Set in early 19th-century Paris, La Peau de Chagrin (1831) by Honoré de Balzac tells the story of a young man, Raphaël de Valentin, who makes a Faustian pact to fulfil his excessive bourgeois desires at the cost of his soul. The protagonist is given a piece of shagreen leather that will provide him with his every request, and as forewarned, it diminishes along with his health and sanity as he wishes himself to death. The novel, a meditation on consumption and morality, seems like…
read more »