ABSTRACT
Honore de Balzac's preface to the first edition of La Peau de chagrin aims to dissolve the misunderstanding caused by the anonymous publication of Physiologie du mariage concerning the identity of its author. E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose impact in France developed fast into a true vogue, provides Balzac with an alternative to the Gothic extravagances on which he drew in his youthful novels. Balzac situates irony and the sympathetic imagination within the context of his theory of energy; and this very contextualization reveals the function of this inherited image for the realist author. If the antiquary is a capitalist only on a metaphoric level, the metaphor becomes literal in the case of Gobseck the miser, and in his portrayal as, in Karl Marx's words, 'a capitalist gone mad'. Balzac describes Gobseck as a capitalist whose aim is not accumulation but the circulation of capital. Vautrin, like a true capitalist, treats his living speculations instrumentally.
