“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?
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 white woman up there together.
What will she say?