La Peau de chagrin
La Peau de chagrin is an 1831 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac. It tells the story of a young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen that fulfills his every desire. For each wish granted, however, the skin shrinks and consumes a portion of his physical energy. Although the novel uses fantastic elements, its main focus is a realistic portrayal of the excesses of bourgeois materialism.
About La Peau de chagrin in brief
La Peau de chagrin is an 1831 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac. It tells the story of a young man who finds a magic piece of shagreen that fulfills his every desire. For each wish granted, however, the skin shrinks and consumes a portion of his physical energy. Although the novel uses fantastic elements, its main focus is a realistic portrayal of the excesses of bourgeois materialism. The book served as the catalyst for a series of letters he exchanged with a Polish baroness named Ewelina Hańska, who later became his wife. It also inspired Giselher Klebe’s opera Die tödlichen Wünsche. The novel firmly established Balzac as a writer of significance in France, and he was sought eagerly by publishers for future projects. The central theme of the novel is the conflict between desire and longevity, with the skin representing the owner’s life-force, which is depleted through every expression of will, especially when it is employed for the acquisition of power. At the time, French literary appetites for fantastic stories had been whetted by the 1829 translation of German writer E. T. Hoffmann’s Fantastic Tales of England’s Ann Radcliffe; and French author J. Jannene Mortin’s 1829 novel L’Fantastice et la Femme Guotinée. He planned a novel in the same tradition, but disliked the term ‘fantastic’ as it was used to refer to a genre in its first flush of newness.
He was replaced by Louis-Philippe, who was forced to abdicate during the July Revolution of 1830, in an attempt to distance himself from the controversial King Ancien Régime. After six controversial years, Charles X became King of France, reigning for six years for four more years before abdicating himself in 1842. He achieved a major success later the same year when he published La Physiologie du mariage, a treatise on the institution of marriage. In 1831 he wrote La Peau of Chagrin, a novel about a young woman who falls in love with a rich man, and published it under his own name. He also wrote a novel called L’Etudes philosophiques, a collection of twelve otherphilosophical tales, which was released one month later. He died in Paris in 1843. He is survived by his wife, his daughter, two sons, and a daughter-in-law, and two step-daughters. He wrote a number of short stories and essays in the magazines Revue de Paris, La Caricature, and La Mode. He published his first novel in 1829, Les Chouans, which did not succeed commercially, but it made Balzac known in literary circles. He spent the next several years writing simple potboiler novels, which he published under a variety of pseudonyms. He shared some of his income from these with his parents, but by 1828 he still owed them 50,000 francs.
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