and weak leadership. Writing and publication The title La Peau de chagrin first appeared in print on 9 December 1830, as a passing mention in an article Balzac wrote for La Caricature under the pseudonym Alfred Coudreux. His scrapbook includes the following note, probably written at the same time: "L'invention d'une peau qui représente la vie. Conte oriental." ("The invention of a skin that represents life. Oriental story.") One week later, he published a story fragment called "Le Dernier Napoléon" in La Caricature, under the name "Henri B...". In it, a young man loses his last Napoleon coin at a Parisian gambling house, then continues to the Pont Royal to drown himself. During this early stage, Balzac did not think much of the project. He referred to it as "a piece of thorough nonsense in the literary sense, but in which [the author] has sought to introduce certain of the situations in this hard life through which men of genius have passed before achieving anything". Before long, though, his opinion of the story improved. By January 1831 Balzac had generated enough interest in his idea to secure a contract with publishers Charles Gosselin and Urbain Canel. They agreed on 750 copies of an octavo edition, with a fee of 1,125 francs paid to the author upon receipt of the manuscript – by mid-February. Balzac delivered the novel in July. During the intervening months, however, he provided glimpses of his erratic progress. Two additional fragments appeared in May, part of a scheme to promote the book before its publication. "Une Débauche", published in the Revue des deux mondes, describes an orgiastic feast that features constant bantering and discussion from its bourgeois participants. The other fragment, "Le Suicide d'un poète", was printed in the Revue de Paris; it concerns the difficulties of a would-be poet as he tries to compensate for his lack of funds. Although the three fragments were not connected into a coherent narrative, Balzac was excerpting characters and scenes from his novel-in-progress. The novel's delayed publication was a result of Balzac's active social life. He spent many nights dining at the homes of friends, including novelist Eugène Sue and his mistress Olympe Pélissier, as well as the feminist writer George Sand and her lover Jules Sandeau. Balzac and Pélissier had a brief affair, and she became the first lover with whom he appeared in public. Eventually he removed himself