The Wild Ass's Skin

E308183

The Wild Ass's Skin is an 1831 philosophical novel by Honoré de Balzac that explores themes of desire, power, and self-destruction through a magical shrinking talisman that grants wishes at the cost of the owner's life.

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All labels observed (3)

Label Occurrences
Donkey Skin 1
The Wild Ass's Skin canonical 1
The Wild Ass’s Skin 1

Statements (45)

Predicate Object
instanceOf French novel
fantastic literature
novel
philosophical novel
author Honoré de Balzac
centralObject magical talisman
wild ass's skin
countryOfOrigin France
explores the cost of fulfilled wishes
the relationship between materialism and mortality
firstPublicationFormat book
genre fantasy fiction
philosophical fiction
hasAdaptation film adaptations
theatrical adaptations
hasCharacter Antoine
Foedora
Jonathan
Pauline
includedIn Études philosophiques
surface form: Études philosophiques section of La Comédie humaine
influencedBy romanticism
literaryForm prose
literaryMovement Realism
mainCharacter Raphaël de Valentin
narrativePerspective third-person narration
notableFor combining realism with the fantastic
early major success of Balzac
originalLanguage French
originalTitle La Peau de chagrin
partOf La Comédie humaine
plotDevice talisman that grants wishes at the cost of the owner's life
publicationYear 1831
publisher Charpentier
seriesPosition Études philosophiques
settingLocation Paris
theme consumption and excess
desire
fate
free will
power
self-destruction
the relationship between desire and lifespan
the will to live
timePeriodOfSetting early 19th century
workInAuthorCareer one of Balzac's first widely acclaimed novels

How these facts were elicited

The pipeline generated the facts above by prompting gpt-5.1 with this entity's name + description and the instruction below.

Instruction
You are a knowledge base construction expert. Given a subject entity and a description of it, return factual statements that you know for the subject as a JSON list of dictionaries(triples), where keys must be "subject", "predicate" and "object". The number of facts may be very high, between 25 to 50 or more, for very popular subjects. For less popular subjects, the number of facts can be very low, like 5 or 10.

# Requirements
- If you don't know the subject at all, return an empty list.
- If the subject is not a named entity, return an empty list.
- Include at least one triple where predicate is "instanceOf".
- Do not get too wordy.
- Separate several objects into multiple triples with one object.
Input
Subject: The Wild Ass's Skin
Description of subject: The Wild Ass's Skin is an 1831 philosophical novel by Honoré de Balzac that explores themes of desire, power, and self-destruction through a magical shrinking talisman that grants wishes at the cost of the owner's life.

Referenced by (3)

Full triples — surface form annotated when it differs from this entity's canonical label.

La Peau de chagrin alternateTitle The Wild Ass's Skin
Jacques Demy notableWork The Wild Ass's Skin
this entity surface form: Donkey Skin
The Magic Skin hasAlternativeEnglishTitle The Wild Ass's Skin
this entity surface form: The Wild Ass’s Skin