The Magic Skin

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THE MAGIC SKIN

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC


Translated by
Ellen Marriage



To Monsieur Savary, Member of Le Academie des Sciences.



[omitted: a drawing representing the serpentine
path made by the tip of a stick when flourished.]
STERNE--Tristram Shandy, ch. cccxxii.



I

THE TALISMAN

Towards the end of the month of October 1829 a young man entered the
Palais-Royal just as the gaming-houses opened, agreeably to the law
which protects a passion by its very nature easily excisable. He
mounted the staircase of one of the gambling hells distinguished by
the number 36, without too much deliberation.

"Your hat, sir, if you please?" a thin, querulous voice called out. A
little old man, crouching in the darkness behind a railing, suddenly
rose and exhibited his features, carved after a mean design.

As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your hat at the
outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation? Or by exacting
some pledge or other, is not an infernal compact implied? Is it done
to compel you to preserve a respectful demeanor towards those who are
about to gain money of you? Or must the detective, who squats in our
social sewers, know the name of your hatter, or your own, if you
happen to have written it on the lining inside? Or, after all, is the
measurement of your skull required for the compilation of statistics
as to the cerebral capacity of gamblers? The executive is absolutely
silent on this point. But be sure of this, that though you have
scarcely taken a step towards the tables, your hat no more belongs to
you now than you belong to yourself. Play possesses you, your fortune,
your cap, your cane, your cloak.

As you go out, it will be made clear to you, by a savage irony, that
Play has yet spared you something, since your property is returned.
For all that, if you bring a new hat with you, you will have to pay
for the knowledge that a special costume is needed for a gambler.

The evident astonishment with which the young man took a numbered
tally in exchange for his hat, which was fortunately somewhat rubbed
at the brim, showed clearly enough that his mind was yet untainted;
and the little old man, who had wallowed from his youth up in the
furious pleasures of a gambler's life, cast a dull, indifferent glance
over him, in which a philosopher might have seen wretchedness lying in
the hospital, the vagrant lives of ruined folk, inquests on numberless
suicides, life-long penal servitude and transportations to
Guazacoalco.

His pallid, lengthy visage appeared like a haggard embodiment of the
passion reduced to its simplest terms. There were traces of past
anguish in its wrinkles. He supported life on the glutinous soups at
Darcet's, and gambled away his meagre earnings day by day. Like some
old hackney which takes no heed of the strokes of the whip, nothing
could move him now. The stifled groans of ruined players, as they
passed out, their mute imprecations, their stupefied faces, found him
impassive. He was the spirit of Play incarnate. If the young man had
noticed this sorry Cerberus, perhaps he would have said, "There is
only a pack of cards in that heart of his."

The stranger did not heed this warning writ in flesh and blood, put
here, no doubt, by Providence, who has set loathing on the threshold
of all evil haunts. He walked boldly into the saloon, where the rattle
of coin brought his senses under the dazzling spell of an agony of
greed. Most likely he had been drawn thither by that most convincing
of Jean Jacques' eloquent periods, which expresses, I think, this
melancholy thought, "Yes, I can imagine that a man may take to
gambling when he sees only his last shilling between him and death."

There is an illusion about a gambling saloon at night as vulgar as
that of a bloodthirsty drama, and just as effective. The rooms are
filled with players and onlookers, with poverty-stricken age, which
drags itself thither in search of stimulation, with excited faces, and
revels that began in wine, to end shortly in the Seine. The passion is
there in full measure, but the great number of the actors prevents you
from seeing the gambling-demon face to face. The evening is a harmony
or chorus in which all take part, to which each instrument in the
orchestra contributes his share. You would see there plenty of
respectable people who have come in search of diversion, for which
they pay as they pay for the pleasures of the theatre, or of gluttony,
or they come hither as to some garret where they cheapen poignant
regrets for three months to come.

Do you understand all the force and frenzy in a soul which impatiently
waits for the opening of a gambling hell? Between the daylight gambler
and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between
a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window.
Only with morning comes the real throb of the passion and the craving
in its stark horror. Then you can admire the real gambler, who has
neither eaten, slept, thought, nor lived, he has so smarted under the
scourge of his martingale, so suffered on the rack of his desire for a
coup of _trente-et-quarante_. At that accursed hour you encounter eyes
whose calmness terrifies you, faces that fascinate, glances that seem
as if they had power to turn the cards over and consume them. The
grandest hours of a gambling saloon are not the opening ones. If Spain
has bull-fights, and Rome once had her gladiators, Paris waxes proud
of her Palais-Royal, where the inevitable _roulettes_ cause blood to
flow in streams, and the public can have the pleasure of watching
without fear of their feet slipping in it.

Take a quiet peep at the arena. How bare it looks! The paper on the
walls is greasy to the height of your head, there is nothing to bring
one reviving thought. There is not so much as a nail for the
convenience of suicides. The floor is worn and dirty. An oblong table
stands in the middle of the room, the tablecloth is worn by the
friction of gold, but the straw-bottomed chairs about it indicate an
odd indifference to luxury in the men who will lose their lives here
in the quest of the fortune that is to put luxury within their reach.

This contradiction in humanity is seen wherever the soul reacts
powerfully upon itself. The gallant would clothe his mistress in
silks, would deck her out in soft Eastern fabrics, though he and she
must lie on a truckle-bed. The ambitious dreamer sees himself at the
summit of power, while he slavishly prostrates himself in the mire.
The tradesman stagnates in his damp, unhealthy shop, while he builds a
great mansion for his son to inherit prematurely, only to be ejected
from it by law proceedings at his own brother's instance.

After all, is there a less pleasing thing in the world than a house of
pleasure? Singular question! Man is always at strife with himself. His
present woes give the lie to his hopes; yet he looks to a future which
is not his, to indemnify him for these present sufferings; setting
upon all his actions the seal of inconsequence and of the weakness of
his nature. We have nothing here below in full measure but misfortune.

There were several gamblers in the room already when the young man
entered. Three bald-headed seniors were lounging round the green
table. Imperturbable as diplomatists, those plaster-cast faces of
theirs betokened blunted sensibilities, and hearts which had long
forgotten how to throb, even when a woman's dowry was the stake. A
young Italian, olive-hued and dark-haired, sat at one end, with his
elbows on the table, seeming to listen to the presentiments of luck
that dictate a gambler's "Yes" or "No." The glow of fire and gold was
on that southern face. Some seven or eight onlookers stood by way of
an audience, awaiting a drama composed of the strokes of chance, the
faces of the actors, the circulation of coin, and the motion of the
croupier's rake, much as a silent, motionless crowd watches the
headsman in the Place de Greve. A tall, thin man, in a threadbare
coat, held a card in one hand, and a pin in the other, to mark the
numbers of Red or Black. He seemed a modern Tantalus, with all the
pleasures of his epoch at his lips, a hoardless miser drawing in
imaginary gains, a sane species of lunatic who consoles himself in his
misery by chimerical dreams, a man who touches peril and vice as a
young priest handles the unconsecrated wafer in the white mass.

One or two experts at the game, shrewd speculators, had placed
themselves opposite the bank, like old convicts who have lost all fear
of the hulks; they meant to try two or three coups, and then to depart
at once with the expected gains, on which they lived. Two elderly
waiters dawdled about with their arms folded, looking from time to
time into the garden from the windows, as if to show their
insignificant faces as a sign to passers-by.

The croupier and banker threw a ghastly and withering glance at the
punters, and cried, in a sharp voice, "Make your game!" as the young
man came in. The silence seemed to grow deeper as all heads turned
curiously towards the new arrival. Who would have thought it? The
jaded elders, the fossilized waiters, the onlookers, the fanatical
Italian himself, felt an indefinable dread at sight of the stranger.
Is he not wretched indeed who can excite pity here? Must he not be
very helpless to receive sympathy, ghastly in appearance to raise a
shudder in these places, where pain utters no cry, where wretchedness
looks gay, and despair is decorous? Such thoughts as these produced a
new emotion in these torpid hearts as the young man entered. Were not
executioners known to shed tears over the fair-haired, girlish heads
that had to fall at the bidding of the Revolution?

The gamblers saw at a glance a dreadful mystery in the novice's face.
His young features were stamped with a melancholy grace, his looks
told of unsuccess and many blighted hopes. The dull apathy of the
suicide had made his forehead so deadly pale, a bitter smile carved
faint lines about the corners of his mouth, and there was an
abandonment about him that was painful to see. Some sort of demon
sparkled in the depths of his eye, which drooped, wearied perhaps with
pleasure. Could it have been dissipation that had set its foul mark on
the proud face, once pure and bright, and now brought low? Any doctor
seeing the yellow circles about his eyelids, and the color in his
cheeks, would have set them down to some affection of the heart or
lungs, while poets would have attributed them to the havoc brought by
the search for knowledge and to night-vigils by the student's lamp.

But a complaint more fatal than any disease, a disease more merciless
than genius or study, had drawn this young face, and had wrung a heart
which dissipation, study, and sickness had scarcely disturbed. When a
notorious criminal is taken to the convict's prison, the prisoners
welcome him respectfully, and these evil spirits in human shape,
experienced in torments, bowed before an unheard-of anguish. By the
depth of the wound which met their eyes, they recognized a prince
among them, by the majesty of his unspoken irony, by the refined
wretchedness of his garb. The frock-coat that he wore was well cut,
but his cravat was on terms so intimate with his waistcoat that no one
could suspect him of underlinen. His hands, shapely as a woman's were
not perfectly clean; for two days past indeed he had ceased to wear
gloves. If the very croupier and the waiters shuddered, it was because
some traces of the spell of innocence yet hung about his meagre,
delicately-shaped form, and his scanty fair hair in its natural curls.

He looked only about twenty-five years of age, and any trace of vice
in his face seemed to be there by accident. A young constitution still
resisted the inroads of lubricity. Darkness and light, annihilation
and existence, seemed to struggle in him, with effects of mingled
beauty and terror. There he stood like some erring angel that has lost
his radiance; and these emeritus-professors of vice and shame were
ready to bid the novice depart, even as some toothless crone might be
seized with pity for a beautiful girl who offers herself up to infamy.

The young man went straight up to the table, and, as he stood there,
flung down a piece of gold which he held in his hand, without
deliberation. It rolled on to the Black; then, as strong natures can,
he looked calmly, if anxiously, at the croupier, as if he held useless
subterfuges in scorn.

The interest this coup awakened was so great that the old gamesters
laid nothing upon it; only the Italian, inspired by a gambler's
enthusiasm, smiled suddenly at some thought, and punted his heap of
coin against the stranger's stake.

The banker forgot to pronounce the phrases that use and wont have
reduced to an inarticulate cry--"Make your game. . . . The game is
made. . . . Bets are closed." The croupier spread out the cards, and
seemed to wish luck to the newcomer, indifferent as he was to the
losses or gains of those who took part in these sombre pleasures.
Every bystander thought he saw a drama, the closing scene of a noble
life, in the fortunes of that bit of gold; and eagerly fixed his eyes
on the prophetic cards; but however closely they watched the young
man, they could discover not the least sign of feeling on his cool but
restless face.

"Even! red wins," said the croupier officially. A dumb sort of rattle
came from the Italian's throat when he saw the folded notes that the
banker showered upon him, one after another. The young man only
understood his calamity when the croupiers's rake was extended to
sweep away his last napoleon. The ivory touched the coin with a little
click, as it swept it with the speed of an arrow into the heap of gold
before the bank. The stranger turned pale at the lips, and softly shut
his eyes, but he unclosed them again at once, and the red color
returned as he affected the airs of an Englishman, to whom life can
offer no new sensation, and disappeared without the glance full of
entreaty for compassion that a desperate gamester will often give the
bystanders. How much can happen in a second's space; how many things
depend on a throw of the die!

"That was his last cartridge, of course," said the croupier, smiling
after a moment's silence, during which he picked up the coin between
his finger and thumb and held it up.

"He is a cracked brain that will go and drown himself," said a
frequenter of the place. He looked round about at the other players,
who all knew each other.

"Bah!" said a waiter, as he took a pinch of snuff.

"If we had but followed _his_ example," said an old gamester to the
others, as he pointed out the Italian.

Everybody looked at the lucky player, whose hands shook as he counted
his bank-notes.

"A voice seemed to whisper to me," he said. "The luck is sure to go
against that young man's despair."

"He is a new hand," said the banker, "or he would have divided his
money into three parts to give himself more chance."

The young man went out without asking for his hat; but the old
watch-dog, who had noted its shabby condition, returned it to him
without a word. The gambler mechanically gave up the tally, and went
downstairs whistling _Di tanti Palpiti_ so feebly, that he himself
scarcely heard the delicious notes.

He found himself immediately under the arcades of the Palais-Royal,
reached the Rue Saint Honore, took the direction of the Tuileries, and
crossed the gardens with an undecided step. He walked as if he were in
some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not see, hearing through all
the voices of the crowd one voice alone--the voice of Death. He was
lost in the thoughts that benumbed him at last, like the criminals who
used to be taken in carts from the Palais de Justice to the Place de
Greve, where the scaffold awaited them reddened with all the blood
spilt here since 1793.

There is something great and terrible about suicide. Most people's
downfalls are not dangerous; they are like children who have not far
to fall, and cannot injure themselves; but when a great nature is
dashed down, he is bound to fall from a height. He must have been
raised almost to the skies; he has caught glimpses of some heaven
beyond his reach. Vehement must the storms be which compel a soul to
seek for peace from the trigger of a pistol.

How much young power starves and pines away in a garret for want of a
friend, for lack of a woman's consolation, in the midst of millions of
fellow-creatures, in the presence of a listless crowd that is burdened
by its wealth! When one remembers all this, suicide looms large.
Between a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a
young man to Paris, God only knows what may intervene; what contending
ideas have striven within the soul; what poems have been set aside;
what moans and what despair have been repressed; what abortive
masterpieces and vain endeavors! Every suicide is an awful poem of
sorrow. Where will you find a work of genius floating above the seas
of literature that can compare with this paragraph:

"Yesterday, at four o'clock, a young woman threw herself into the
Seine from the Pont des Arts."

Dramas and romances pale before this concise Parisian phrase; so must
even that old frontispiece, _The Lamentations of the glorious king of
Kaernavan, put in prison by his children_, the sole remaining fragment
of a lost work that drew tears from Sterne at the bare perusal--the
same Sterne who deserted his own wife and family.

The stranger was beset with such thoughts as these, which passed in
fragments through his mind, like tattered flags fluttering above the
combat. If he set aside for a moment the burdens of consciousness and
of memory, to watch the flower heads gently swayed by the breeze among
the green thickets, a revulsion came over him, life struggled against
the oppressive thought of suicide, and his eyes rose to the sky: gray
clouds, melancholy gusts of the wind, the stormy atmosphere, all
decreed that he should die.

He bent his way toward the Pont Royal, musing over the last fancies of
others who had gone before him. He smiled to himself as he remembered
that Lord Castlereagh had satisfied the humblest of our needs before
he cut his throat, and that the academician Auger had sought for his
snuff-box as he went to his death. He analyzed these extravagances,
and even examined himself; for as he stood aside against the parapet
to allow a porter to pass, his coat had been whitened somewhat by the
contact, and he carefully brushed the dust from his sleeve, to his own
surprise. He reached the middle of the arch, and looked forebodingly
at the water.

"Wretched weather for drowning yourself," said a ragged old woman, who
grinned at him; "isn't the Seine cold and dirty?"

His answer was a ready smile, which showed the frenzied nature of his
courage; then he shivered all at once as he saw at a distance, by the
door of the Tuileries, a shed with an inscription above it in letters
twelve inches high: THE ROYAL HUMANE SOCIETY'S APPARATUS.

A vision of M. Dacheux rose before him, equipped by his philanthropy,
calling out and setting in motion the too efficacious oars which break
the heads of drowning men, if unluckily they should rise to the
surface; he saw a curious crowd collecting, running for a doctor,
preparing fumigations, he read the maundering paragraph in the papers,
put between notes on a festivity and on the smiles of a ballet-dancer;
he heard the francs counted down by the prefect of police to the
watermen. As a corpse, he was worth fifteen francs; but now while he
lived he was only a man of talent without patrons, without friends,
without a mattress to lie on, or any one to speak a word for him--a
perfect social cipher, useless to a State which gave itself no trouble
about him.

A death in broad daylight seemed degrading to him; he made up his mind
to die at night so as to bequeath an unrecognizable corpse to a world
which had disregarded the greatness of life. He began his wanderings
again, turning towards the Quai Voltaire, imitating the lagging gait
of an idler seeking to kill time. As he came down the steps at the end
of the bridge, his notice was attracted by the second-hand books
displayed on the parapet, and he was on the point of bargaining for
some. He smiled, thrust his hands philosophically into his pockets,
and fell to strolling on again with a proud disdain in his manner,
when he heard to his surprise some coin rattling fantastically in his
pocket.

A smile of hope lit his face, and slid from his lips over his
features, over his brow, and brought a joyful light to his eyes and
his dark cheeks. It was a spark of happiness like one of the red dots
that flit over the remains of a burnt scrap of paper; but as it is
with the black ashes, so it was with his face, it became dull again
when the stranger quickly drew out his hand and perceived three
pennies. "Ah, kind gentleman! _carita_, _carita_; for the love of St.
Catherine! only a halfpenny to buy some bread!"

A little chimney sweeper, with puffed cheeks, all black with soot, and
clad in tatters, held out his hand to beg for the man's last pence.

Two paces from the little Savoyard stood an old _pauvre honteux_, sickly
and feeble, in wretched garments of ragged druggeting, who asked in a
thick, muffled voice:

"Anything you like to give, monsieur; I will pray to God for
you . . ."

But the young man turned his eyes on him, and the old beggar stopped
without another word, discerning in that mournful face an abandonment
of wretchedness more bitter than his own.

"_La carita_! _la carita_!"

The stranger threw the coins to the old man and the child, left the
footway, and turned towards the houses; the harrowing sight of the
Seine fretted him beyond endurance.

"May God lengthen your days!" cried the two beggars.

As he reached the shop window of a print-seller, this man on the brink
of death met a young woman alighting from a showy carriage. He looked
in delight at her prettiness, at the pale face appropriately framed by
the satin of her fashionable bonnet. Her slender form and graceful
movements entranced him. Her skirt had been slightly raised as she
stepped to the pavement, disclosing a daintily fitting white stocking
over the delicate outlines beneath. The young lady went into the shop,
purchased albums and sets of lithographs; giving several gold coins
for them, which glittered and rang upon the counter. The young man,
seemingly occupied with the prints in the window, fixed upon the fair
stranger a gaze as eager as man can give, to receive in exchange an
indifferent glance, such as lights by accident on a passer-by. For him
it was a leave-taking of love and of woman; but his final and
strenuous questioning glance was neither understood nor felt by the
slight-natured woman there; her color did not rise, her eyes did not
droop. What was it to her? one more piece of adulation, yet another
sigh only prompted the delightful thought at night, "I looked rather
well to-day."

The young man quickly turned to another picture, and only left it when
she returned to her carriage. The horses started off, the final vision
of luxury and refinement went under an eclipse, just as that life of
his would soon do also. Slowly and sadly he followed the line of the
shops, listlessly examining the specimens on view. When the shops came
to an end, he reviewed the Louvre, the Institute, the towers of Notre
Dame, of the Palais, the Pont des Arts; all these public monuments
seemed to have taken their tone from the heavy gray sky.

Fitful gleams of light gave a foreboding look to Paris; like a pretty
woman, the city has mysterious fits of ugliness or beauty. So the
outer world seemed to be in a plot to steep this man about to die in a
painful trance. A prey to the maleficent power which acts relaxingly
upon us by the fluid circulating through our nerves, his whole frame
seemed gradually to experience a dissolving process. He felt the
anguish of these throes passing through him in waves, and the houses
and the crowd seemed to surge to and fro in a mist before his eyes. He
tried to escape the agitation wrought in his mind by the revulsions of
his physical nature, and went toward the shop of a dealer in
antiquities, thinking to give a treat to his senses, and to spend the
interval till nightfall in bargaining over curiosities.

He sought, one might say, to regain courage and to find a stimulant,
like a criminal who doubts his power to reach the scaffold. The
consciousness of approaching death gave him, for the time being, the
intrepidity of a duchess with a couple of lovers, so that he entered
the place with an abstracted look, while his lips displayed a set
smile like a drunkard's. Had not life, or rather had not death,
intoxicated him? Dizziness soon overcame him again. Things appeared to
him in strange colors, or as making slight movements; his irregular
pulse was no doubt the cause; the blood that sometimes rushed like a
burning torrent through his veins, and sometimes lay torpid and
stagnant as tepid water. He merely asked leave to see if the shop
contained any curiosities which he required.