This volume contains a facsimile reprint of "The Magic Skin," by Honore de Balzac (1799-1850). Born Honore Balzac, he was a nineteenth-century French novelist and playwright. His work, much of which is a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled "La Comédie humaine." Balzac is generally regarded as a founding father of realism in European literature, and many of his works have been mimicked for the past hundred years.