It would seem as if the opening of his authorial vein in this book had freed him for a long time from bad blood. His conception of life is henceforward a more elevated one, or rather, it divides itself into two conceptions, a serious and a sportive. The serious and the sensually cynic philosophy of human life, which in _La Physiologie du Mariage_ blent into one repulsive whole, now separate, displaying themselves in the form of tragedy and satyric comedy. In 1831 he both writes his first philosophic novel, _La Peau de Chagrin_ (which laid the foundation of his fame as an author) and begins, with _La belle Impéria_, the long series of the _Contes drôlatiques_, a collection of tales in the freest Renaissance style, reminiscent of Queen Marguerite and Brantôme in matter and of Rabelais in language. Told in the language of our own day, they would be both disgusting and dull; but the grand, simple, old-fashioned prose style, which lends more nobility to the subject than even the severest metrical forms, metamorphoses these deifications of the flesh into genuine works of art, burlesque as the tales told by one of those worldly-minded, handy, jovial monks who swarm in the legendary lore of every country. In one of the masterly prologues to this collection of tales the author tells how, having lost his patrimony in his youth, and being reduced to the direst poverty, he cried to heaven, like the woodcutter in the fable who had lost his axe, in hopes that the gods might take pity on him and give him another axe. What Mercury threw down to him was an ink-horn, on which were engraved the three letters AVE. He stood turning the heavenly gift round and round in his hands until he caught sight of the letters backwards, EVA. What was Eva? What but all women in one? A heavenly voice had called to him: "Think of woman; she will heal thy woes and fill thy pockets; she is thy fortune, thy property. Ave, I salute thee! Eva, O woman!" Which, being interpreted, meant that what he was now to attempt was to win a smile from the unprejudiced reader by mad and merry love stories. And he succeeded. In none of his other writings did his style attain such brilliance and vigour; Rubens's colouring is not bolder nor richer, and Rubens hardly equals this herculean wantonness with his fauns and drunken bacchantes. But it is difficult to find ten successive lines that are fit for quotation or reading aloud.