The Magic Skin

Raphaël de Valentin, a ruined young man in Paris, is about to throw himself into the Seine when he wanders into an antique shop, where a mysterious old dealer offers him a talisman: a piece of wild ass's skin inscribed with the promise that it will grant his every wish. But each wish makes the skin shrink, and with it the length of his life. Raphaël becomes immensely rich overnight, and then, terrified, tries to stop wishing for anything at all.

Honoré de Balzac published the novel in 1831, and it made him famous; he later placed it at the head of the 'philosophical studies' of his Human Comedy, as a fable about the price of desire. The translation is by Ellen Marriage. For more in the same vein, read Father Goriot and Lost Illusions.

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was born in Tours, trained as a lawyer and failed as a printer and publisher, leaving debts that pursued him all his life. To pay them he wrote at night, fuelled by enormous quantities of coffee, producing nearly a hundred novels and stories in twenty years.

He gathered them into The Human Comedy, a vast portrait of French society with characters who reappear from book to book; Eugénie Grandet is one of its best-known parts. After eighteen years of letters he married the Polish countess Ewelina Hańska, months before his death.