was followed by parodies and derivative works from other writers. Balzac's friend Théophile Gautier included a comical homage in his 1833 story collection Les Jeunes-France when, during a recreation of the feast from Balzac's novel, a character says: "This is the point at which I'm supposed to pour wine down my waistcoat ... It says so in black and white on page 171 of La Peau de chagrin ... And this is where I have to toss a 100-sou coin in the air to see whether or not there's a God." The novel established Balzac as a prominent figure in the world of French literature. Publishers fought among themselves to publish his future work, and he became a mainstay on the list of invitation for social functions around Paris. Balzac took pride in his novel's success, and declared to the editor of the journal L'Avenir that "Elle est donc le point de départ de mon ouvrage" ("This is the point of departure for my body of work"). Consistently popular even after his death, La Peau de chagrin was republished nineteen times between 1850 and 1880. When he developed his scheme for organizing all of his novels and stories into a single sequence called La Comédie humaine, Balzac placed La Peau de chagrin at the start of the section called Études philosophiques ("Philosophical Studies"). Like the other works in this category – including the similarly autobiographical Louis Lambert (1832) – it deals with philosophy and the supernatural. But it also provides a bridge to the realism of the Études des mœurs ("Study of Manners"), where the majority of his novels were located. L'Étrangère The popularity of the novel extended to Ukraine, where a baroness named Ewelina Hańska read about Balzac's novels in newspapers she received from Paris. Intrigued, she ordered copies of his work, and she read them with her cousins and friends around Volhynia. They were impressed by the understanding he showed toward women in La Physiologie du mariage, but felt that La Peau de chagrin portrayed them in a cruel and unforgiving light. Hańska wrote a letter to Balzac, signed it as L'Étrangère ("The Stranger"), and mailed it from Odessa on 28 February 1832. With no return address, Balzac was left to reply in the Gazette de France, with the hope that she would see the notice. She did not, but wrote again in November: "Your soul embraces centuries,