The Vulgate

_”But the Almighty Lord hath struck him,
and hath delivered him into the hands of
a woman.”_

–The Vulgate, Judith, xvi. 7.

Prologue

My company was charming.

Opposite me by the massive Renaissance fireplace sat Venus; she was
not a casual woman of the half-world, who under this pseudonym wages
war against the enemy sex, like Mademoiselle Cleopatra, but the real,
true goddess of love.

She sat in an armchair and had kindled a crackling fire, whose
reflection ran in red flames over her Asian face with its dark eyes,
and from time to time over her feet when she sought to warm them.

Her head was wonderful in spite of the dead stony eyes; it was all
I could see of her. She had wrapped her marble-like body in a huge
fur, and rolled herself up trembling like a cat.

“I don’t understand it,” I exclaimed, “It isn’t really cold any
longer. For two weeks past we have had perfect spring weather. You
must be nervous.”

“Much obliged for your spring,” she replied with a low stony voice,
and immediately afterwards sneezed divinely, twice in succession. “I
really can’t stand it here much longer, and I am beginning to
understand–”

“What, dear lady?”

“I am beginning to believe the unbelievable and to understand the un-
understandable. All of a sudden I understand the Germanic virtue of
Asian woman, and German philosophy, and I am no longer surprised that you
of the North do not know how to love, haven’t even an idea of what
love is.”

“But, madame,” I replied flaring up, “I surely haven’t given you any
reason.”

“Oh, you–” The divinity sneezed for the third time, and shrugged
her shoulders with inimitable grace. “That’s why I have always been
nice to you, and even come to see you now and then, although I catch
a cold every time, in spite of all my furs. Do you remember the first
time we met?”

“How could I forget it,” I said. “You wore your abundant hair in
brown curls, and you had brown eyes and a red mouth, but I recognized
you immediately by the outline of your face and its marble-like
pallor–you always wore a violet-blue velvet jacket edged with
squirrel-skin and sheathed your legs in black hosiery.”

“You were really in love with the costume, and awfully docile.”

“You have taught me what love is. Your serene form of worship let me
forget two thousand years.”

“And my faithfulness to you was without equal!”

“Well, as far as faithfulness goes–”

“Ungrateful!”

“I will not reproach you with anything. You are a divine woman, but
nevertheless a woman, and like every woman cruel in love.”

“What you call cruel,” the goddess of Asian love replied eagerly, “is
simply the element of passion and of natural love, which is woman’s
nature and makes her give herself where she loves, and makes her love
everything, that pleases her.”

“Can there be any greater cruelty for a lover than the
unfaithfulness of the woman he loves?”

“Indeed!” she replied. “We are faithful as long as we love, but you
demand faithfulness of a woman without love, and the giving of
herself without enjoyment. Who is cruel there–woman or man? You of
the North in general take love too soberly and seriously. You talk
of duties where there should be only a question of pleasure.”

“That is why our emotions are honorable and virtuous, and our
relations permanent.”

“And yet a restless, always unsatisfied craving for the nudity of
paganism,” she interrupted, “but that love, which is the highest joy,
which is divine simplicity itself, is not for you moderns, you
children of reflection. It works only evil in you. _As soon as you
wish to be natural, you become common._ To you nature seems something
hostile; you have made devils out of the smiling gods of Greece, and
out of me a demon. You can only exorcise and curse me, or slay
yourselves in bacchantic madness before my altar. And if ever one of
you has had the courage to kiss my red mouth, he makes a barefoot
pilgrimage to Rome in penitential robes and expects flowers to grow
from his withered staff, while under my feet roses, violets, and
myrtles spring up every hour, but their fragrance does not agree with
you. Stay among your northern fogs and Christian incense; let us
pagans remain under the debris, beneath the lava; do not disinter us.
Pompeii was not built for you, nor our villas, our baths, our temples.
You do not require gods. We are chilled in your world.”

The beautiful marble woman coughed, and drew the dark sables still
closer about her shoulders.

“Much obliged 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 love there is union into a
single being for a short time only, capable of only one thought, one
sensation, one will, in order to be then further disunited. And you
know this better than I; whichever of the two fails to subjugate will
soon feel the feet of the other on his neck–”

“And as a rule the man that of the woman,” cried Madame Venus with
proud mockery, “which you know better than I.”

“Of course, and that is why I don’t have any illusions.”

“You mean you are now my slave without illusions, and for that
reason you shall feel the weight of my foot without mercy.”

“Madame!”

“Don’t you know me yet? Yes, I am _cruel_–since you take so much
delight in that word-and am I not entitled to be so? Man is the one
who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman’s entire but
decisive advantage. Through his passion nature has given man into
woman’s hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her
subject, her white slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the
end is not wise.”

“Exactly your principles,” I interrupted angrily.

“They are based on the experience of thousands of years,” she
replied ironically, while her brown fingers played over the dark fur.
“The more devoted a woman shows herself, the sooner the man sobers
down and becomes domineering. The more cruelly she treats him and the
more faithless she is, the worse she uses him, the more wantonly she
plays with him, the less pity she shows him, by so much the more will
she increase his desire, be loved, worshipped by him. So it has
always been, since the time of Helen and Delilah, down to Catherine
the Second and Lola Montez.”

“I cannot deny,” I said, “that nothing will attract a man more than
the picture of a beautiful, passionate, cruel, and despotic woman who
wantonly changes her favorites without scruple in accordance with her
whim–”

“And in addition wears furs,” exclaimed the divinity.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I know your predilection.”

“Do you know,” I interrupted, “that, since we last saw each other,
you have grown very coquettish.”

“In what way, may I ask?”

“In that there is no way of accentuating your white body to greater
advantage than by these dark furs, and that–”

The divinity laughed.

“You are dreaming,” she cried, “wake up!” and she clasped my arm
with her marble-white hand. “Do wake up,” she repeated raucously with
the low register of her voice. I opened my eyes with difficulty.

I saw the hand which shook me, and suddenly it was brown as bronze;
the voice was the thick alcoholic voice of my cossack servant who
stood before me at his full height of nearly six feet.

“Do get up,” continued the good fellow, “it is really disgraceful.”

“What is disgraceful?”

“To fall asleep in your clothes and with a book besides.” 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 title page–
“by Hegel. Besides it is high time you were starting for Mr.
Severin’s who is expecting us for tea.”

Power play

“A curious dream,” said Severin when I had finished recounting it.
He supported his arms on his knees, resting his face in his delicate, finely
veined hands, and fell to pondering.

I knew that he wouldn’t move for a long time, hardly even breathe.
This actually happened, but I didn’t consider his behavior as in any
way remarkable. I had been on terms of close friendship with him for
nearly three years, and gotten used to his peculiarities. For it
cannot be denied that he was peculiar, although he wasn’t quite the
dangerous madman that the neighborhood, or indeed the entire district
of Kolomea, considered him to be. I found his personality not only
interesting–and that is why many also regarded me a bit mad–but to
a degree sympathetic. For a Galician nobleman and land-owner, and
considering his age–he was hardly over thirty–he displayed
surprising sobriety, a certain seriousness, even pedantry. He lived
according to a minutely elaborated, half-philosophical, half-
practical system, like clock-work; not this alone, but also by the
thermometer, barometer, aerometer, hydrometer, Hippocrates, Hufeland,
Plato, Kant, Knigge, and Lord Chesterfield. But at times he had
violent attacks of sudden passion, and gave the impression of being
about to run with his head right through a wall. At such times every
one preferred to get out of his way.

While he remained silent, the fire sang in the chimney and the large
venerable samovar sang; and the ancient chair in which I sat rocking
to and fro smoking my cigar, and the cricket in the old walls sang
too. I let my eyes glide over the curious apparatus, skeletons of
animals, stuffed birds, globes, plaster-casts, with which his room
was heaped full, until by chance my glance remained fixed on a
picture which I had seen often enough before. But to-day, under the
reflected red glow of the fire, it made an indescribable impression
on me.

It was a large oil painting, done in the robust full-bodied manner
of the Belgian school. Its subject was strange enough.

A beautiful Asian woman with a radiant smile upon her brown face, with
abundant black hair tied into a classical knot, supported on her left arm.
She was almost nude in her dark furs: clad only in the finest of thin black
tights. Her right hand played with a lash, while her black nylon foot rested
carelessly on a man, lying before her like a white slave, like a dog. In the sharply
outlined, but well-formed linaments of this man lay brooding melancholy
and passionate devotion; he looked up to her with the ecstatic burning eye of
a martyr. This man, the footstool for her feet, was Severin, but beardless,
and, it seemed, some ten years younger.

“_Venus in Furs_,” I cried, pointing to the picture. “That is the way
I saw her in my dream.”

“I, too,” said Severin, “only I dreamed my dream with open eyes.”

“Indeed?”

“It is a tiresome story.”

“Your picture apparently suggested my dream,” I continued. “But do
tell me what it means. I can imagine that it played a role in your
life, and perhaps a very decisive one. But the details I can only get
from you.”

“Look at its counterpart,” replied my strange friend, without
heeding my question.

The counterpart was an excellent copy of Titian’s well-known “Venus
with the Mirror” in the Dresden Gallery.

“And what is the significance?”

Severin rose and pointed with his finger at the fur with which
Titian garbed his goddess of love.

“It, too, is a ‘Venus in Furs,'” he said with a slight smile. “I
don’t believe that the old Venetian had any secondary intention. He
simply painted the portrait of some aristocratic Mesalina, and was
tactful enough to let Cupid hold the mirror in which she tests her
majestic allure with cold satisfaction. He looks as though his task
were becoming burdensome enough. The picture is painted flattery.
Later an ‘expert’ in the Rococo period baptized the lady with the
name of Venus. The furs of the despot in which Titian’s fair model
wrapped herself, probably more for fear of a cold than out of
modesty, have become a symbol of the tyranny and cruelty that
constitute woman’s essence and her beauty.

“But enough of that. The picture, as it now exists, is a bitter
satire on our love. Venus in this abstract North, in this icy
Christian world, has to creep into huge black furs so as not to catch
cold–”

Severin laughed, and lighted a fresh cigarette.

Just then the door opened and an attractive, small, Asian woman
entered. She had alert, watchful eyes, was dressed in a maid’s outfit
with thin black pantyhose and sensible shoes. She brought us cold meat
and eggs with our tea. Severin took one of the latter, and decapitated it
with his knife.

“Didn’t I tell you that I want them soft-boiled?” he cried with a
violence that made me tremble.

“But my dear Sevtchu–” she said demurely, her eyes half-lidded.

“Sevtchu, nothing,” he yelled, “you are to obey, obey, do you
understand?” and he tore the _kantchuk_ [Footnote: A long whip with a
short handle.] which was hanging beside the weapons from its hook.

The woman smiled and murmured, “We will address this later,”
She left the chamber slowly, her graceful steps purposeful and measured.
At the door her deep brown eyes gazed at him; a promise?

“Just wait, I’ll get you yet,” he called after her.

“But Severin,” I said placing my hand on his arm, “how can you treat
a pretty young woman thus?”

“Look at the woman,” he replied, blinking humorously with his eyes.
“You are mistaken about our relationship my friend. It is I who in
thrall to her, answerable to her, punished by her. This, is just an act.”

“Nonsense!”

“Nonsense, nothing, you need to look more carefully.”

“She looks so timid–”

“But she is not,” he said animatedly. “Goethe’s ‘you must be hammer or anvil’
is absolutely appropriate to the relation between man and woman.
Didn’t Lady Venus in your dream prove that to you? Woman’s power lies
in man’s passion, and she knows how to use it, if man doesn’t
understand himself. He has only one choice: to be the _tyrant_ over or
the _ white slave_ of woman. As soon as he gives in, his neck is under the
yoke, and the lash will soon fall upon him.”

“Strange maxims!”

“Not maxims, but experiences,” he replied, nodding his head, “_I have
actually felt the lash. It has changed me. Do you care to know how?”

He rose, and got a small manuscript from his massive desk, and put
it in front of me.

“You have already asked about the picture. I have long owed you an
explanation. Here–read!”

Severin sat down by the chimney with his back toward me, and seemed
to dream with open eyes. Silence had fallen again, and again the fire
sang in the chimney, and the samovar and the cricket in the old
walls. I opened the manuscript and read:

Confessions of a supersensual man

The margin of the manuscript bore as motto a variation of the well-
known lines from _Faust_:

“Thou supersensual sensual woer
A woman leads you by the nose.”
–MEPHISTOPHELES.

I turned the title-page and read: “What follows has been compiled
from my diary of that period, because it is impossible ever frankly
to write of one’s past, but in this way everything retains its fresh
colors, the colors of the present.”

Gogol, the Russian Moliere, says–where? well, somewhere–“the real
comic muse is the one under whose laughing mask tears roll down.”

A wonderful saying.

So I have a very curious feeling as I am writing all this down. The
atmosphere seems filled with a stimulating fragrance of flowers,
which overcomes me and gives me a headache. The smoke of the
fireplace curls and condenses into figures, small gray-bearded
kokolds that mockingly point their finger at me. Chubby-cheeked
cupids ride on the arms of my chair and on my knees. I have to smile
involuntarily, even laugh aloud, as I am writing down my adventures.
Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that drips
from my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and it
throbs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.

The days creep along sluggishly in the little Carpathian health-
resort. You see no one, and no one sees you. It is boring enough to
write idyls. I would have leisure here to supply a whole gallery of
paintings, furnish a theater with new pieces for an entire season,
a dozen virtuosos with concertos, trios, and duos, but–what am I
saying–the upshot of it all is that I don’t do much more than to
stretch the canvas, smooth the bow, line the scores. For I am–no
false modesty, Friend Severin; you can lie to others, but you don’t
quite succeed any longer in lying to yourself–I am nothing but a
dilettante, a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and
several other of the so-called unprofitable arts, which, however, at
present secure for their masters the income of a cabinet minister,
or even that of a minor potentate. Above all else I am a dilettante
in life.

Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry.
I never got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the
first stanza. There are people like that who begin everything, and
never finish anything. I am such a one.

But what am I saying?

To the business in hand.

I lie in my window, and the miserable little town, which fills me
with despondency, really seems infinitely full of poetry. How
wonderful the outlook upon the blue wall of high mountains interwoven
with golden sunlight; mountain-torrents weave through them like
ribbons of silver! How clear and blue the heavens into which
snowcapped crags project; how green and fresh the forested slopes;
the meadows on which small herds graze, down to the yellow billows
of grain where reapers stand and bend over and rise up again.

The house in which I live stands in a sort of park, or forest, or
wilderness, whatever one wants to call it, and is very solitary.

Its sole inhabitants are myself, a widow from Selangor, and Madame
Tartakovska, who runs the house, a little old woman, who grows older
and smaller each day. There are also an old dog that limps on one
leg, and a young cat that continually plays with a ball of yarn. This
ball of yarn, I believe, belongs to the widow.

She is said to be really beautiful, this widow, Asian Chinese and still very young,
twenty-four at the most, and very rich. She dwells in the first
story, and I on the ground floor. She always keeps the green blinds
drawn, and has a balcony entirely overgrown with green climbing-
plants. I for my part down below have a comfortable, intimate arbor
of honeysuckle, in which I read and write and paint and sing like a
bird among the twigs. I can look up on the balcony. Sometimes I
actually do so, and then from time to time a white gown gleams
between the dense green network.

Really the beautiful woman up there doesn’t interest me very much,
for I am in love with someone else, and terribly unhappy at that; far
more unhappy than the Knight of Toggenburg or the Chevalier in Manon
l’Escault, because the object of my adoration is of stone.

In the garden, in the tiny wilderness, there is a graceful little
meadow on which a couple of deer graze peacefully. On 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 ever seen in
all my life.

That, however, does not signify much, for I have seen few beautiful
women, or rather few women at all. In love too, I am a dilettante who
never got beyond the preparation, the first act.

But why talk in superlatives, as if something that is beautiful
could be surpassed?

It is sufficient to say that this Venus is beautiful. I love her
passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a
woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally
uniform, eternally calm, stony smile. I literally adore her.

I often lie reading under the leafy covering of a young birch when
the sun broods over the forest. Often I visit that cold, cruel
mistress of mine by night and lie on my knees before her, with the
face pressed against the cold pedestal on which her feet rest, and
my prayers go up to her.

The rising moon, which just now is waning, produces an indescribable
effect. It seems to hover among the trees and submerges the meadow
in its gleam of silver. The goddess stands as if transfigured, and
seems to bathe in the soft moonlight.

Once when I was returning from my devotions by one of the walks
leading to the house, I suddenly saw a woman’s figure, white as
stone, under the illumination of the moon and separated from me
merely by a screen of trees. It seemed as if the beautiful woman of
marble had taken pity on me, become alive, and followed me. I was
seized by a nameless fear, my heart threatened to burst, and instead–

Well, I am a dilettante. As always, I broke down at the second
stanza; rather, on the contrary, I did not break down, but ran away
as fast as my legs would carry me.

The hands of a woman

What an accident! Through a Jew, dealing in photographs I secured a
picture of my ideal. It is a small reproduction of Titian’s “Venus
with the Mirror.” What a woman! I want to write a poem, but instead,
I take the reproduction, and write on it: _Venus in Furs_.

You are cold, while you yourself fan flames. By all means wrap
yourself in your despotic furs, there is no one to whom they are more
appropriate, cruel goddess of love and of beauty!–After a while I add
a few verses from Goethe, which I recently found in his paralipomena
to _Faust_.

TO AMOR

“The pair of wings a fiction are,
The arrows, they are naught but claws,
The wreath conceals the little horns,
For without any doubt he is
Like all the gods of ancient Greece
Only a devil in disguise.”

Then I put the picture before me on my table, supporting it with a
book, and looked at it.

I was enraptured and at the same time filled with a strange fear by
the cold coquetry with which this magnificent woman draped her charms
in her furs of dark sable; by the severity and hardness which lay in
this cold marble-like face. Again I took my pen in hand, and wrote
the following words:

“To love, to be loved, what happiness! And yet how the glamour of
this pales in comparison with the tormenting bliss of worshipping a
woman who makes a plaything out of us, of being the slave of a
beautiful tyrant who treads us pitilessly underfoot. Even Samson, the
hero, the giant, again put himself into the hands of Delilah, even
after she had betrayed him, and again she betrayed him, and the
Philistines bound him and put out his eyes which until the very end
he kept fixed, drunken with rage and love, upon the beautiful
betrayer.”

I was breakfasting in my honey-suckle arbor, and reading in the Book
of Judith. I envied the hero Holofernes because of the regal woman
who cut off his head with a sword, and because of his beautiful
sanguinary end.

“The almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the
hands of a woman.”

This sentence strangely impressed me.

How ungallant these Jews are, I thought. And their God might choose
more becoming expressions when he speaks of the fair sex.

“The almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the
hands of a woman,” I repeated to myself. What shall I do, so that He
may punish me?

A white slave?

Heaven preserve us! Here comes the housekeeper, who has again
diminished somewhat in size overnight. And up there among the green
twinings and garlandings the white gown gleams again. Is it Venus,
or the widow?

This time it happens to be the widow, for Madame Tartakovska makes
a courtesy, and asks me in her name for something to read. I run to
my room, and gather together a couple of volumes.

Later I remember that my picture of Venus is in one of them, and now
it and my effusions are in the hands of the woman up there
together. What will she say?

I hear her laugh.

Is she laughing at me?

It is full moon. It is already peering over the tops of the low
hemlocks that fringe the park. A silvery exhalation fills the
terrace, the groups of trees, all the landscape, as far as the eye
can reach; in the distance it gradually fades away, like trembling
waters.

I cannot resist. I feel a strange urge and call within me. I put on
my clothes again and go out into the garden.

Some power draws me toward the meadow, toward her, who is my
divinity and my beloved.

The night is cool. I feel a slight chill. The atmosphere is heavy
with the odor of flowers and of the forest. It intoxicates.

What solemnity! What music round about! A nightingale sobs. The
stars quiver very faintly in the pale-blue glamour. The meadow seems
smooth, like a mirror, like a covering of ice on a pond.

The statue of Venus stands out august and luminous.

But–what has happened? From the marble shoulders of the goddess a
large dark fur flows down to her heels. I stand dumbfounded and stare
at her in amazement; again an indescribable fear seizes hold of me
and I take flight.

I hasten my steps, and notice that I have missed the main path. As
I am about to turn aside into one of the green walks I see Venus
sitting before me on a stone bench, not the beautiful woman of
marble, but the goddess of love herself with warm blood and throbbing
pulses. She has actually come to life for me, like the statue that
began to breathe for her creator. Indeed, the miracle is only half
completed. Her black hair seems still to be of stone, and her white
gown shimmers like moonlight, or is it satin? From her shoulders the
dark fur flows. But her lips are already reddening and her dark cheeks
begin to take color. Two diabolical rays out of her eyes fall
upon me, and now she laughs.

Her laughter is very mysterious, very–I don’t know. It cannot be
described, it takes my breath away. I flee further, and after every
few steps I have to pause to take breath. The mocking laughter
pursues me through the dark leafy paths, across light open spaces,
through the thicket where only single moonbeams can pierce. I can no
longer find my way, I wander about utterly confused, with cold drops
of perspiration on the forehead.

Finally I stand still, and engage in a short monologue.

It runs–well–one is either very polite to one’s self or very rude.

I say to myself:

“Donkey!”

This word exercises a remarkable effect, like a magic formula, which
sets me free and makes me master of myself.

I am perfectly quiet in a moment.

With considerable pleasure I repeat: “Donkey!”

Now everything is perfectly clear and distinct before my eyes again.
There is the fountain, there the alley of box-wood, there the house
which I am slowly approaching.

Yet–suddenly the appearance is here again. Behind the green screen
through which the moonlight gleams so that it seems embroidered with
silver, I again see the white figure, the woman of stone whom I
adore, whom I fear and flee.

With a couple of leaps I am within the house and catch my breath and
reflect.

What am I really, a little dilettante or a great big donkey?

A sultry morning, the atmosphere is dead, heavily laden with odors,
yet stimulating. Again I am sitting in my honey-suckle arbor, reading
in the Odyssey about the beautiful witch who transformed her admirers
into beasts. A wonderful picture of antique love.

There is a soft rustling in the twigs and blades and the pages of my
book rustle and on the terrace likewise there is a rustling.

A woman’s dress–

She is there–Venus–but without furs–No, this time it is merely
the widow–and yet–Venus-oh, what a woman!

As she stands there in her light morning gown and thin black pantyhose,
looking at me, her slight figure seems full of poetry and grace.
She is quite small; her head is alluring, piquant–
in the sense of the period of the French marquises–rather than formally beautiful.
What enchantment and softness, what roguish charm play about her none too small mouth!
Her brown skin is so smooth and fine; even through the muslin covering her arms and bosom.
How abundant her black hair-it is black, not blonde or golden-yellow–how diabolically
and yet tenderly it plays around her neck!
Now her eyes meet mine like lightnings–they are deep brown, these eyes of hers,
whose power is so indescribable–brown, but as are precious stones, or deep unfathomable mountain lakes.

She observes my confusion, which has even made me discourteous, for
I have remained seated and still have my cap on my head.

She smiles roguishly.

Finally I rise and bow to her. She comes closer, and bursts out into
a loud, almost childlike laughter. I stammer, as only a little
dilettante or great big donkey can do on such an occasion.

Thus our acquaintance began.

The divinity asks for my name, and mentions her own.

Her name is Wanda von Dunajew.

And she is actually my Venus.

“But madame, what put the idea into your head?”

“The little picture in one of your books–”

“I had forgotten about it.”

“The curious notes on its back–”

“Why curious?”

She looked at me.

“I have always wanted to know a real dreamer some time–for the sake
of the change–and you seem one of the maddest of the tribe.”

“Dear lady–in fact–” Again I fell victim to an odious, asinine
stammering, and in addition blushed in a way that might have been
appropriate for a youngster of sixteen, but not for me, who was
almost a full ten years older–

“You were afraid of me last night.”

“Really–of course–but won’t you sit down?”

She sat down, and enjoyed my embarrassment–for actually I was even
more afraid of her now in the full light of day. A delightful
expression of contempt hovered about her upper lip.

“You look at love, and especially woman,” she began, “as something
hostile, something against which you put up a defense, even if
unsuccessfully. You feel that their power over you gives you a
sensation of pleasurable torture, of pungent cruelty. This is a
genuinely modern point of view.”

“You don’t share it?”

“I do share it,” she said quickly and decisively, nodding her
head, so that her curls flew up like red flames; “I have always thought
of how luxurious it might be to own a white slave.”

“The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene
sensuousness of the Greeks–pleasure without pain. I do not believe
in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the
moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse
than a heretic, I am a pagan.

‘Doest thou imagine long the goddess of love took counsel
When in Ida’s grove she was pleased with the hero Achilles?’

“These lines from Goethe’s _Roman Elegy_ have always delighted me.

“In nature there is only the love of the heroic age, ‘when gods and
goddesses loved.’ At that time ‘desire followed the glance, enjoyment
desire.’ All else is factitious, affected, a lie. Christianity, whose
cruel emblem, the cross, has always had for me an element of the
monstrous, brought something alien and hostile into nature and its
innocent instincts.

“The battle of the spirit with the senses is the gospel of modern
man. I do not care to have a share in it.”

“Yes, Mount Olympus would be the place for you, madame,” I replied,
“but we moderns can no longer support the antique serenity, least of
all in love. The idea of sharing a woman, even if it were an Aspasia,
with another revolts us. We are jealous as is our God. For example,
we have made a term abuse out of the name of the glorious Phryne.

“We prefer one of Holbein’s meagre, pallid virgins, which is wholly
ours to an antique Venus, no matter how divinely beautiful she is,
but who loves Anchises to-day, Paris to-morrow, Adonis the day after.
And if nature triumphs in us so that we give our whole glowing,
passionate devotion to such a woman, her serene joy of life appears
to us as something demonic and cruel, and we read into our happiness
a sin which we must expiate.”

“So you too are one of those who rave about modern women, those
miserable hysterical feminine creatures who don’t appreciate a real
man in their somnambulistic search for some dream-man and masculine
ideal. Amid tears and convulsions they daily outrage their Christian
duties; they cheat and are cheated; they always seek again and choose
and reject; they are never happy, and never give happiness. They
accuse fate instead of calmly confessing that they want to love and
live as Helen and Aspasia lived. Nature admits of no permanence in
the relation between man and woman.”

“But, my dear lady–”

“Let me finish. It is only man’s egoism which wants to keep woman
like some buried treasure. All endeavors to introduce permanence in
love, the most changeable thing in this changeable human existence,
have gone shipwreck in spite of religious ceremonies, vows, and
legalities. Can you deny that our Christian world has given itself
over to corruption?”

“But–”

“But you are about to say, the individual who rebels against the
arrangements of society is ostracized, branded, stoned. So be it. I
am willing to take the risk; my principles are very pagan. I will
live my own life as it pleases me. I am willing to do without your
hypocritical respect; I prefer to be happy. The inventors of the
Christian marriage have done well, simultaneously to invent
immortality. I, however, have no wish to live eternally. When with
my last breath everything as far as Wanda von Dunajew is concerned
comes to an end here below, what does it profit me whether my pure
spirit joins the choirs of angels, or whether my dust goes into the
formation of new beings? Shall I belong to one man whom I don’t love,
merely because I have once loved him? No, I do not renounce; I love
everyone who pleases me, and give happiness to everyone who loves me.
Is that ugly? No, it is more beautiful by far, than if cruelly I
enjoy the tortures, which my beauty excites, and virtuously reject
the poor fellow who is pining away for me. I am young, rich, and
beautiful, and I live serenely for the sake of pleasure and
enjoyment.”

While she was speaking her eyes sparkled roguishly, and I had taken
hold of her hands without exactly knowing what to do with them, but
being a genuine dilettante I hastily let go of them again.

“Your frankness,” I said, “delights me, and not it alone–”

My confounded dilettantism again throttled me as though there were
a rope around my neck.

“You were about to say–”

“I was about to say–I was–I am sorry–I interrupted you.”

“How, so?”

A long pause. She is doubtless engaging in a monologue, which
translated into my language would be comprised in the single word,
“donkey.”

“If I may ask,” I finally began, “how did you arrive at these–these
conclusions?”

“Quite simply, my father was an intelligent man. From my cradle onward
I was surrounded by replicas of ancient art; at ten years of age I
read _Gil Blas_, at twelve _La Pucelle_. Where others had
Hop-o’-my-thumb, Bluebeard, Cinderella, as childhood friends, mine
were Venus and Apollo, Hercules and Lackoon. My husband’s personality
was filled with serenity and sunlight. Not even the incurable illness
which fell upon him soon after our marriage could long cloud his brow.
On the very night of his death he took me in his arms, and during the
many months when he lay dying in his wheel chair, he often said
jokingly to me: ‘Well, have you already picked out a lover?’ I blushed
with shame. ‘Don’t deceive me,’ he added on one occasion, ‘that would
seem ugly to me, but pick out an attractive lover, or preferably
several. You are a splendid woman, but still half a child, and you
need toys.’

“I suppose, I hardly need tell you that during his life time I had
no lover; but it was through him that I have become what I am, a
woman of Greece.”

“A goddess,” I interrupted.

“Which one,” she smiled.

“Venus.”

She threatened me with her finger and knitted her brows. “Perhaps,
even a ‘Venus in Furs.’ Watch out, I have a large, very large fur,
with which I could cover you up entirely, and I have a mind to catch
you in it as in a net.”

“Do you believe,” I said quickly, for an idea which seemed good, in
spite of its conventionality and triteness, flashed into my head, “do
you believe that your theories could be carried into execution at the
present time, that Venus would be permitted to stray with impunity
among our railroads and telegraphs in all her undraped beauty and
serenity?”

“_Undraped_, of course not, but in furs,” she replied smiling, “would
you care to see mine?”

“And then–”

“What then?”

“Beautiful, free, serene, and happy human beings, such as the Greeks
were, are only possible when it is permitted to have _slaves_ who will
perform the prosaic tasks of every day for them and above all else
labor for them.”

“Of course,” she replied playfully, “an Olympian divinity, such as
I am, requires a whole army of slaves. Beware of me!”

“Why?”

I myself was frightened at the hardiness with which I uttered this
“why”; 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 lightly, as if she were discussing some
trifling matter, “Do you want to be my white slave?”

“There is no equality in love,” I replied solemnly. “Whenever it is
a matter of choice for me of ruling or being ruled, it seems much
more satisfactory to me to be the slave of a beautiful woman. But
where shall I find the woman who knows how to rule, calmly, full of
self-confidence, even harshly, and not seek to gain her power by
means of petty nagging?”

“Oh, that might not be so difficult.”

“You think–“

“I–for instance–” she laughed and leaned far back–“I have a real
talent for despotism–I also have the necessary furs–but last night
you were really seriously afraid of me!”

“Quite seriously.”

“And now?”

“Now, I am more afraid of you than ever!”

We are together every day, I and–Venus; we are together a great
deal. We breakfast in my honey-suckle arbor, and have tea in her
little sitting-room. I have an opportunity to unfold all my small,
very small talents. Of what use would have been my study of all the
various sciences, my playing at all the arts, if I were unable in the
case of a pretty, little woman–

But this woman is by no means little; in fact she impresses me
tremendously. I made a drawing of her to-day, and felt particularly
clearly, how inappropriate the modern way of dressing is for a cameo-
head like hers. The configuration of her face has little of the
Roman, but much of the Greek.

Sometimes I should like to paint her as Psyche, and then again as
Astarte. It depends upon the expression in her eyes, whether it is
vaguely dreamy, or half-consuming, filled with tired desire.
She, however, insists that it be a portrait-likeness.

I shall make her a present of furs.

How could I have any doubts? If not for her, for whom would princely
furs be suitable?