keen glance around me. I placed my bet, since I was certain of not being recognized by anyone, along with that of a jolly little fat man, on whose head I piled more prayers and wishes than are offered up at sea in the middle of three thunderstorms. Then, with an instinct for wickedness or a Machiavellian cunning surprising at my age, I went and stood near the door, looking through into the rooms without seeing a thing. My soul and my eyes were hovering around that fateful baize.

  ‘From that evening I date my first observation of human physiology, to which I owe the deep understanding that has allowed me to grasp some of the mysteries of our dual nature. I stood with my back turned to the table on which my future happiness was being decided, a happiness all the more profound perhaps because it was criminal. Between the two players and myself there was a crowd of men in four or five rows, talking. The humming of voices prevented anyone from distinguishing the chink of the gold, which mingled with the sounds of the orchestra. In spite of all these obstacles, the passions being endowed with the power of annihilating time and space, I could clearly hear the voices of the two players; I knew the score, I could tell which one had turned up the king, just as if I could see the cards. At ten paces I blenched at the way the game went up and down. My father suddenly walked past in front of me and I understood the words of the Bible:* “The spirit of God passed before his face!” I had won. Through the whirlpool of men who gravitated around the card-players, I ran to the table, slipping in between them like an eel escaping through the torn mesh in a net. Joy filled my being that had been in agony. I was like a condemned man who, walking to the gallows, meets the king. As it happened, a man wearing medals
claimed he was missing forty francs. Suspicious eyes were cast in my direction. I went white and beads of sweat lined my brow. The crime of stealing from my father seemed to be avenged. The nice little fat man then said, in a voice that was certainly that of an angel: “All these gentlemen placed a bet,” and he paid the forty francs. I lifted my head and threw a triumphant look at the players. After putting back in my father’s purse the gold I had taken out, I left what I had won with this worthy and honest man, who carried on winning. As soon as I saw I was in possession of a hundred and sixty francs, I wrapped them up in my handkerchief so that they could not drop out or make a noise during our return home, and I did not place any further bets.

  ‘“What were you doing at the gaming table?” said my father as we got into the carriage.

  ‘“Watching,” I replied, terrified.

  ‘“But,” my father went on, “it would not have been surprising if you had been obliged, through self-esteem, to put some money on the table. In the eyes of the world you appear to be old enough to do such foolish things. So I would forgive you, Raphael, if you had made use of my purse …”

  ‘I did not answer. When we got home I gave my father back his keys and his money. As he went into his room, he emptied the purse out on to the mantelpiece, counted the gold, turned to me with rather a gracious air, and said, separating each phrase with a long and significant pause:

  ‘“My son, soon you will be twenty. I am pleased with you. You will be needing an allowance, if only to teach you how to economize, to learn about practical things. From tonight I shall give you a hundred francs a month. You can spend your money how you please. This is the first quarter’s supply for the year,” he added, fingering the heap of gold coins, as if to make sure of the amount.