“You are a strange person,” continued Wanda. “You wish to possess me at
any price?”
“Yes, at any price.”
“But of what value, for instance, would that be?”—She pondered; a
lurking uncanny expression entered her eyes—“If I no longer loved you,
if I belonged to another.”
A shudder ran through me. I looked at her She stood firmly and
confident before me, and her eyes disclosed a cold gleam.
“You see,” she continued, “the very thought frightens you.” A beautiful
smile suddenly illuminated her face.
“I feel a perfect horror, when I imagine, that the woman I love and who
has responded to my love could give herself to another regardless of
me. But have I still a choice? If I love such a woman, even unto
madness, shall I turn my back to her and lose everything for the sake
of a bit of boastful strength; shall I send a bullet through my brains?
I have two ideals of woman. If I cannot obtain the one that is noble
and simple, the woman who will faithfully and truly share my life, well
then I don’t want anything half-way or lukewarm. Then I would rather be
subject to a woman without virtue, fidelity, or pity. Such a woman in
her magnificent selfishness is likewise an ideal. If I am not permitted
to enjoy the happiness of love, fully and wholly, I want to taste its
pains and torments to the very dregs; I want to be maltreated and
betrayed by the woman I love, and the more cruelly the better. This too
is a luxury.”
“Have you lost your senses,” cried Wanda.
“I love you with all my soul,” I continued, “with all my senses, and
your presence and personality are absolutely essential to me, if I am
to go on living. Choose between my ideals. Do with me what you will,
make of me your husband or your slave.”
“Very well,” said Wanda, contracting her small but strongly arched
brows, “it seems to me it would be rather entertaining to have a man,
who interests me and loves me, completely in my power; at least I shall
not lack pastime. You were imprudent enough to leave the choice to me.
Therefore I choose; I want you to be my slave, I shall make a plaything
for myself out of you!”
“Oh, please do,” I cried half-shuddering, half-enraptured. “If the
foundation of marriage depends on equality and agreement, it is
likewise true that the greatest passions rise out of opposites. We are
such opposites, almost enemies. That is why my love is part hate, part
fear. In such a relation only one can be hammer and the other anvil. I
wish to be the anvil. I cannot be happy when I look down upon the woman
I love. I want to adore a woman, and this I can only do when she is
cruel towards me.”
“But, Severin,” replied Wanda, almost angrily, “do you believe me
capable of maltreating a man who loves me as you do, and whom I love?”
“Why not, if I adore you the more on this account? _It is possible to
love really only that which stands above us,_ a woman, who through her
beauty, temperament, intelligence, and strength of will subjugates us
and becomes a despot over us.”
“Then that which repels others, attracts you.”
“Yes. That is the strange part of me.”
“Perhaps, after all, there isn’t anything so very unique or strange in
all your passions, for who doesn’t love beautiful furs? And everyone
knows and feels how closely sexual love and cruelty are related.”
“But in my case all these elements are raised to their highest degree,”
I replied.
“In other words, reason has little power over you, and you are by
nature, soft, sensual, yielding.”
“Were the martyrs also soft and sensual by nature?”
“The martyrs?”
“On the contrary, they were _supersensual men,_ who found enjoyment in
suffering. They sought out the most frightful tortures, even death
itself, as others seek joy, and as they were, so am I—_supersensual.”_
“Have a care that in being such, you do not become a martyr to love,
the _martyr of a woman_.”
We are sitting on Wanda’s little balcony in the mellow fragrant summer
night. A twofold roof is above us, first the green ceiling of
climbing-plants, and then the vault of heaven sown with innumerable
stars. The low wailing love-call of a cat rises from the park. I am
sitting on footstool at the feet of my divinity, and am telling her of
my childhood.
“And even then all these strange tendencies were distinctly marked in
you?” asked Wanda.
“Of course, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have them. Even in my
cradle, so mother has told me, I was _supersensual._ I scorned the
healthy breast of my nurse, and had to be brought up on goats’ milk. As
a little boy I was mysteriously shy before women, which really was only
an expression of an inordinate interest in them. I was oppressed by the
gray arches and half-darknesses of the church, and actually afraid of
the glittering altars and images of the saints. Secretly, however, I
sneaked as to a secret joy to a plaster-Venus which stood in my
father’s little library. I kneeled down before her, and to her I said
the prayers I had been taught—the Paternoster, the Ave Maria, and the
Credo.
“Once at night I left my bed to visit her. The sickle of the moon was
my light and showed me the goddess in a pale-blue cold light. I
prostrated myself before her and kissed her cold feet, as I had seen
our peasants do when they kissed the feet of the dead Savior.
“An irresistible yearning seized me.
“I got up and embraced the beautiful cold body and kissed the cold
lips. A deep shudder fell upon me and I fled, and later in a dream, it
seemed to me, as if the goddess stood beside my bed, threatening me
with up-raised arm.
“I was sent to school early and soon reached the gymnasium. I
passionately grasped at everything which promised to make the world of
antiquity accessible to me. Soon I was more familiar with the gods of
Greece than with the religion of Jesus. I was with Paris when he gave
the fateful apple to Venus, I saw Troy burn, and followed Ulysses on
his wanderings. The prototypes of all that is beautiful sank deep into
my soul, and consequently at the time when other boys are coarse and
obscene, I displayed an insurmountable aversion to everything base,
vulgar, unbeautiful.
“To me, the maturing youth, love for women seemed something especially
base and unbeautiful, for it showed itself to me first in all its
commonness. I avoided all contact with the fair sex; in short, I was
supersensual to madness.
“When I was about fourteen my mother had a charming chamber-maid,
young, attractive, with a figure just budding into womanhood. I was
sitting one day studying my Tacitus and growing enthusiastic over the
virtues of the ancient Teutons, while she was sweeping my room.
Suddenly she stopped, bent down over me, in the meantime holding fast
to the broom, and a pair of fresh, full, adorable lips touched mine.
The kiss of the enamoured little cat ran through me like a shudder, but
I raised up my _Germania_, like a shield against the temptress, and
indignantly left the room.”
Wanda broke out in loud laughter. “It would, indeed, be hard to find
another man like you, but continue.”
“There is another unforgetable incident belonging to that period,” I
continued my story. “Countess Sobol, a distant aunt of mine, was
visiting my parents. She was a beautiful majestic woman with an
attractive smile. I, however, hated her, for she was regarded by the
family as a sort of Messalina. My behavior toward her was as rude,
malicious, and awkward as possible.
“One day my parents drove to the capital of the district. My aunt
determined to take advantage of their absence, and to exercise judgment
over me. She entered unexpectedly in her fur-lined _kazabaika,_2
followed by the cook, kitchen-maid, and the cat of a chamber-maid whom
I had scorned. Without asking any questions, they seized me and bound
me hand and foot, in spite of my violent resistance. Then my aunt, with
an evil smile, rolled up her sleeve and began to whip me with a stout
switch. She whipped so hard that the blood flowed, and that, at last,
notwithstanding my heroic spirit, I cried and wept and begged for
mercy. She then had me untied, but I had to get down on my knees and
thank her for the punishment and kiss her hand.
[Footnote 2: A woman’s jacket.]
“Now you understand the supersensual fool! Under the lash of a
beautiful woman my senses first realized the meaning of woman. In her
fur-jacket she seemed to me like a wrathful queen, and from then on my
aunt became the most desirable woman on God’s earth.
“My Cato-like austerity, my shyness before woman, was nothing but an
excessive feeling for beauty. In my imagination sensuality became a
sort of cult. I took an oath to myself that I would not squander its
holy wealth upon any ordinary person, but I would reserve it for an
ideal woman, if possible for the goddess of love herself.
“I went to the university at a very early age. It was in the capital
where my aunt lived. My room looked at that time like Doctor Faustus’s.
Everything in it was in a wild confusion. There were huge closets
stuffed full of books, which I bought for a song from a Jewish dealer
on the Servanica;3 there were globes, atlases, flasks, charts of the
heavens, skeletons of animals, skulls, the busts of eminent men. It
looked as though Mephistopheles might have stepped out from behind the
huge green store as a wandering scholiast at any moment.
[Footnote 3: The street of the Jews in Lemberg.]
“I studied everything in a jumble without system, without selection:
chemistry, alchemy, history, astronomy, philosophy, law, anatomy, and
literature; I read Homer, Virgil, Ossian, Schiller, Goethe,
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Molière, the Koran, the Kosmos,
Casanova’s Memoirs. I grew more confused each day, more fantastical,
more supersensual. All the time a beautiful ideal woman hovered in my
imagination. Every so and so often she appeared before me like a vision
among my leather-bound books and dead bones, lying on a bed of roses,
surrounded by cupids. Sometimes she appeared gowned like the Olympians
with the stern white face of the plaster Venus; sometimes in braids of
a rich brown, blue-eyes, in my aunt’s red velvet _kazabaika,_ trimmed
with ermine.
“One morning when she had again risen out of the golden mist of my
imagination in all her smiling beauty, I went to see Countess Sobol,
who received me in a friendly, even cordial manner. She gave me a kiss
of welcome, which put all my senses in a turmoil. She was probably
about forty years old, but like most well-preserved women of the world,
still very attractive. She wore as always her fur-edged jacket. This
time it was one of green velvet with brown marten. But nothing of the
sternness which had so delighted me the other time was now discernable.
“On the contrary, there was so little of cruelty in her that without
any more ado she let me adore her.
“Only too soon did she discover my supersensual folly and innocence,
and it pleased her to make me happy. As for myself—I was as happy as a
young god. What rapture for me to be allowed to lie before her on my
knees, and to kiss her hands, those with which she had scourged me!
What marvellous hands they were, of beautiful form, delicate, rounded,
and white, with adorable dimples! I really was in love with her hands
only. I played with them, let them submerge and emerge in the dark fur,
held them against the light, and was unable to satiate my eyes with
them.”
Wanda involuntarily looked at her hand; I noticed it, and had to smile.
“From the way in which the supersensual predominated in me in those
days you can see that I was in love only with the cruel lashes I
received from my aunt; and about two years later when I paid court to a
young actress only in the roles she played. Still later I became the
admirer of a respectable woman. She acted the part of irreproachable
virtue, only in the end to betray me with a rich Jew. You see, it is
because I was betrayed, sold, by a woman who feigned the strictest
principles and the highest ideals, that I hate that sort of poetical,
sentimental virtue so intensely. Give me rather a woman who is honest
enough to say to me: I am a Pompadour, a Lucretia Borgia, and I am
ready to adore her.”
Wanda rose and opened the window.
“You have a curious way of arousing one’s imagination, stimulating all
one’s nerves, and making one’s pulses beat faster. You put an aureole
on vice, provided only if it is honest. Your ideal is a daring
courtesan of genius. Oh, you are the kind of man who will corrupt a
woman to her very last fiber.”
* * * * *
In the middle of the night there was a knock at my window; I got up,
opened it, and was startled. Without stood “Venus in Furs,” just as she
had appeared to me the first time.
“You have disturbed me with your stories; I have been tossing about in
bed, and can’t go to sleep,” she said. “Now come and stay with me.”
“In a moment.”
As I entered Wanda was crouching by the fireplace where she had kindled
a small fire.
“Autumn is coming,” she began, “the nights are really quite cold
already. I am afraid you may not like it, but I can’t put off my furs
until the room is sufficiently warm.”
“Not like it—you are joking—you know—” I threw my arm around her, and
kissed her.
“Of course, I know, but why this great fondness for furs?”
“I was born with it,” I replied. “I already had it as a child.
Furthermore furs have a stimulating effect on all highly organized
natures. This is due both to general and natural laws. It is a physical
stimulus which sets you tingling, and no one can wholly escape it.
Science has recently shown a certain relationship between electricity
and warmth; at any rate, their effects upon the human organism are
related. The torrid zone produces more passionate characters, a heated
atmosphere stimulation. Likewise with electricity. This is the reason
why the presence of cats exercises such a magic influence upon
highly-organized men of intellect. This is why these long-tailed Graces
of the animal kingdom, these adorable, scintillating electric batteries
have been the favorite animal of a Mahommed, Cardinal Richelieu,
Crebillon, Rousseau, Wieland.”
“A woman wearing furs, then,” cried Wanda, “is nothing else than a
large cat, an augmented electric battery?”
“Certainly,” I replied. “That is my explanation of the symbolic meaning
which fur has acquired as the attribute of power and beauty. Monarchs
and the dominant higher nobility in former times used it in this sense
for their costume, exclusively; great painters used it only for queenly
beauty. The most beautiful frame, which Raphael could find for the
divine forms of Fornarina and Titian for the roseate body of his
beloved, was dark furs.”
“Thanks for the learned discourse on love,” said Wanda, “but you
haven’t told me everything. You associate something entirely individual
with furs.”
“Certainly,” I cried. “I have repeatedly told you that suffering has a
peculiar attraction for me. Nothing can intensify my passion more than
tyranny, cruelty, and especially the faithlessness of a beautiful
woman. And I cannot imagine this woman, this strange ideal derived from
an aesthetics of ugliness, this soul of Nero in the body of a Phryne,
except in furs.”
“I understand,” Wanda interrupted. “It gives a dominant and imposing
quality to a woman.”
“Not only that,” I continued. “You know I am _supersensual._ With me
everything has its roots in the imagination, and thence it receives its
nourishment. I was already pre-maturely developed and highly sensitive,
when at about the age of ten the legends of the martyrs fell into my
hands. I remember reading with a kind of horror, which really was
rapture, of how they pined in prisons, were laid on the gridiron,
pierced with arrows, boiled in pitch, thrown to wild animals, nailed to
the cross, and suffered the most horrible torment with a kind of joy.
To suffer and endure cruel torture from then on seemed to me exquisite
delight, especially when it was inflicted by a beautiful woman, for
ever since I can remember all poetry and everything demonic was for me
concentrated in woman. I literally carried the idea into a sort of
cult.
“I felt there was something sacred in sex; in fact, it was the only
sacred thing. In woman and her beauty I saw something divine, because
the most important function of existence—the continuation of the
species—is her vocation. To me woman represented a personification of
nature, _Isis_, and man was her priest, her slave. In contrast to him
she was cruel like nature herself who tosses aside whatever has served
her purposes as soon as she no longer has need for it. To him her
cruelties, even death itself, still were sensual raptures.
“I envied King Gunther whom the mighty Brunhilde fettered on the bridal
night, and the poor troubadour whom his capricious mistress had sewed
in the skins of wolves to have him hunted like game. I envied the
Knight Ctirad whom the daring Amazon Scharka craftily ensnared in a
forest near Prague, and carried to her castle Divin, where, after
having amused herself a while with him, she had him broken on the
wheel—”
“Disgusting,” cried Wanda. “I almost wish you might fall into the hands
of a woman of their savage race. In the wolf’s skin, under the teeth of
the dogs, or upon the wheel, you would lose the taste for your kind of
poetry.”
“Do you think so? I hardly do.”
“Have you actually lost your senses.”
“Possibly. But let me go on. I developed a perfect passion for reading
stories in which the extremest cruelties were described. I loved
especially to look at pictures and prints which represented them. All
the sanguinary tyrants that ever occupied a throne; the inquisitors who
had the heretics tortured, roasted, and butchered; all the woman whom
the pages of history have recorded as lustful, beautiful, and violent
women like Libussa, Lucretia Borgia, Agnes of Hungary, Queen Margot,
Isabeau, the Sultana Roxolane, the Russian Czarinas of last century—all
these I saw in furs or in robes bordered with ermine.”
“And so furs now rouse strange imaginings in you,” said Wanda, and
simultaneously she began to drape her magnificent fur-cloak
coquettishly about her, so that the dark shining sable played
beautifully around her bust and arms. “Well, how do you feel now, half
broken on the wheel?”
Her piercing green eyes rested on me with a peculiar mocking
satisfaction. Overcome by desire, I flung myself down before her, and
threw my arms about her.
“Yes—you have awakened my dearest dream,” I cried. “It has slept long
enough.”
“And this is?” She put her hand on my neck.
I was seized with a sweet intoxication under the influence of this warm
little hand and of her regard, which, tenderly searching, fell upon me
through her half-closed lids.
_“To be the slave of a woman, a beautiful woman, whom I love, whom I
worship.”_
“And who on that account maltreats you,” interrupted Wanda, laughing.
“Yes, who fetters me and whips me, treads me underfoot, the while she
gives herself to another.”
“And who in her wantonness will go so far as to make a present of you
to your successful rival when driven insane by jealousy you must meet
him face to face, who will turn you over to his absolute mercy. Why
not? This final tableau doesn’t please you so well?”