From: lcs Mixmaster Remailer <mix@anon.lcs.mit.edu>
Subject: Venus In Furs [1/7]
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INTRODUCTION
In the slightly less than one hundred years since its
appearance in 1870 Venus im Pelz has taken a leading place
among those novels which, though regarded as serious works of
literature when they first appeared, are now valued less as
works of art than as human documents, and whose impact and
appeal are still mainly sensational. Its popular success has
been extraordinary: it has gone through more than thirty
editions in its native German and been translated into most
European languages, has been widely though unsuccessfully
imitated, and has given its author the distinction -_ about
which he complained bitterly at the time -_ of having his name
attached to what is now one of the most widespread sexual
aberrations in the world.
With all this, the book has never been properly rendered
in English, doubtless owing to the censorship which forbade it
in both England and the United States for many years and thus
discouraged professional, or even competent, translation. The
comparative innocence of the text may therefore come as a
surprise to a public which has so long been protected against
it as an opus diaboli. For there is nothing obscene or even
indelicate in Venus in Furs: to the uninitiated, indeed, it
might seem no more than the work of a man so steeped in
romantic idealism, so obstinately subjective and egocentric, as
to be a little unbalanced. Censorship, however, fixed its
attention and based its case on the symbolic flagellation
motif, which was thus inflated out of all proportion to the
underlying theme; for, paradoxically, the source of the book's
real and lasting attraction lies a good deal deeper than any
specious erotic colouring, and is obviously to be found in the
extent to which it partakes of the quality of folklore. In
Venus in Furs Sacher-Masoch drew deeply on the collective human
subconscious, and despite all the flagellant and fetishist
trappings of his novel he is constantly giving us flashes of a
reality which evoke our instinctive assent to a primitive,
poetic conception of the role of woman in both love and life --
the role of a cruel and merciless goddess; rightly or wrongly,
he saw sexuality as a duel between the sexes, and a duel to the
death. The poetic attraction of this thesis is heightened by
the mixture of extreme delicacy and extreme frankness in the
writing itself, by the headlong pace of the story and the
inspired naivet‚ of action and incident. That its style and
sentiments are hopelessly dated does not matter: the emotion
comes through on almost every page. Perhaps the harshest
criticism one can make amounts to this: such a book could not
be written today -- which is a pity, for Venus in Furs is not
on the first but the best "masochistic" novel ever written.
It is a truism that masochism in literature does not begin
with Sacher-Masoch. One might also think, therefore,
considering the prevalence of the aberration in modern
psychosexuality, that it has always had its devotees and
therefore its literature. But the astonishing fact is that
there is absolutely no record of masochism as a consciously
sexual aberration before the end of the 15th century. It is
unheard of in the literature of ancient Greece or Rome: those
faithful recorders of sexual quirks, Aristophanes, Athenaeus,
Ovid, Catullus, Juvenal and Martial, are silent on the subject,
and even the 16th chapter of the Satyricon cannot be regarded
as a serious treatment of the aberration as we know it today.
The first authentic record of masochism thus deserves to be
noted with precision: it occurs, to the best of my knowledge,
in the posthumously printed Disputationes adversus astrologiam
divinatricem (V, 27) of Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), where
this universal scholar refers to a man "personally known to me,
who was possessed by such a monstrous and unheard of lust
(prodigiosae libidinis et inauditae) that he could not become
amorous unless through the infliction of blows, and to this end
would have himself scourged with thongs by a prostitute."
Masochism was clearly a rarity in Pico's day. But little more
than seventy years later we find Brant“me speaking of it as
something familiar, though still ridiculous and a little
puzzling; and, soon after, B‚roalde de Verville in his Moyen
de parvenir (1610) mentions it almost casually. Thereafter the
references multiply. In 17th-century England it was a subject
for epigrams and lampoons, was cannily touched on by Richard
Head in The English Rouge (1665), soon appeared in entire
scenes of the plays of Shadwell (The Virtuoso, 1676) and Otway
(Venice Preserved, 1682), and at last became so common that Ned
Ward in The London Spy (1698-1703) notes that masochists were
referred to in the cant of the brothels as "flogging cullies."
In 1749 Cleland presented the episode of Mr. Barville in his
Fanny Hill; and by the turn of the century England was deluged
by masochistic books with such amusing titles as The Adventures
of Lady Gay Spanker, Madame Birchini's Dance (in verse) and The
Bumtickler Revels.
As for any treatment of masochism that was not satirical,
erotic or quasi-medical, there was none: the only serious
reference to the aberration is Rousseau's well-known admission
in the Confessions (I, 1) that he was subject to it, as a more
or less autoerotic preoccupation, all his life. Neither Peter
Motteux, the editor and translator of Rabelais, nor the
materialist philosopher Helvetius, both confirmed masochists,
mentions it al all. Sade treats it in the 120 Days of Sodom
and other works, but only in the baldest and most cursory
fashion. For almost the first three-quarters of the 19th
century, the subject was the exclusive preserve of pornography.
It was certainly not regarded as serious literary material
by anyone before Sacher-Masoch. Even then, Venus in Furs was
not conceived as an independent work: the novel was only the
fifth in a series entitled Love, which in turn was one of five
other projected series (of six novels each) entitled Property,
The State, War, Work, and Death. This whole vast cycle of 36
novels, apparently planned after the Com‚die humaine, was to
bear the over-all title of The Heritage of Cain. Only twelve
of these novels were written, and almost all of them, except
Venus in Furs, are deservedly forgotten.
m
The events of Sacher-Masoch's life are involved in some
confusion. The three main biographical sources are his early
memoir of his own life, The Divorcee (1865), a Strindbergian
novel which verges on autobiography; Sacher-Masoch and
Masochism (1901), a biography by Carl felix von Schlictegroll,
whose uncritical adulation makes his book generally unreliable;
and the Confessions (1906) of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, the work
of his first wife Aurora Rumelin, who assumed the name of the
heroine of Venus in Furs to further the sale of her own
sensational books. Albert Eulenburg has managed, in his Sadism
and Masochism (1910), to winnow a few facts from this mass of
fiction, legend and falsehood.
These facts may be briefly summarized. Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch was born on January 27, 1836, in Lemberg (Lvov),
the capital of what was then the Austrian province of Galicia,
where his father was Director of Police; the latter, Leopold
von Sacher, of noble Spanish descent and member of a family of
high Austrian government officials, had married the daughter of
a Russian nobleman, Franz von Masoch, and in 1838 added his
wife's name to his own. The young Leopold, a weak and sickly
child, was only kept alive by the efforts of his Ruthenian
nurse, a powerful peasant woman of whom he said later that he
owed to her not only the preservation of his life but the
"formation of his soul." In 1848 his father was stationed in
Prague, where the boy learned German; and in the town of Graz,
where his father held the position of Commissioner of Police in
1853, he entered the University, obtained his doctorate of law
in 1855, and in the following year was appointed lecturer in
German history. An eye-witness describes him at the time as "a
delicate, slender young man of boyish appearance who delivered
his lectures on the Reformation in a rather weak and spiritless
manner." But he was hard-working and ambitious, and was soon
publishing historical works remarkable mainly for their
exaggeration of the cruel and despotic traits of female rulers
-_ notably Queen Maria of Austria and the Empress Catherine II
of Russia. In 1858 appeared his first work of fiction,
Galician Sketches, highly praised for its truth, freshness and
charm, and showing the strong naturalistic influence of
Turgenev -_ but shot through with a certain veiled sensuality
in the form of a passive and voluptuous attitude towards the
cruelty of nature. In 1864 he published his first full-length
novel, Don Juan in Kolomea, in which the idealization of female
cruelty is even more pronounced. This was followed in 1870 by
the sensational Venus in Furs, which made him famous, and
thereafter by at least twenty other novels and a large quantity
of ephemeral journalism.
In 1873 he married his mistress Aurora Rumelin, by whom he
had two children. In 1882 he founded the international
literary review Auf der H”he in Leipzig; soon after this he
went to Paris -_ where he was already famous through
translations of his work in the Revue des Deux Mondes and the
Republique Fran‡aise -- to be lionized and feted and to
receive, through the influence of Henri Rochefort, the then
enormous sum of 10,000 francs for a French edition of his
complete works. The following year, on the celebration of his
25th literary anniversary, he received the homage of Daudet,
Dumas the Younger, Fran‡ois Copp‚e, Saint-Sa‰ns, Zola and
Victor Hugo, and was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour.
Thereafter his decline as a writer was steady and
uninterrupted. He returned to Leipzig in 1884, where he
continued to produce novels which were progressively flatter
and feebler imitations of Venus in Furs. In 1885 he was
divorced, immediately married his second wife, a school
teacher, and five years later retired to the village of
Lindheim in Hesse, where he died on March 9, 1896, in his
sixtieth year.
This comprises the bare chronology of his life. The rest
of his portrait must be briefly filled in from fairly reliable
records eked out by reasonable conjecture. Beyond a number of
casual mistresses and innumerable passing loves, there were
three women who played a decisive part in Sacher-Masoch's
fantastic love-life. They are all strikingly similar, and
undoubtedly represent successive incarnations of his
supersensual, masochistic ideal, the cruel, despotic, faithless
woman he so passionately desired and whom he spent his life in
seeking -_ for it must be noted that Sacher-Masoch, unlike such
withdrawn auto-erotists as Rousseau and Flaubert, was always
boldly and even recklessly bent on living his fantasies.
The first was Anna von Kottowitz, the wife of a physician
in Graz, with whom he lived openly from 1864 to 1869. He broke
with her, Schlictegroll tells us, not so much on account of her
follies and extravagance as because she contracted syphilis
from another lover, an absconding chemist's assistant posing as
a Polish count, whom Sacher-Masoch had introduced to her. The
liaison forms the subject of The Divorcee; and in this book a
curious trait in the hero-author's character is already
apparent -_ his attraction to the idea of being deceived by his
mistress with another man. This peculiarity, which is perhaps
something more than an extension and development of his love of
suffering, was to become more and more pronounced; from now on
the figure of this welcome supplanter looms ever larger in the
background of both his novels and his actual relationships with
women. In 1869 he met the second of his great loves, Baroness
Fanny Pistor Bogdanoff. She is the most attractive of them
all. An avowed adventuress, half bluestocking and half
courtesan, whose portraits show her as extremely beautiful and
whose character was almost as fantastical as his own, she is
the original of the Wanda von Dunaiev of Venus in Furs. It was
with her that he took his famous trip to Florence in 1870,
travelling as her servant "Gregor", just as his hero Severin
did, it was she who whipped, humiliated and maltreated him as
he wished, and who at last crowned his desires by deceiving him
with the famous Italian actor Tommaso Salvini, the original of
Alexis Papadopolis, the "handsome Greek" of the novel. And
when she tired of him she merely left him, as Wanda left
Severin. The author's life, however, did not follow that of
his hero who withdrew to the family estate and amused himself
by subjugating peasant girls. Soon after his Italian adventure
Sacher-Masoch met Aurora Rumelin, the third and most fatal of
his loves, whom he married in 1873 and who for the next ten
years abused and tormented him as he had always desired.
The secret of her lasting hold over him seems to have been
that, unlike his other loves, she was a genuine sadist. While
Anna von Kottowitz and the Baroness Bogdanoff had had to be
encouraged and even coached in the role of female tyrant,
Aurora took real pleasure in dominating, ill-treating and
deceiving her husband: she was, as he often declared, the
realization of his ideal. Here it must be noted that his
biographers and critics unite in deploring this marriage, in
expressing their sympathy for the martyred man of letters, and
in comparing him, as Schlictegroll does, to a "poor butterfly
who singed his wings." But the facts speak otherwise. During
the ten years of his marriage Sacher-Masoch reached the peak of
his literary productivity; he was a devoted father and family
man; he became rich and famous an the bizarre sexual adventures
in which he and Aurora where constantly engaged, always (be it
noted) as partners and accomplices, are the best indication
that their marriage was not only happy but far from dull. The
notion, moreover, that he was not the instigator and leader in
her endless experiments in infidelity, is impossible to
maintain. In the same way, the subsequent diversion and
frittering away of his literary talent was his own doing.
The principal source for this period is, it is true,
Aurora's own Confessions, written ten years after his death;
but the book, in spite of much romantic and specious
self-vindication, has an air of authenticity, while many of its
most fantastic episodes are fully confirmed by contemporary
evidence. Reading it, one cannot doubt the author's early
devotion to her husband: for her, the brilliant handsome and
eccentric Sacher-Masoch had also been the realization of an
ideal. She makes no secret of her humble birth, her poverty,
her coldblooded abandonment by her father, her occupations as
seamstress, glove-maker and laundress, her sordid love-affairs
with a hairdresser, a priest, a painter, an army officer, nor
of her immediate infatuation with the young novelist -_ only
ten years her senior but already famous for his sexual
escapades -_ whom she had adored for many months from a
distance.
She admits that she pursued him boldly, even shamelessly.
Knowing he was engaged to a young actress in the theatre at
Graz, she nonetheless wrote him that she felt herself to be the
incarnation of his Venus in Furs, and that her only aim was "to
intoxicate his senses while leaving his heart free." Soon they
were engaged in an erotic correspondence which, on his side at
least, seems now both absurd and touching. Her strategy, always
directed towards their eventual marriage, was carried out with
skill: she wrote him inflammatory sadistic letters,
represented herself as a wealthy married woman of noble birth,
refused to let him speak to her unless she was both masked and
veiled, and managed to raise him to such a pitch of excitement
that within three months he broke off his engagement and
declared himself her "slave unto death."
Even then, he was not yet her lover; almost incredibly,
he had not seen her face. It was now, however, that Aurora,
judging she would "have to become his mistress before becoming
his wife," decided to reveal her features and surrender. The
first resolve took some courage, for she knew she was not
beautiful by ordinary standards; but as for the second, she
had no doubt of assuring the happiness of the man she already
loved to distraction. In any event, she passed both tests.
Sacher-Masoch found her face "better than beautiful -_ young,
piquant, maddening"; and her account of their first night of
love is more outspoken than anything he himself ever wrote.
For the next twelve months they were the happiest of couples.
She indulged his taste for flagellation with enthusiasm; she
dressed constantly in his beloved furs; she even deceived him
with one of his friends. Then she became pregnant.
Sacher-Masoch was deeply moved by the prospect of
fatherhood. But Aurora's child, a boy, was born prematurely
and lived only a few days. Her lover was griefstricken, and at
this juncture she told him the truth about herself -_ that she
was not married, not of noble birth, had had many lovers, and
had even had a previous miscarriage. Sacher-Masoch's reaction
was all she could have hoped for. "He burst into tears, took
me in his arms and promised to devote the rest of his life to
making me happy." A week later they were married.
Returning from the church, she tells us, he declared
himself the happiest of men. "And now that you are my lawful
wife," he added, "it will be even more piquant for you to
deceive me with another man!" She promised she would soon
arrange this.
For the next few years she faithfully kept her promise.
Her lovers were innumerable, and included a defrocked priest, a
dubious German baron, a number of painters, and a confidence
man called Schwartz. But none of these completely satisfied
Sacher-Masoch. He continued to dream of the "handsome Greek"
who would not only cuckold but physically maltreat him. As
time went on, the quest for "the Greek" became an obsession,
involving him in situations which were tasteless, absurd and
even dangerous. He placed advertisements in the newspapers,
openly offering Aurora to "handsome and athletic men," and
corresponded at length with everyone who answered them; in this
way he came in contact with a soi-disant Turkish pasha (in
reality a Viennese pander), an impotent French count, a number
of homosexuals, an even greater number of masochists, and at
last, from 1878 to 1879, with a mysterious correspondent who
professed himself "insuperably chaste, like Lohengrin," signed
his melancholy and romantic letters "Anatole," and turned out
to be the mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
Such is the picture of the novelist given by his wife, and
many of the details are well corroborated. For the most part,
the book breathes nothing but admiration and affectionate
indulgence. Only towards the end does a note of irritation
creep in as she records his insistence on seducing every
chambermaid she engaged, and then on being "punished" for it.
Perhaps the cause of their final rupture (which she avoids
mentioning) was that Sacher-Masoch became even more promiscuous
and fantastic as he passed middle age, and that his conduct
began to bore her -_ just as Severin's had bored Wanda many
years before.
While it is not certain when she definitely left him, it
was she who made the breach. She yielded to the attractions of
an adventurer called Jacob Rosenthal who carried her off to
Paris where he took the name of Jacques Saint-CŠre and, after a
meteoric career as political editor of Le Figaro, deserted her.
She then supported herself, mainly by literature, but with
waning success; after she was divorced her fortunes declined
steadily; she died in Paris some time around 1906 (the date is
always followed by a pathetic question mark), in abject
poverty.
In the meantime Sacher-Masoch, having at last obtained his
divorce and the custody of his children -_ both of which had
met with many difficulties owing to Aurora's violent opposition
and his own religious status as a Roman Catholic -_ married his
mistress Hulda Meister, a beautiful, brilliant and devoted
young woman twenty years his junior, and after flitting
restlessly between Budapest, Leipzig, Vienna and Paris for
several years, at last retired to Lindheim in his native
Galicia; here, tenderly cared for by Hulda, he divided his
time between raising their own three children, writing
increasingly bad novels, and occupying himself with the welfare
of the villagers who were to mourn his death as that of a
benefactor and a wise and kindly counsellor.
Little wonder that Eulenburg says, "What a total betrayal
of natural genius! What a wasted life!"
And now what of this book, this Venus in Furs which is
incontestably his masterpiece?
It is not a great book. By conventional standards, it is
not even a good book. It has a neat melodramatic story, a
flowing, easy style, many touches of poetry and humour, the
greatest professional competence -_ and that, on the face of
it, is all. Its faults, on the other hand, are glaring: an
over-contrived plot, inflated sentiment and epithet, the
hollow, disguised and devious character of much of the
dialogue, and a general air of being little more than a kind of
sustained erotic reverie, sickly and insincere; the fetishism
for furs -_ even for the very words Pelz, Pelzjacke, Dunkelpelz
-- is intolerably tedious. But once these criticisms are made,
one is somehow at a loss. The book is still there, as sharp
and compelling as ever, still able to cast its spell through
the sheer power and persistence of the hero-author's
fascination with the beauty of female domination. One forgets
all its blemishes, even closes one's eyes to Severin's own
latent sadism and the masked homosexuality of his attraction
for "the Greek," and ends by being caught up in the freedom of
fantasy, by yielding to the force of a dream rendered with such
almost insane fervour. Its secret, one suddenly sees, is that
it is not a work of fiction but of mythology, the fruit of an
obsession that refuses to accept the limitations of art, life
or common sense, and demands that the reader do so as well. It
is the triumph of the subjective, autoerotic, intuitional
vision of a man who knew he was telling the truth about himself
in a way no one had ever done before. This, and not its
eroticism, is the quality by which it has survived and for
which it will continue to be read.
The present translation is made from the text of the
revised Dresden edition of 1892. This edition differs slightly
from the first edition of 1870 (the one generally reprinted),
but is unquestionably better from the standpoint of taste and
style: many of the scenes are improved by a word, a phrase,
occasionally a whole sentence. However, three or four of the
long bluestocking speeches by Wanda on pages 15-16, the
tiresome discussion of furs between her and Severin on pages
29-30, and her whole untimely 'lecture' on pages 101-2, are
omitted in that edition, _- and these, after careful
consideration, I have retained; for while there is no doubt
they retard and even disfigure the story, there is no clear
warrant for excluding them, -_ and to put them in an appendix
would be awkward. Moreover, there is still some uncertainty
surrounding this edition of 1892. Sacher-Masoch made no
revisions of his other published works, and doubt has been cast
on the authenticity of this one. Was the revision made by the
ageing author, by Hulda Meister, or by Aurora herself? There
is no telling. All we know is that Sacher-Masoch never
protested or disclaimed it: perhaps, if it was not his own
work, he saw it was an improvement on the original; perhaps he
did not wish to engage in further litigation with Aurora;
perhaps he simply did not care. For by this time he was old,
sick, tired. He was still under sixty, but had worn himself
out in the pursuit of his crazy ideal, in sheer emotional
excess. He was no longer interested in cruel women, in whips,
Greeks or furs. There was something else to torment him now:
a young doctor called Krafft-Ebing had written a "stupid book
with a Latin title," in which "my honourable name, the very
name of my Mother, has been used to denominate a sexual
perversion... The idiot has even identified my furs with some
kind of memory of the sexual fleece! Is there no recourse
against such learned buffoonery? Ah, but these scientific
fools understand nothing, nothing. . ."
Perhaps, after all, they did not understand him
altogether, this man driven all his life by his "supersensual"
ideal. Only now, when the sexual aberration which he
illustrated not only in his writing but in his life has been
exhaustively examined and plumbed, can we begin to appreciate
the real sources of energy which he tapped, and to understand
that the explosion of these forces of a reversed sadism which
he recorded with such ingenuous ‚lan was, like the experiments
of the mediaeval alchemists, an oblique revelation of another
and still more valuable process -_ the creative process itself.
Foster, Quebec June, 1965
Path: bull.hkstar.net!hk.linkage.net!hpg30a.csc.cuhk.hk!news.cuhk.edu.hk!news.glink.net.hk!uunet!in2.uu.net!mail2news.alias.net!anon.lcs.mit.edu!mail2news Date: Tue, 30 Jul 1996 05:20:00 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <199607300920.FAA08514@anon.lcs.mit.edu> From: lcs Mixmaster Remailer <mix@anon.lcs.mit.edu> X-Comment1: This message did not originate from the X-Comment2: above address. It was automatically remailed X-Comment3: by an anonymous mail service. Please report X-Comment4: problems or inappropriate use to X-Comment5: <mix-admin@anon.lcs.mit.edu> Subject: Venus In Furs [2/7] Newsgroups: alt.sex.femdom,alt.sex.stories Complaints-To: mix-admin@anon.lcs.mit.edu Organization: mail2news@anon.lcs.mit.edu (contact: mix-admin@anon.lcs.mit.edu) Lines: 962 Xref: bull.hkstar.net alt.sex.femdom:31695 alt.sex.stories:150784
as the lover's pinch
Which hurts, and is desired.
-- Antony and Cleopatra, V, 2
I was in charming company.
Facing me, before the massive Renaissance fireplace, sat
Venus: not the casual demi-mondaine who measures swords with
the enemy sex under a pseudonym -- no "Madame Phryne" or
"Mademoiselle Cl‚opƒtre" -- but the real Goddess of Love.
She was sitting in an armchair, and had kindled a roaring
fire whose reflections ran in red flames over her pale face
with its white eyes and from time to time over her naked feet
when she tried to warm them.
Her head was magnificent in spite of the dead stony eyes,
but this was all I could see of her: the divinity had wrapped
her marble body in a great fur and was curled up, quivering,
like a cat.
"I don't understand it, dear lady," I said. "It's not
really cold now. These past two weeks we have had perfect
spring weather. It must be your nerves."
"My compliments on your spring," she replied in a deep
stony voice, and at once sneezed divinely, twice in succession.
"I really cannot bear it here much longer, and I am beginning
to understand -_" She paused.
"What, dear lady?"
"I am beginning to believe the incredible and to
understand the incomprehensible. Suddenly I understand the
virtue of German women, and German philosophy -- and I no
longer wonder why you of the North do not know how to love, why
you have no idea of love."
"But madam," I replied with spirit, "I at least have
surely given you no cause -_"
"Oh, not you..." The goddess smiled, then suddenly sneezed
again, and shrugged her shoulders with inimitable grace. "Not
you. Which is why I've always been kind to you, and even visit
you now and then -- though I catch cold every time, even with
all these furs. Do you remember the first time we met?"
"How could I forget? You wore your flowing hair in brown
curls and you had brown eyes and a red mouth, but I knew you at
once by the curve of your cheek and its marble pallor. And you
were wearing a violet velvet jacket edged with squirrel."
"Yes, you were quite in love with the costume. And how
teachable you were!"
"You taught me what love really is -- a serene form of
worship which made me forget two thousand years."
"And my fidelity was unequalled!"
"Why, as for strict fidelity --" I smiled.
"Ungrateful man!"
"I make no reproaches. You are a divinity, but nonetheless
a woman and, like every woman, cruel in matters of love."
"What you call cruelty," the Goddess of Love replied with
animation, "is simply the element of passion and sensuality
which is part of woman's nature, and which makes her give
herself whenever she loves, and love everything that pleases
her."
"But can there be any greater cruelty than to make a love
endure the faithlessness of the woman he loves?"
She shrugged, making her beautiful breasts quiver within
the fur. "We are faithful as long as we love, but you demand
that a woman be faithful when she has ceased to love, and that
she give herself without any but the most degrading, mechanical
enjoyment. Who is cruel there, the woman or the man? You of
the North take love too seriously. You talk of duties, when
there should be only a question of pleasure."
"Yes, madam, that is why our feelings are respectable and
virtuous, and our relations permanent."
"And yet you retain a restless, unsatisfied yearning for
the nudity of paganism," she said. "But that love which is the
height of joy, that central union of breath and limbs and
feeling by which our bodies figure forth the original divine
unity of man and woman, that is not for you moderns, you
children of reflection. In you it turns to something evil.
Whenever you wish to be natural, you become gross. For you,
nature is something hostile; you have made devils of the
smiling gods of Greece, and of me a demon. You can only
exorcise and curse me, or immolate yourselves in a bacchantic
ecstasy before my altar. And should one of you ever have the
courage to kiss my red mouth, he must make a barefoot
pilgrimage to Rome in penitential garb and expect flowers to
grow from a withered staff, while under my very feet roses,
violets and myrtles spring up every hour -- only their
fragrance does not agree with you. Remain here among the
clouds of your northern fogs and Christian incense; leave us
pagans lying under the debris, under the lava; do not dig us
up. Pompeii was not built for you, nor our villas, our baths,
our temples. You do not need gods like us. Our world was not
made for you, and we are chilled in yours." The beautiful
marble woman gave a little cough and drew the dark sables still
closer around her naked shoulders.
"A thousand thanks for the classical lesson," I replied,
"but you cannot deny that man and woman are mortal enemies in
your serene sunlit world as well as in our foggy one. In the
act of love they merge and are reconciled for a short time
only, when they have but one thought, one sensation, one will,
and then they disunite and become greater enemies than ever.
And whichever of the two fails to dominate will -- as you know
better than I -- soon feel the other's foot on his neck --"
"And as a rule it is the man who feels the woman's," said
lady Venus with mocking satisfaction. "As you know still
better than I."
"Of course. That is why I have no illusions."
"You mean you are now my slave without illusions?" Her
brows contracted. "Ah, for that I shall tread on you without
mercy..."
"Madam!"
"You do not know me yet? Yes, I am cruel -- since you
take such delight in the word -- and have I not the right to
be? Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired:
this is her complete and decisive advantage. Through his
passions, Nature has put man in thraldom to woman, and the
woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave,
her toy, and now to betray him at last with a smile, is a
fool."
"Your own principles," I said drily.
"They are based on several thousands of years'
experience," she replied with an ironical smile as her white
fingers played over the dark fur. "The more devotion a woman
shows, the sooner the man recovers his sanity and begins to
domineer. The more cruelly she treats him, the more faithless
she is, the more wantonly she plays with him, the less pity she
shows -- by so much does she heighten his desire and compel his
love and worship. So it has always been, from the times of
Helen and Delilah down to those of Catherine the Great and Lola
Montez."
"I will not deny," I said, "That nothing attracts a man
more than the image of a beautiful, passionate, cruel and
despotic woman, who changes her lovers freely and without
scruple according to her whim --"
"And who in addition wears furs," the goddess struck in
with a mocking look. "What do you mean by that, madam?"
"I know your weakness. Who better?"
"Do you know," I said, "that since our last meeting you
have become very much the coquette?"
"In what way, may I ask?"
"In having found there is no better way of displaying your
white body than in those dark furs, and that --"
The goddess laughed. "You are dreaming," she cried.
"Wake up!" and she seized my arm with her marble hand. "Do
wake up," she repeated hoarsely, her voice dropping into the
lower register. I opened my eyes with difficulty.
I saw the hand which was shaking me, but this hand was as
brown as tobacco, while the voice was the thick,
vodka-roughened voice of my Cossack servant who was towering
over me at his full height of over six feet.
"Do get up," the good fellow was saying. "It is really
disgraceful."
"What is disgraceful?"
"To fall asleep like this in your clothes, and with a book
as well."
He snuffed the candles which had burned down, and picked
up the volume which had fallen from my hand. "With a book by -
-" he looked at the cover "-- by Hegel. Besides, it's time we
were starting for Herr Severin's where you're expected for
tea."
"A curious dream," said Severin when I had finished. He
rested his arms on his knees, holding his face in his delicate
finely veined hands, and plunged into thought.
I knew he would remain so for a long time, hardly even
breathing. This often happened, and by now I looked on his
behaviour as in no way remarkable. I had been on terms of
close friendship with him for nearly three years, and was used
to his peculiarities. For it could not be denied he was
peculiar, although not quite the dangerous madman which the
neighbourhood, and indeed the entire district of Kolomea,
considered him. I found his personality not only interesting
but -- and this was why many people looked on me as a little
mad also -- highly sympathetic.
For a Galician nobleman and landowner, and considering his
age -- he was barely over thirty -- he showed a surprising
maturity of outlook, a gravity verging on the pedantic. He
lived by a minutely elaborated, half-philosophical,
half-practical system, like a piece of clock-work; and not by
this alone, but also by the thermometer, barometer, aerometer,
hydrometer, Hippocrates, Hufeland, Plato, Kant, Knigge and Lord
Chesterfield. But at times he had sudden attacks of violent
passion, and gave the impression of being about to run his head
right through the wall. At such times everyone found it better
to keep out of his way.
While he remained silent the fire sang in the chimney, and
the big old samovar sang too; the ancient chair in which I sat
rocking to and fro, smoking my cigar, was also singing rather
creakily, as was a cricket somewhere in the old walls. I let
my eyes roam over the curious apparatus which crowded his room,
the skeletons of animals, stuffed birds, globes and
plaster-casts, until by chance my gaze fell on a painting which
I had often seen in this room but which today, touched by the
red reflections of the fire, made a new and indescribable
impression on me. It was a large oil painting done in the
robust, full-blooded manner of the Flemish school. The subject
was curious enough. A beautiful woman with a radiant smile on
her lips, her luxuriant hair tied in a classical knot, was half
lying on an ottoman, supporting herself on her left arm, quite
naked in her dark furs. Her right hand was playing with a
long-lashed whip, while her bare foot rested carelessly on a
man lying before her like a slave or a dog. This man, in whose
stark but well-formed features there lay a brooding sadness and
passionate devotion, looked up at her with the ecstatic burning
gaze of a martyr. And this man, this footstool for the woman's
feet, was Severin, but beardless and, as it seemed, some ten
years younger.
"Venus in Furs!" I cried, pointing to the picture. "That
is how I saw her in my dream."
"So did I," said Severin, his voice remote. "Only I
dreamed my dream with open eyes."
"Indeed?"
"Ah, it's a tedious story..."
"Your picture must have suggested my dream," I went on.
"Now tell me what it means. I can guess it played a role in
your life, perhaps a decisive one, but you alone can give me
the details."
"Look then at its model and counterpart," my strange
friend replied without heeding my request, as he gestured
towards a picture hanging opposite -- a fine copy of Titian's
famous Venus with the Mirror in the Dresden Gallery.
"And what is its significance?"
Severin rose and pointed at the fur in which Titian had
clothed his goddess of love. "It too is a 'Venus in Furs'," he
said with a faint smile, "though I don't believe the old
Venetian had any such ulterior motive. He simply painted the
portrait of some fashionable Messalina, and was tactful enough
to have Cupid hold the mirror in which she appraises her
majestic allure with such cold aplomb -- though the boy looks
as if his task were rather irksome. The title is merely a
piece of flattery. Following the pictorial conventions of the
time, the lady was given the name of Venus. But the imperial
furs in which Titian's lovely model draped herself, probably
less from modesty than from fear of catching a chill, have
become for us a symbol of the tyranny and cruelty that are the
essence and beauty of woman. But enough of that... The
picture, as it stands, is a pungent satire on our own
conception of love. In this rarefied northland, this icy
Christian world, Venus must creep into a great black fur so as
not to catch cold..." He laughed and lit a fresh cigarette.
At that moment the door opened and a plump comely blonde
girl entered; she had wise, kindly eyes, was dressed in black
silk, and had brought us eggs and cold meat for our tea.
Severin took one of the eggs and broke it with his knife.
"Didn't I tell you I wanted them soft-boiled?" he exclaimed
with a violence which made the young woman tremble.
"But my dear Sevtchu --" she said timidly.
"Sevtchu nothing!" he cried. "You are to obey, to obey,
do you understand!" And he seized a kantschuk from the hook
where it was hanging among his other weapons.
The pretty girl fled from the room as swiftly and shyly as
a doe.
"Wait -- I'll deal with you later!" he called after her.
"Severin," I said, laying a hand on his arm, "how can you
treat a pretty young woman like this?"
"Consider this woman," he replied, his eyes twinkling
mirthfully. "If I had made a habit of flattering her she would
have put a rope around my neck long ago. But now, when I bring
her up under the kantschuk, she adores me."
"Nonsense!"
"Not at all. This is how one breaks women in."
"Well, you can live like a pasha in your harem if you
wish, but do not lay down theories about it --"
"Why not?" he took me up short. "Goethe's 'you must be
hammer or anvil' applies very well to the relation between men
and women, or didn't the Lady Venus in your dream convince you?
Woman's power lies in man's passion, and she knows how to use
this power if he fails to understand it. He has only one
choice: to be the tyrant or the slave of woman. No sooner
does he give way than his neck is under the yoke, and then the
whip will begin to fall."
"Odd maxims!"
"Not maxims, but truths verified by experience," he
replied, nodding his head. "I have actually felt the lash. I
am cured. Would you like to know how?"
He rose, took a small manuscript from his massive desk and
laid it before me.
"You have already asked me about the picture," he said,
"and I have long owed you an explanation. Here, read..."
He sat down by the fire with his back to me, and seemed to
dream with open eyes. Silence had fallen once again, and once
again the fire was singing in the chimney, and the samovar and
the cricket in the wall were singing too. I opened the
manuscript and read:
In the margin was the epigraph, a variation of the well-known lines of Mephistopheles in Faust:
Thou sensual, supersensual wooer,
A woman leads thee by the nose.
I turned the title-page and read:
What follows has been compiled from the pages of my diary
of the period. For it is never possible to write frankly of
one's own past: only in personal records does everything keep
the freshness of its colours, the colours of the moment.
Gogol, the Russian MoliŠre, says -- where? well, somewhere
-- "The true Comic Muse is the one beneath whose mask of
laughter the tears are falling."
A wonderful saying...
I have a curious feeling as I am writing all this down.
The air seems full of a disturbing fragrance of flowers, an
odour which overcomes me and makes my head swim, the smoke from
the fireplace curls up and shapes itself into the figures of
little gray-bearded goblins who point their fingers mockingly
at me, while little plump-cheeked amoretti ride on the arms of
my chair and on my knees -- and then I smile involuntarily, I
even laugh aloud as I record my adventures, even though I am
writing not with common ink but with the red blood that drips
from my heart, for all its long-closed wounds have reopened,
throbbing and smarting, and every now and then a tear falls on
the paper.
m
The days creep by sluggishly in this little Carpathian
resort. You see no one, and no one sees you. It is so boring
one could write idylls. I have enough leisure here to fill an
entire picture-gallery, to supply a theatre with new plays for
a whole season and a dozen virtuosos with concertos, trios and
duos, but -- what am I saying? -- the upshot of it all is that
I do no more than stretch the canvas, smooth the bow, line the
scores. For I am -- no false modesty now, friend Severin: you
can lie to others but can't succeed in lying to yourself any
longer -- I am nothing but a dilettante, a dilettante in
painting, in poetry, in music and in several of the other
so-called unprofitable arts which, however, secure for their
masters these days the income of a cabinet minister or even of
a petty princeling. Above all, I am a dilettante in life.
Until now I have lived as I have painted and poetized:
that is, I have never got beyond the preliminary work, the
plan, the first act, the first stanza. There are people like
that, who begin everything and finish nothing. I am one of
them.
But what am I running on about?
To the business in hand.
I lounge in my window-seat, and the miserable little town
which fills me with ennui really seems ineffably full of
poetry. How marvellous the prospect of that blue wall of
mountains interwoven with golden sunlight and laced with
torrents like ribbons of silver! How clear and blue the sky
into which rise the snow-capped peaks, how fresh and green the
wooded slopes and the meadows grazed by the little knots of
cattle_green all the way down to the yellow waves of grain in
which the reapers stand, bend down and rise again.
The house where I live is in a kind of park or forest or
wilderness, whatever you care to call it, and is very secluded.
Its only inhabitants are myself, a widow from Lemberg, and
Madame Tartakovska the landlady, a little old woman who grows
older and smaller every day. There is also an old dog that
limps on one leg, and a young cat that is always playing with a
ball of wool. The ball of wool belongs, I believe, to the
widow.
She is said to be really beautiful, this widow, still very
young, twenty-four at the most, and very rich. She keeps her
green jalousies always closed, and has a balcony quite
embowered with green creepers and climbing plants. I, down
below, have a comfortable cosy arbour of honeysuckle, where I
read and write and paint and sing like a bird among the
branches. I can look up at the balcony; sometimes I actually
do, and then from time to time a white gown gleams amid the
dense green network of the leaves.
But the beautiful woman up there doesn't really interest
me, because I am in love with someone else, and most unhappily:
far more unhappily than the Knight of Toggenburg or the
Chevalier in Manon Lescaut, because my beloved is made of
stone.
In the park, in the little wilderness, there is a pretty
meadow where a couple of deer graze peacefully. In this meadow
is a stone statue of Venus_the original of which, I believe, is
in Florence. This Venus is the most beautiful woman I have
seen in all my life.
But that does not mean a great deal, for I have not seen
many beautiful women, nor indeed many women at all. In matters
of love, too, I am a dilettante who has never gone beyond the
preliminaries, the first act. But why make comparisons, as if
anything beautiful can ever be surpassed?
It is enough to say this Venus is beautiful; and I love
her passionately and with a morbid intensity -- madly, as one
can only love a woman who never responds to one's love save by
an unchanging, an eternally calm and stony smile. Yes. I
literally adore her.
Often I lie reading under the leafy shelter of a young
birch-tree nearby, while the sun broods over the forest; often
I visit that cold, cruel mistress of mine by night and kneel
before her, my forehead or my lips pressed to the cold pediment
on which her feet are standing -- and my prayers ascend to her.
The rising moon, now past its third quarter, produces an
indescribable effect: it seems to hover among the trees,
drenching the meadow in its stream of silver, and the Goddess
stands transfigured and shining, as if she were bathing in the
soft radiance.
Once, as I was returning from my orisons by one of the
paths leading to the house, I suddenly saw a woman's moving
figure, white as stone under the moon's light and screened from
me only by a row of trees. For a moment it seemed the
beautiful marble woman had taken pity on me, had come to life
and was following me! I was seized by a nameless fear, my
heart threatened to burst, but instead of --
Well, I am a dilettante. As usual, I broke down at the
second stanza, or rather I didn't break down, but on the
contrary ran away as fast as I could.
What luck! Through a Jew who deals in prints and
engravings I have secured a picture of my ideal. A small
reproduction of Titian's Venus with the Mirror. What a woman!
I would like to write a poem, but instead I take the
reproduction and write on it:
"VENUS IN FURS
"You are cold, even while you fan our flames. Wrap yourself then in your despot's furs, for there is none on whom they sit better, cruel goddess of love and beauty!"
After a while I add a few verses from Goethe, which I
found the other day in his Paralipomena to Faust:
To Amor
"The pair of wings a fiction are,
The arrows, they are only claws,
The wreath conceals the little horns;
For there's no doubt at all that he
-- Like all the gods of ancient Greece --
Is only a devil in disguise.
Then I place the picture before me on my table, propping
it with a book, and gaze at it. The cold coquetry with which
this superb woman drapes her charms in her furs of dark sable,
the severity and hardness which dwell in this marmoreal face,
fill me with rapture and a strange fear. Once more I take up
my pen and write these words:
"To love, to be loved, what happiness! And yet how this bliss pales before the tormenting ecstasy of worshipping a woman who makes a plaything of one, of being the slave of a beautiful tyrant who treads one pitilessly underfoot! So Samson, the hero, the mighty warrior, once more gave himself into the hands of Delilah even after she had betrayed him, and then once again she betrayed him, and the Philistines bound him and put out his eyes which until the last he kept fixed, drunken with rage and love, on the lovely traitress."
I was breakfasting in my honeysuckle arbour and reading in
the Book of Judith. I envied the grim hero Holofernes because
of the queenly woman who cut off his head with a sword, I
envied him his beautiful sanguinary end.
"The Lord hath punished him, and delivered him into the
hands of a woman."
The verse struck me.
How ungallant these Jews are, I thought. And their God
might have chosen more becoming expressions when speaking of
the fair sex.
"The Lord hath punished him, and delivered him into the
hands of a woman," I repeated to myself. What shall I do, that
he may so punish me?
Heaven preserve us! Here comes the landlady, who has
again diminished somewhat in size overnight. And up above,
among the twining greenery and the garlands, the white gown is
gleaming again. Is it Venus, or the widow?
This time it is the widow, for Madame Tartakovska makes a
curtsey and asks me, on her behalf, for something to read. I
run to my room and pick up a couple of books at random.
Later I remember that my picture of Venus is in one of
them, and now both it and my effusions are in the hands of the
lady in white upstairs. What will she say?
I can hear her laughing.
Is she laughing at me?
A full moon. It is already peering over the tops of the
low hemlocks that fringe the park, and a silvery light fills
the park, the clumps of trees, the whole landscape as far as
the eye can reach, fading gradually in the distance like
trembling waters.
I cannot resist, I feel a strange impulse and summons; I
get dressed again and go out into the garden. Some power draws
me towards the meadow, towards her, my goddess and my beloved.
The night is cool. I feel a slight chill. The air is
heavy with the odour of flowers and of the forest, it is
intoxicating.
What solemnity! What music all around! A nightingale is
sobbing. The stars quiver faintly in the pale blue
transparency. The meadow seems smooth as a mirror, like a veil
of ice on a pond.
The statue of Venus stands out, august and luminous.
But -- what has happened?
From the goddess' marble shoulders a great dark fur flows
down to her heels. I stand dumbfounded and stare at her in
amazement, and once again an indescribable fear seizes me and I
take flight.
I quicken my steps, and find I have missed the main path.
As I am about to turn aside into one of the green alleys I see
Venus sitting before me on a stone bench: not the beautiful
woman of marble but the very Goddess of Love herself, with warm
blood and throbbing pulses! Yes, this is really my beloved,
come to life like that statue which drew breath for its
creator. Indeed the miracle seems only half accomplished: her
white-powdered hair seems still to be of stone, and her white
gown shimmers like moonlight -- or is it only satin? From her
shoulders the dark fur is flowing now -- but her lips are
surely red, her cheeks have the hue of life. Two diabolical
green rays from her eyes fall on me, and she is laughing.
Her laughter is so strange, so -- I cannot describe it, it
takes my breath away, and I run further, and every few steps I
have to pause for breath. And the mocking laughter pursues me
through the dark leafy paths, across the bright open spaces,
through the thickets pierced by a single moonbeam. I can no
longer see my way, I wander about in utter confusion with cold
drops of sweat on my forehead.
At last I come to a halt, and engage in a short monologue.
It runs -- well, one is either very polite to oneself or
very rude -- like this:
I say to myself: "Donkey!"
The word has a remarkable effect, like a magic formula
which frees me and restores my self-possession.
In a moment I become quite calm.
With great pleasure I repeat: "Donkey!"
Now my surroundings are once more clear and distinct.
There is the fountain, there the alley of boxwood, there the
house which I am approaching slowly.
And all at once the apparition is before me again. Behind
the green hedge, shot through by moonlight so that it seems
fretted with silver, I see the white figure again, the woman of
stone whom I adore, whom I fear and flee from.
With two bounds I am inside the house, and I catch my
breath and reflect. What am I, after all -- a little
dilettante or a big donkey?
A sultry morning, the air is languid, heavily laden with
odours, yet exciting. Again I am sitting in my arbour, reading
in the Odyssey about the beautiful witch who turned her
worshippers into beasts. A splendid picture of antique love.
There is a sort rustling in the leaves and branches around
me, the pages of my book are rustling, and from the terrace
beside me comes a rustling too.
A woman's dress --
There she is -- Venus -_ but without her furs -- no, it is
the widow -- and yet -- Venus... Oh, what a woman!
As she stands there in her light white morning gown,
looking at me, her slender figure seems full of poetry and
grace. She is neither large nor small; her head is alluring,
piquant in the style of a French marquise rather than beautiful
-- but how enchanting, what softness, what a wayward charm
plays around her none too small mouth! Her skin is so
infinitely delicate that the blue veins show through, even
through the muslin covering her arms and splendid breasts. How
luxuriant is her red hair -- it is red, not blond or gold --
how diabolically and yet how tenderly it curls around her neck!
Now her eyes meet mine like green lightning -- yes, they are
green, these eyes of hers whose power is so indescribable --
green, but like precious stones or unfathomable mountain lakes.
She studies my confusion, which has even made me forget
myself, for I have remained seated and still have my cap on my
head. She smiles mockingly.
At last I rise and bow. She comes closer and bursts into
loud, almost childlike laughter. I stammer, as only a little
dilettante or a big donkey would at such a moment.
That was how our acquaintance began.
The goddess asks my name, and tells me her own.
Her name is Wanda von Dunaiev.
And she is really my Venus.
"But madam, how did that strange fancy come to you?"
"The little picture in one of your books..."
"I had forgotten it."
"The curious notes on the back..."
"Curious? "
She looked at me. "I have always wanted to know a real
dreamer -- for the sake of novelty -- and you seemed one of the
maddest of the species."
"Dear lady -- indeed --" Again I lapsed into a miserable
asinine stammering, and even blushed in a manner proper to a
youth of sixteen but not a man fully ten years older.
"You were afraid of me last night."
"Really -- well... but won't you sit down?"
She did so, obviously enjoying my embarrassment. And now,
in the light of day, I was still more afraid of her. A
charming expression of contempt played over her upper lip.
"You seem to regard love, and particularly woman," she
said, "as something hostile, something to guard yourself
against, even unsuccessfully -- as if its power were a kind of
pleasant torment, a piquant cruelty. A truly modern attitude."
"You do not share it?"
"I do not," she said quickly and with decision, shaking
her head so that her curls danced like red flames. "To me the
serene sensuousness of the Greeks -- pleasure without pain --
is the ideal we should aim at. The kind of love preached by
Christianity, by the moderns, the Knights of the Spirit -- I
don't believe in it. Yes, look at me, I am worse than a
heretic, I am a pagan.
Dost thou imagine long the goddess of love took counsel
When in Ida's grove she was pleased with the hero
Anchises?
Those lines of the Roman Elegy have always pleased me.
"In Nature there is only the same love as in the heroic
age, 'when gods and goddesses loved.' Then
Desire followed love, and enjoyment desire.
Everything else is artificial, affected, lying.
Christianity with its cruel symbol of the cross has always had
for me an element of the monstrous, it has introduced something
alien and hostile into Nature and her innocent impulses. The
contest of spirit with the world of sense is the gospel of
modern man. I will have none of it."
"Yes, Mount Olympus would be the place for you, madam," I
replied. But we moderns can no longer enjoy that antique
serenity. Least of all in love. The idea of sharing a woman
repels us, even if she were an Aspasia. We are jealous, like
our God. For instance, we have made the name of the glorious
Phryne a term of reproach, even of abuse. We prefer one of
Holbein's meagre pallid virgins -- as long as she is wholly
ours -- to an antique Venus no matter how divinely beautiful,
who loves Anchises today, Paris tomorrow, Adonis the day after.
And if our sensual nature so triumphs in us that we give our
complete, passionate, burning devotion to such a woman, her
serene joy in life seems to us something cruel and demonic, and
we see in our own bliss a sin we must expiate."
She looked at me scornfully. "So you too are one of the
enthusiasts of modern women, of those wretched hysterical
females who in their somnambulistic search for an ideal man
cannot appreciate a real one, and in tears and spasms violate
the Christian ethic, cheating and being cheated, always hunting
and choosing and rejecting, never happy themselves nor giving
happiness to others, and forever accusing fate instead of
quietly admitting they wish to love and live like Helen or
Aspasia. Nature knows no permanence in the tie between man and
woman."
"But, dear lady --"
"Let me finish. It is only man's egoism which seeks
to bury woman like a treasure in the earth. Every effort
to impart some permanence to love, that most fickle thing
in our fickle humanity, has come to nothing -- yes, all
those holy ceremonies, solemn vows, legal sanctions. Can
you deny that our Christian world has given itself up to
license?"
"But --"
"But, you would say, the one who rebels against the
institutions of society is ostracized, branded, stoned.
Very well. I am willing to take the risk, my principles
are quite pagan. I live my life as it pleases me, I can
do without your hypocritical respect, I would rather be
happy. The inventors of Christian marriage did well to
invent immortality at the same time. I however have no
wish to live for ever. When with my last breath
everything here below comes to an end for Wanda von
Dunaiev, what difference will it make to me whether my
pure spirit joins the choir of angels or my dust goes lo
make new beings? Shall I belong entirely to a man I do
not love, simply because I have once loved him? No, I
renounce nothing, I will love everyone who pleases me and
make everyone who loves me happy. Is that ugly? No, it
is far more beautiful than cruelly to enjoy the torments
which my beauty has caused, and virtuously to reject the
poor fellow who is pining away for me. I am young, rich
and beautiful, and I live serenely for pleasure and
enjoyment."
While she was speaking with flashing eyes, I had
taken her hands without exactly knowing what to do with
them, but being a real dilettante I now hastily let go of
them.
"Your frankness," I said, "delights me, and not only
your frankness --" But my cursed dilettantism again
choked me as if there were a rope around my neck.
"You were saying?"
"I was about to say -- I was... Excuse me, dear lady
-- I interrupted you."
"How so?"
A long pause. She is doubtless engaged in a
monologue which, in my own phraseology, would be comprised
in the single word, "Donkey."
"If I may be so bold," I said at last, "how did you
arrive at these conclusions?"
"Very simply. My father was an intelligent man.
>From my cradle I was surrounded by reproductions of
ancient art. At the age of ten I read Gil Blas, at twelve
Voltaire's La Pucelle; where other children had
Hop-o'-my-thumb, Bluebeard and Cinderella for friends, I
had Venus and Apollo, Hercules and Laoco”n. My husband's
character was full of serenity and sunlight. Not even the
incurable illness which struck him down soon after our
marriage could cloud his spirit for long. On the night
before his death he received me in his bed, and during the
many months when he sat dying in his wheelchair he would
often ask me in jest, 'Well, have you chosen a lover
yet?', and I would blush with shame. 'But do not hoodwink
me,' he added once. 'That would be ugly. Take an
attractive lover, or preferably several. You are an
honest woman, but still little more than a child, and you
must have toys.' I need hardly tell you that while he
lived I had no lover; but it was thanks to him that I have
become what I am, a woman of Greece..."
"A goddess," I interjected.
"Which?" she smiled.
"Venus."
She made as if to threaten me with her finger, and
knitted her brows. "Perhaps even a Venus in furs. Take
good care, I have a great fur which could cover you
entirely, and I will catch you in it as in a net."
I felt myself turn pale; then recovering quickly I
followed a train of thought which for all its
conventionality and triteness struck me as very much to
the point. "Do you believe," I said, "that your ideas of
love could be realized in the present day, that Venus
would be permitted to wander with impunity among our
railroads and telegraphs in all her undraped beauty and
serenity?"
"Undraped, of course not -- but in furs, yes," she
replied laughing. "Would you care to see mine?"
I had a moment of daring. "Ah, that is not all."
"What else, then?"
"Beautiful, free, serene and happy beings, such as
the Greeks were, can only exist where there are slaves to
perform the prosaic everyday tasks for them and above all
to work for them."
"Of course," she replied airily. "An Olympian deity,
such as I am, would require a whole army of slaves.
Beware of me!"
"Why?"
I was frightened by the boldness with which I uttered
this "why?" But it did not startle her in the least; she
drew back her lips a little so that her small white teeth
became visible and then said casually, as if she were
discussing some trifling matter, "Would you like to be my
slave?"
I caught my breath. "There is no such thing these
days," I said. "But even if there were, there is no
equality in love. Whenever it is a question of ruling or
being ruled, it seems to me much more satisfying to be the
slave of a beautiful woman. But where shall I find the
woman who knows how to rule, calmly and with assurance,
even with severity, instead of trying to assert her power
by a course of petty nagging?"
"Oh, that might not be so difficult."
"You think --"
"I, for instance," she laughed and leaned back in her
chair, "I have a real talent for tyranny. I have also the
furs... But last night you were actually afraid of me!"
"Yes, actually."
"And now?"
"Now -- I am more afraid of you than ever!"
We are together every day now, I and -- Venus. We
are together a great deal; we have breakfast in my
honeysuckle arbour, and tea in her little sitting-room,
and I have the opportunity of displaying my small, my very
small talents. What good has been my study of all the
sciences, my playing at all the forms of art, if I'm not
able, faced with a pretty woman, to --
But this woman is much more than pretty, in fact she
impresses me enormously. I made a sketch of her today,
feeling above all how much the modern fashion in dress is
unsuited to that cameo-like head of hers. The
configuration of her head has little of the Roman, much of
the Greek.
Sometimes I feel I would like to paint her as Psyche,
sometimes as Astarte. It depends on the expression of her
eyes -- whether it is vague and dreamy, or avid, or
instinct with a kind of weary desire. She, however,
insists only on a likeness.
I would like to do her in furs.
How could I doubt their fitness? On whose shoulders
would an imperial fur rest better than on hers?
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