Excerpt from The Wild Ass's Skin, And, the Quest of the Absolute It has been observed, in no carping or hypercritical spirit, that passages of the book are somewhat high-flown in style. The fact is that Balzac had rather a tendency to this style, and only outgrew it, if he ever did outgrow it, by dint of its greater and greater unfitness for his chosen subjects. Here, if anywhere, it was excusable, just as here, if anywhere, the gigantic element in his genius found scope and play. There had been some inventories in literature before, and there have been many more since the description of the curiosity shop; but none, if we except the brief Shakespearian perfec tion of that in Clarence's dream, and none at all in a heaped and minute style, can approach this. The thing is night marish - you see the magots and the armor, the pictures and the statues, and among them all the sinister piece of sha green, with the inefi'aceable letters stamped on it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.