Complete and unabridged, with 40 full-page plates by Honoré Daumier, Eugène Delacroix and Édouard Manet. A ruined young man about to drown himself steps into a curiosity shop and is offered a piece of shagreen that grants every wish — and shrinks with each one, dragging his life in with it. Balzac wrote it at thirty-two and made his name; he worked nights on fifty cups of coffee a day and died at fifty-one, which gives the parable an edge he did not intend. Forty plates of painting from 1794 to 1880, among them Daumier and Courbet, catch the fable's darker moods in night bridges, street musicians and the Erlking's ride.