oned parchment on which contracts were signed with the devil.
M. Valentin, its possessor, is a Faust of the boulevards; but our
prejudices are softened by the circumstance that the _peau de chagrin_
has a false air of scientific authenticity. It is discovered by a
gentleman who spends a spare half-hour before committing suicide in an
old curiosity shop, which occupies a sort of middle standing-ground
between a wizard's laboratory and the ordinary Wardour Street shop.
There is no question of signing with one's blood, but simply of
accepting a curious substance with the property--rather a startling one,
it is true--that its area diminishes in proportion to the amount of
wishes gratified, and vanishes with the death of the possessor. The
steady flesh-and-blood men of science treat it just as we feel certain
that they would do. After smashing a hydraulic press in the attempt to
compress it, and exhausting the power of chemical agents, they agree to
make a joke of it. It is not so much more wonderful than some of those
modern miracles, which leave us to hesitate between the two incredible
alternatives that men of science are fallible, or that mankind in
general, like Sir Walter Scott's grandmother, are 'awfu' leears.' Every
effort is made to reduce the strain upon our credulity to that moderate
degree of intensity which may fairly be required from the reader of a
wild fiction. When the first characteristic wish of the
proprietor--namely, that he may be indulged in a frantic orgie--has been
gratified without any apparent intervention of the supernatural, we are
left just in that proper equilibrium between scepticism and credulity
which is the right mental attitude in presence of a marvellous story.
Balzac, it is true, seems rather to flag in continuing his narrative.
The symbolical meaning begins to part company with the facts. Stories of
this kind require the congenial atmosphere of an ideal world, and the
effort of interpreting such a poetical legend into terms of ordinary
life is perhaps too great for the powers of any literary artist. At any
rate M. Valentin drops after a time from the level of Faust to become
the hero of a rather commonplace Parisian story. The opening scenes,
however, are an admirable specimen of the skill by which our
irrepressible scepticism may be hindered from intruding into a sphere
where it is out of place; or rather--for one can hardly speak of belief
in such a connection--of the skill by which the