The ass's skin is, like ourselves, at last annihilated by "vouloir et pouvoir." With real profundity Balzac shows in this powerful representation of the chief impulse of the younger generation of his day--to drink the cup of life greedily to the very dregs--what emptiness there is in satiety, how certain it is that death lies cowering in the satisfaction of desire. Youthful, fertile, suggestive, and vaguely melancholy, like all books produced by genius before the acquirement of personal experience, _La Peau de Chagrin_ made its mark abroad as well as in France. Goethe read it during the last year of his life. Riemer (who attributes the authorship of the book to Victor Hugo) reports Goethe to have said on October 11, 1831: "I have been reading more of _La Peau de Chagrin_. It is an excellent work in the newest style, distinguished by the vigour and cleverness of its back-and-forward movement between the impossible and the painful, and by the logical manner in which the marvellous is employed in producing the most extraordinary chains of thought and events, of which, taken in detail, much that is favourable might be said." In a letter of the 17th November of the same year he writes of the same work: "This book, the production of an intellect of very high order, points to a deep-seated, incurable corruption in the French nation, which will spread steadily unless the provinces, which can neither read nor write, restore it to health again, as far as that is possible." (_Goethe-Jahrbuch_, 1880, pp. 287, 289.)
The novel contains not a little autobiography. Balzac knew from his own experience the feelings of the impecunious youth, who, descending from his garret, picks his way in his solitary pair of white silk stockings and dancing-shoes across the muddy street, in deadly fear of being splashed by a passing carriage, and consequently deprived of the sight of his beloved. But what interests us more, is the sum of inward experience which is contained in the book, and which amounts to this: Society detests misfortune and suffering, avoids them like infectious diseases, never hesitates in choosing between a misfortune and a crime. Let a misfortune be never so sublime, society will manage to belittle it, to make it ridiculous by some witty sally; it has no sympathy to spare for the fallen gladiator. To Balzac, in short, even now in his youth, society appears devoid of every higher religious or moral feeling; it shrinks from the old, the sick, and the poor; it does homage to luck, to strength, and, above all, to wealth; it tolerates no misfortune out of which it cannot by some means or other coin money.