Description

La Comédie humaine (The human comedy) is the promethean project, conceived by the great French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799−1850), which sought to represent contemporary society and man in their entirety through novels and short stories. Many characters appear in several of the stories that make up the larger endeavor, and events and situations echo each other from one story to the next. Presented here is La Peau de Chagrin (The magic skin), the second novel in the cycle, in the original edition published by Gosselin in 1831. It ...