The Magic Skin

By the French author, who, along with Flaubert, is generally regarded as a founding-father of realism in European fiction. His large output of works, collectively entitled The Human Comedy (La Comédie Humaine), consists of 95 finished works (stories, novels and essays) and 48 unfinished works. His stories are an attempt to comprehend and depict the realities of life in contemporary bourgeois France. They are placed in a variety of settings, with characters reappearing in multiple stories. Balzac entered the mainstream with The Magic Skin (La Peau de Chagrin) (1831), a fable-like tale delineating the excesses and vanities of contemporary life.