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I had long resisted reading any Balzac and only gave way in prospect of seeing an art exhibition that opened this week at the Maison de Balzac museum in Paris (till October 30), near the prickly pears and Reine Claudes of Passy market. It is on the theme of The Wild Ass’s Skin. The works are by the English artist Rupert Shrive, whose work I’ve admired since he used to have a studio last century above the Coach and Horses pub in Soho.

In some ways the novel was as bad as I feared. Balzac convincingly described the drunken talk at that dinner, but then it becomes a sort of orgy, not just misogynistic but vulgar. The women arrive with the coffee. Fortunately some of them are made of stern stuff.

In form the novel (its title not wrongly translated from the French La Peau de chagrin) is an oriental tale hinging on Raphaël being given a tanned skin that grants his wishes but at each wish shrinks and saps his vital forces. Balzac combines this magical plot-mechanism with his own ability to convey realistic descriptions – of a gambling den or a garret. But memorable incidents in the novel come in a series of theatrical tableaux, not photographic records.

Balzac has a moral purpose in recounting the life of a modern King Midas, but what surprised me was his interest in institutional religion – which in his milieu was the Catholic Church. Just as being a bohemian avant la lettre did not leave him an anti-monarchist, nor did it make the accoutrements of religion laughable to him.

The hero’s father is described as standing as straight as a paschal candle. The prospect of a win at the gaming table is compared to “the sacred elements for young priests rehearsing their first Mass”. In the antique shop with the magical skin, Balzac says of a painting by the Renaissance painter Raphael: “The whole Gospel was contained in the calm simplicity of those eyes”. That may be nonsense regarding Raphael, or the Gospel, but it is not disrespectful.

Later in the novel, the hero is determined to do away with any desires that could tempt him to wish upon the magic skin. So at the opera he uses a pair of opera glasses, not to ogle the diva but to see her human deficiencies instead of the enchantment lent by distance. Rupert Shrive makes these opera glasses part of a syllabary of emblems rearranged in different canvasses to reflect the author’s preoccupations. One canvas collects some of these emblems: the opera glasses, a barbed hook, an autumn leaf painted with Ruskinian attention to form, a few strung pearls beside barbed wire.

Balzac himself appears as a 14ft-high head moulded as though screwed up by a superhuman hand. A canvas shows the same head squashed claustrophobically into the height of a room behind sharp leaves of the snake plant (Sansevieria), beside a broken-limbed lay figure and in front of La baigneuse de Valpinçon by Ingres; in the foreground growls a black panther, not quite the spotted pard of Dante, but as likely to embody physical desire.

Though Balzac lived into the age of photography, we have only one such image of him: a daguerreotype, in shirtsleeves with his hand upon his breast, like a fat El Greco. His world lends itself to the medium of paint.