Book of a Lifetime: The Wild Ass’s Skin by Honoré de Balzac

From The Independent archive: Marina Warner wraps herself in the French novelist’s Faustian fairytale that shows the true costs of possessing – and being possessed by – great wealth and power

A daguerreotype of Honoré de Balzac next to a 1961 Everyman edition of The Wild Ass’s Skin (Nadar/Getty Images/Everyman)

Bent on killing himself by throwing himself into the Seine after losing his shirt at the gaming tables, Raphael de Valentin, the romanticised, doomed young hero of Balzac’s early 1831 novel, La Peau de chagrin (translated as The Magic Skin or The Wild Ass’s Skin), turns into an antiques shop to while away the hours till darkness (when he can be sure not to be rescued). There he finds himself in an emporium of civilisation’s treasures, from all over the world and in every marvellous material, executed to the highest degree of human art.

Eventually, the eerie, wizened keeper appears and shows Valentin the magic skin which gives the novel its title. It’s the hide of a wild ass and, like the ring of the Nibelungen, has the power to grant its owner every wish. But in return it will take possession of Valentin, body and soul. Every time it performs, it will shrink – and Valentin’s life will shorten in accord.

The pun in Balzac’s title can’t be captured in translation: shagreen in English – green shark’s skin – isn’t freighted like French chagrin, sorrow. The scene of the fatal bargain is pure phantasmagoria: among the gleaming heaps of stuff, the decrepit antiquarian lifts his lamp so that Valentin can read the inscription on the skin. It’s in Arabic, a promise and a warning. Valentin enthusiastically accepts the fatal Faustian pact.