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+Project Gutenberg's Venus in Furs, by Ritter von Leopold Sacher-Masoch
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Venus in Furs
+
+Author: Ritter von Leopold Sacher-Masoch
+
+Translator: Fernanda Savage
+
+Posting Date: October 20, 2011 [EBook #6852]
+Release Date: November, 2004
+[This file was first posted on February 2, 2003]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK VENUS IN FURS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Avinash Kothare, Tom Allen, Tiffany Vergon,
+Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+VENUS IN FURS
+
+
+Of this book, intended for
+private circulation, only
+1225 copies have been
+printed, and type afterward
+distributed.
+
+
+
+
+VENUS IN FURS
+
+By
+
+LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH
+
+
+Translated from the German
+
+By
+
+FERNANDA SAVAGE
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in Lemberg, Austrian Galicia, on
+January 27, 1836. He studied jurisprudence at Prague and Graz, and in
+1857 became a teacher at the latter university. He published several
+historical works, but soon gave up his academic career to devote
+himself wholly to literature. For a number of years he edited the
+international review, _Auf der Hohe_, at Leipzig, but later removed to
+Paris, for he was always strongly Francophile. His last years he spent
+at Lindheim in Hesse, Germany, where he died on March 9, 1895. In 1873
+he married Aurora von Rumelin, who wrote a number of novels under the
+pseudonym of Wanda von Dunajew, which it is interesting to note is the
+name of the heroine of _Venus in Furs_. Her sensational memoirs which
+have been the cause of considerable controversy were published in 1906.
+
+During his career as writer an endless number of works poured from
+Sacher-Masoch's pen. Many of these were works of ephemeral journalism,
+and some of them unfortunately pure sensationalism, for economic
+necessity forced him to turn his pen to unworthy ends.
+
+There is, however, a residue among his works which has a distinct
+literary and even greater psychological value. His principal literary
+ambition was never completely fulfilled. It was a somewhat
+programmatic plan to give a picture of contemporary life in all its
+various aspects and interrelations under the general title of the
+_Heritage of Cain_. This idea was probably derived from Balzac's
+_Comedie Humaine_. The whole was to be divided into six subdivisions
+with the general titles _Love, Property, Money, The State, War,_ and
+_Death_. Each of these divisions in its turn consisted of six novels,
+of which the last was intended to summarize the author's conclusions
+and to present his solution for the problems set in the others.
+
+This extensive plan remained unachieved, and only the first two parts,
+_Love_ and _Property_, were completed. Of the other sections only
+fragments remain. The present novel, _Venus in Furs_, forms the fifth
+in the series, _Love_.
+
+The best of Sacher-Masoch's work is characterized by a swift
+narration and a graphic representation of character and scene and a
+rich humor. The latter has made many of his shorter stories dealing
+with his native Galicia little masterpieces of local color.
+
+There is, however, another element in his work which has caused his
+name to become as eponym for an entire series of phenomena at one end
+of the psycho-sexual scale. This gives his productions a peculiar
+psychological value, though it cannot be denied also a morbid tinge
+that makes them often repellent. However, it is well to remember that
+nature is neither good nor bad, neither altruistic nor egoistic, and
+that it operates through the human psyche as well as through crystals
+and plants and animals with the same inexorable laws.
+
+Sacher-Masoch was the poet of the anomaly now generally known as
+_masochism_. By this is meant the desire on the part of the individual
+affected of desiring himself completely and unconditionally subject to
+the will of a person of the opposite sex, and being treated by this
+person as by a master, to be humiliated, abused, and tormented, even
+to the verge of death. This motive is treated in all its innumerable
+variations. As a creative artist Sacher-Masoch was, of course, on the
+quest for the absolute, and sometimes, when impulses in the human
+being assume an abnormal or exaggerated form, there is just for a
+moment a flash that gives a glimpse of the thing in itself.
+
+If any defense were needed for the publication of work like
+Sacher-Masoch's it is well to remember that artists are the historians
+of the human soul and one might recall the wise and tolerant Montaigne's
+essay _On the Duty of Historians_ where he says, "One may cover over
+secret actions, but to be silent on what all the world knows, and things
+which have had effects which are public and of so much consequence is an
+inexcusable defect."
+
+And the curious interrelation between cruelty and sex, again and
+again, creeps into literature. Sacher-Masoch has not created anything
+new in this. He has simply taken an ancient motive and developed it
+frankly and consciously, until, it seems, there is nothing further to
+say on the subject. To the violent attacks which his books met he
+replied in a polemical work, _Über den Wert der Kritik_.
+
+It would be interesting to trace the masochistic tendency as it occurs
+throughout literature, but no more can be done than just to allude to
+a few instances. The theme recurs continually in the _Confessions_ of
+Jean Jacques Rousseau; it explains the character of the chevalier in
+Prévost's _Manon l'Escault_. Scenes of this nature are found in Zola's
+_Nana_, in Thomas Otway's _Venice Preserved_, in Albert Juhelle's _Les
+Pecheurs d'Hommes_, in Dostojevski. In disguised and unrecognized form
+it constitutes the undercurrent of much of the sentimental literature
+of the present day, though in most cases the authors as well as the
+readers are unaware of the pathological elements out of which their
+characters are built.
+
+In all these strange and troubled waters of the human spirit one might
+wish for something of the serene and simple attitude of the ancient
+world. Laurent Tailhade has an admirable passage in his _Platres et
+Marbres_, which is well worth reproducing in this connection:
+
+"Toutefois, les Hellènes, dans, leurs cités de lumière, de douceur
+et d'harmonie, avaient une indulgence qu'on peut nommer scientifique
+pour les troubles amoureux de l'esprit. S'ils ne regardaient pas
+l'aliéné comme en proie a la visitation d'un dieu (idée orientale et
+fataliste), du moins ils savaient que l'amour est une sorte
+d'envoûtement, une folie où se manifeste l'animosité des puissances
+cosmiques. Plus tard, le christianisme enveloppa les âmes de
+ténèbres. Ce fut la grande nuit. L'Église condamna tout ce qui lui
+parût neuf ou menaçant pour les dogmes implaçable qui reduisaient le
+monde en esclavage."
+
+Among Sacher-Masoch's works, _Venus in Furs_ is one of the most
+typical and outstanding. In spite of melodramatic elements and other
+literary faults, it is unquestionably a sincere work, written without
+any idea of titillating morbid fancies. One feels that in the hero
+many subjective elements have been incorporated, which are a
+disadvantage to the work from the point of view of literature, but on
+the other hand raise the book beyond the sphere of art, pure and
+simple, and make it one of those appalling human documents which
+belong, part to science and part to psychology. It is the confession
+of a deeply unhappy man who could not master his personal tragedy of
+existence, and so sought to unburden his soul in writing down the
+things he felt and experienced. The reader who will approach the book
+from this angle and who will honestly put aside moral prejudices and
+prepossessions will come away from the perusal of this book with a
+deeper understanding of this poor miserable soul of ours and a light
+will be cast into dark places that lie latent in all of us.
+
+Sacher-Masoch's works have held an established position in European
+letters for something like half a century, and the author himself was
+made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French Government in
+1883, on the occasion of his literary jubilee. When several years ago
+cheap reprints were brought out on the Continent and attempts were
+made by various guardians of morality--they exist in all countries
+--to have them suppressed, the judicial decisions were invariably
+against the plaintiff and in favor of the publisher. Are Americans
+children that they must be protected from books which any European
+school-boy can purchase whenever he wishes? However, such seems to be
+the case, and this translation, which has long been in preparation,
+consequently appears in a limited edition printed for subscribers
+only. In another connection Herbert Spencer once used these words:
+"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to
+fill the world with fools." They have a very pointed application in
+the case of a work like _Venus in Furs_.
+
+F. S.
+
+Atlantic City
+April, 1921
+
+
+
+
+VENUS IN FURS
+
+
+
+
+  _"But the Almighty Lord hath struck him,
+  and hath delivered him into the hands of
+  a woman."_
+
+--The Vulgate, Judith, xvi. 7.
+
+
+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 pale face with its white 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
+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."
+
+"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 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 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 white 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."
+
+"A curious dream," said Severin when I had finished. 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 woman with a radiant smile upon her face, with abundant
+hair tied into a classical knot, on which white powder lay like a
+soft hoarfrost, was resting on an ottoman, supported on her left arm.
+She was nude in her dark furs. Her right hand played with a lash,
+while her bare foot rested carelessly on a man, lying before her like
+a 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, stoutish, blonde girl
+entered. She had wise, kindly eyes, was dressed in black silk, and
+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 the young woman tremble.
+
+"But my dear Sevtchu--" she said timidly.
+
+"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 fled from the chamber quickly and timidly like a doe.
+
+"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.
+"Had I flattered her, she would have cast the noose around my neck,
+but now, when I bring her up with the _kantchuk_, she adores me."
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+"Nonsense, nothing, that is the way you have to break in women."
+
+"Well, if you like it, live like a pasha in your harem, but don't
+lay down theories for me--"
+
+"Why 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 _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_. I am cured. 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 wooer
+   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 Lemberg, 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, 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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+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?
+
+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?
+
+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 white 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 cheeks
+begin to take color. Two diabolical green 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 white morning gown, looking at me, her
+slight figure seems full of poetry and grace. She is neither large, nor
+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
+skin is so infinitely delicate, that the blue veins show through
+everywhere; even through the muslin covering her arms and bosom. How
+abundant her red hair-it is red, not blonde or golden-yellow--how
+diabolically and yet tenderly it plays around her neck! Now her eyes
+meet mine like green lightnings--they are green, these eyes of hers,
+whose power is so indescribable--green, 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 not share it," she said quickly and decisively, shaking her
+head, so that her curls flew up like red flames.
+
+"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 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?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was with her yesterday evening, reading the _Roman Elegies_ to her.
+Then I laid the book aside, and improvised something for her. She
+seemed pleased; rather more than that, she actually hung upon my
+words, and her bosom heaved.
+
+Or was I mistaken?
+
+The rain beat in melancholy fashion on the window-panes, the fire
+crackled in the fireplace in wintery comfort. I felt quite at home
+with her, and for a moment lost all my fear of this beautiful woman;
+I kissed her hand, and she permitted it.
+
+Then I sat down at her feet and read a short poem I had written for
+her.
+
+  VENUS IN FURS.
+
+  "Place thy foot upon thy slave,
+  Oh thou, half of hell, half of dreams;
+  Among the shadows, dark and grave,
+  Thy extended body softly gleams."
+
+And--so on. This time I really got beyond the first stanza. At her
+request I gave her the poem in the evening, keeping no copy. And now
+as I am writing this down in my diary I can only remember the first
+stanza.
+
+I am filled with a very curious sensation. I don't believe that I am
+in love with Wanda; I am sure that at our first meeting, I felt
+nothing of the lightning-like flashes of passion. But I feel how her
+extraordinary, really divine beauty is gradually winding magic snares
+about me. It isn't any spiritual sympathy which is growing in me; it
+is a physical subjection, coming on slowly, but for that reason more
+absolutely.
+
+I suffer under it more and more each day, and she--she merely smiles.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Without any provocation she suddenly said to me to-day: "You
+interest me. Most men are very commonplace, without verve or poetry.
+In you there is a certain depth and capacity for enthusiasm and a
+deep seriousness, which delight me. I might learn to love you."
+
+After a short but severe shower we went out together to the meadow
+and the statue of Venus. All about us the earth steamed; mists rose
+up toward heaven like clouds of incense; a shattered rainbow still
+hovered in the air. The trees were still shedding drops, but sparrows
+and finches were already hopping from twig to twig. They are
+twittering gaily, as if very much pleased at something. Everything
+is filled with a fresh fragrance. We cannot cross the meadow for it
+is still wet. In the sunlight it looks like a small pool, and the
+goddess of love seems to rise from the undulations of its mirror-like
+surface. About her head a swarm of gnats is dancing, which,
+illuminated by the sun, seem to hover above her like an aureole.
+
+Wanda is enjoying the lovely scene. As all the benches along the
+walk are still wet, she supports herself on my arm to rest a while.
+A soft weariness permeates her whole being, her eyes are half closed;
+I feel the touch of her breath on my cheek.
+
+How I managed to get up courage enough I really don't know, but I
+took hold of her hand, asking,
+
+"Could you love me?"
+
+"Why not," she replied, letting her calm, clear look rest upon me,
+but not for long.
+
+A moment later I am kneeling before her, pressing my burning face
+against the fragrant muslin of her gown.
+
+"But Severin--this isn't right," she cried.
+
+But I take hold of her little foot, and press my lips upon it.
+
+"You are getting worse and worse!" she cried. She tore herself free,
+and fled rapidly toward the house, the while her adorable slipper
+remained in my hand.
+
+Is it an omen?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All day long I didn't dare to go near her. Toward evening as I was
+sitting in my arbor her gay red head peered suddenly through the
+greenery of her balcony. "Why don't you come up?" he called down
+impatiently.
+
+I ran upstairs, and at the top lost courage again. I knocked very
+lightly. She didn't say come-in, but opened the door herself, and
+stood on the threshold.
+
+"Where is my slipper?"
+
+"It is--I have--I want," I stammered.
+
+"Get it, and then we will have tea together, and chat."
+
+When I returned, she was engaged in making tea. I ceremoniously
+placed the slipper on the table, and stood in the corner like a child
+awaiting punishment.
+
+I noticed that her brows were slightly contracted, and there was an
+expression of hardness and dominance about her lips which delighted
+me.
+
+All of a sudden she broke out laughing.
+
+"So--you are really in love--with me?"
+
+"Yes, and I suffer more from it than you can imagine?"
+
+"You suffer?" she laughed again.
+
+I was revolted, mortified, annihilated, but all this was quite
+useless.
+
+"Why?" she continued, "I like you, with all my heart."
+
+She gave me her hand, and looked at me in the friendliest fashion.
+
+"And will you be my wife?"
+
+Wanda looked at me--how did she look at me? I think first of all
+with surprise, and then with a tinge of irony.
+
+"What has given you so much courage, all at once?"
+
+"Courage?"
+
+"Yes courage, to ask anyone to be your wife, and me in particular?"
+She lifted up the slipper. "Was it through a sudden friendship with
+this? But joking aside. Do you really wish to marry me?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, Severin, that is a serious matter. I believe, you love me,
+and I care for you too, and what is more important each of us finds
+the other interesting. There is no danger that we would soon get
+bored, but, you know, I am a fickle person, and just for that reason
+I take marriage seriously. If I assume obligations, I want to be able
+to meet them. But I am afraid--no--it would hurt you."
+
+"Please be perfectly frank with me," I replied.
+
+"Well then honestly, I don't believe I could love a man longer than--"
+She inclined her head gracefully to one side and mused.
+
+"A year."
+
+"What do you imagine--a month perhaps."
+
+"Not even me?"
+
+"Oh you--perhaps two."
+
+"Two months!" I exclaimed.
+
+"Two months is very long."
+
+"You go beyond antiquity, madame."
+
+"You see, you cannot stand the truth."
+
+Wanda walked across the room and leaned back against the fireplace,
+watching me and resting one of her arms on the mantelpiece.
+
+"What shall I do with you?" she began anew.
+
+"Whatever you wish," I replied with resignation, "whatever will give
+you pleasure."
+
+"How illogical!" she cried, "first you want to make me your wife,
+and then you offer yourself to me as something to toy with."
+
+"Wanda--I love you."
+
+"Now we are back to the place where we started. You love me, and
+want to make me your wife, but I don't want to enter into a new
+marriage, because I doubt the permanence of both my and your
+feelings."
+
+"But if I am willing to take the risk with you?" I replied.
+
+"But it also depends on whether I am willing to risk it with you,"
+she said quietly. "I can easily imagine belonging to one man for my
+entire life, but he would have to be a whole man, a man who would
+dominate me, who would subjugate me by his inate strength, do you
+understand? And every man--I know this very well--as soon as he falls
+in love becomes weak, pliable, ridiculous. He puts himself into the
+woman's hands, kneels down before her. The only man whom I could love
+permanently would be he before whom I should have to kneel. I've gotten
+to like you so much, however, that I'll try it with you."
+
+I fell down at her feet.
+
+"For heaven's sake, here you are kneeling already," she said
+mockingly. "You are making a good beginning." When I had risen again
+she continued, "I will give you a year's time to win me, to convince
+me that we are suited to each other, that we might live together. If
+you succeed, I will become your wife, and a wife, Severin, who will
+conscientiously and strictly perform all her duties. During this year
+we will live as though we were married--"
+
+My blood rose to my head.
+
+In her eyes too there was a sudden flame--
+
+"We will live together," she continued, "share our daily life, so that
+we may find out whether we are really fitted for each other. _I grant
+you all the rights of a husband, of a lover, of a friend._ Are you
+satisfied?"
+
+"I suppose, I'll have to be?"
+
+"You don't have to."
+
+"Well then, I want to--"
+
+"Splendid. That is how a man speaks. Here is my hand."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For ten days I have been with her every hour, except at night. All
+the time I was allowed to look into her eyes, hold her hands, listen
+to what she said, accompany her wherever she went.
+
+My love seems to me like a deep, bottomless abyss, into which I
+subside deeper and deeper. There is nothing now which could save me
+from it.
+
+This afternoon we were resting on the meadow at the foot of the
+Venus-statue. I plucked flowers and tossed them into her lap; she
+wound them into wreaths with which we adorned our goddess.
+
+Suddenly Wanda looked at me so strangely that my senses became
+confused and passion swept over my head like a conflagration. Losing
+command over myself, I threw my arms about her and clung to her lips,
+and she--she drew me close to her heaving breast.
+
+"Are you angry?" I then asked her.
+
+"I am never angry at anything that is natural--" she replied, "but
+_I_ am afraid you suffer."
+
+"Oh, I am suffering frightfully."
+
+"Poor friend!" she brushed my disordered hair back from my fore-head. "I
+hope it isn't through any fault of mine."
+
+"No--" I replied,--"and yet my love for you has become a sort of
+madness. The thought that I might lose you, perhaps actually lose
+you, torments me day and night."
+
+"But you don't yet possess me," said Wanda, and again she looked at
+me with that vibrant, consuming expression, which had already once
+before carried me away. Then she rose, and with her small transparent
+hands placed a wreath of blue anemones upon the ringletted white head
+of Venus. Half against my will I threw my arm around her body.
+
+"I can no longer live without you, oh wonderful woman," I said.
+"Believe me, believe only this once, that this time it is not a
+phrase, not a thing of dreams. I feel deep down in my innermost soul,
+that my life belongs inseparably with yours. If you leave me, I shall
+perish, go to pieces."
+
+"That will hardly be necessary, for I love you," she took hold of my
+chin, "you foolish man!"
+
+"But you will be mine only under conditions, while I belong to you
+unconditionally--"
+
+"That isn't wise, Severin," she replied almost with a start. "Don't
+you know me yet, do you absolutely refuse to know me? I am good when
+I am treated seriously and reasonably, but when you abandon yourself
+too absolutely to me, I grow arrogant--"
+
+"So be it, be arrogant, be despotic," I cried in the fulness of
+exaltation, "only be mine, mine forever." I lay at her feet,
+embracing her knees.
+
+"Things will end badly, my friend," she said soberly, without moving.
+
+"It shall never end," I cried excitedly, almost violently. "Only death
+shall part us. If you cannot be mine, all mine and for always, then _I
+want to be your slave_, serve you, suffer everything from you, if only
+you won't drive me away."
+
+"Calm yourself," she said, bending down and kissing my forehead, "I
+am really very fond of you, but your way is not the way to win and
+hold me."
+
+"I want to do everything, absolutely everything, that you want, only
+not to lose you," I cried, "only not that, I cannot bear the thought."
+
+"Do get up."
+
+I obeyed.
+
+"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,_ [Footnote: A woman's jacket.] 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.
+
+"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; [Footnote: The street of the Jews in
+Lemberg.] 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.
+
+"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, Moliere, 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?"
+
+I looked at Wanda frightened.
+
+"You surpass my dreams."
+
+"Yes, we women are inventive," she said, "take heed, when you find
+your ideal, it might easily happen, that she will treat you more
+cruelly than you anticipate."
+
+"I am afraid that I have already found my ideal!" I exclaimed,
+burying my burning face in her lap.
+
+"Not I?" exclaimed Wanda, throwing off her furs and moving about the
+room laughing. She was still laughing as I went downstairs, and when
+I stood musing in the yard, I still heard her peals of laughter above.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Do you really then expect me to embody your ideal?" Wanda asked
+archly, when we met in the park to-day.
+
+At first I could find no answer. The most antagonistic emotions were
+battling within me. In the meantime she sat down on one of the
+stone-benches, and played with a flower.
+
+"Well--am I?"
+
+I kneeled down and seized her hands.
+
+"Once more I beg you to become my wife, my true and loyal wife; if
+you can't do that then become the embodiment of my ideal, absolutely,
+without reservation, without softness."
+
+"You know I am ready at the end of a year to give you my hand, if
+you prove to be the man I am seeking," Wanda replied very seriously,
+"but I think you would be more grateful to me if through me you
+realized your imaginings. Well, which do you prefer?"
+
+"I believe that everything my imagination has dreamed lies latent in
+your personality."
+
+"You are mistaken."
+
+"I believe," I continued, "that you enjoy having a man wholly in
+your power, torturing him--"
+
+"No, no," she exclaimed quickly, "or perhaps--." She pondered.
+
+"I don't understand myself any longer," she continued, "but I have
+a confession to make to you. You have corrupted my imagination and
+inflamed my blood. I am beginning to like the things you speak of.
+The enthusiasm with which you speak of a Pompadour, a Catherine the
+Second, and all the other selfish, frivolous, cruel women, carries
+me away and takes hold of my soul. It urges me on to become like those
+women, who in spite of their vileness were slavishly adored during
+their lifetime and still exert a miraculous power from their graves.
+
+"You will end by making of me a despot in miniature, a domestic
+Pompadour."
+
+"Well then," I said in agitation, "if all this is inherent in you,
+give way to this trend of your nature. Nothing half-way. If you can't
+be a true and loyal wife to me, be a demon."
+
+I was nervous from loss of sleep, and the proximity of the beautiful
+woman affected me like a fever. I no longer recall what I said, but
+I remember that I kissed her feet, and finally raised her foot and
+put my neck under it. She withdrew it quickly, and rose almost angrily.
+
+"If you love me, Severin," she said quickly, and her voice sounded
+sharp and commanding, "never speak to me of those things again.
+Understand, never! Otherwise I might really--" She smiled and sat
+down again.
+
+"I am entirely serious," I exclaimed, half-raving. "I adore you so
+infinitely that I am willing to suffer anything from you, for the
+sake of spending my whole life near you."
+
+"Severin, once more I warn you."
+
+"Your warning is vain. Do with me what you will, as long as you
+don't drive me away."
+
+"Severin," replied Wanda, "I am a frivolous young woman; it is
+dangerous for you to put yourself so completely in my power. You will
+end by actually becoming a plaything to me. Who will give warrant
+that I shall not abuse your insane desire?"
+
+"Your own nobility of character."
+
+"Power makes people over-bearing."
+
+"Be it," I cried, "tread me underfoot."
+
+Wanda threw her arms around my neck, looked into my eyes, and shook
+her head.
+
+"I am afraid I can't, but I will try, for your sake, for I love you
+Severin, as I have loved no other man."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-day she suddenly took her hat and shawl, and I had to go shopping
+with her. She looked at whips, long whips with a short handle, the
+kind that are used on dogs.
+
+"Are these satisfactory?" said the shopkeeper.
+
+"No, they are much too small," replied Wanda, with a side-glance at
+me. "I need a large--"
+
+"For a bull-dog, I suppose?" opined the merchant.
+
+"Yes," she exclaimed, "of the kind that are used in Russia for
+intractable slaves."
+
+She looked further and finally selected a whip, at whose sight I
+felt a strange creeping sensation.
+
+"Now good-by, Severin," she said. "I have some other purchases to
+make, but you can't go along."
+
+I left her and took a walk. On the way back I saw Wanda coming out
+at a furrier's. She beckoned me.
+
+"Consider it well," she began in good spirits, "I have never made a
+secret of how deeply your serious, dreamy character has fascinated
+me. The idea of seeing this serious man wholly in my power, actually
+lying enraptured at my feet, of course, stimulates me--but will this
+attraction last? Woman loves a man; she maltreats a slave, and ends
+by kicking him aside."
+
+"Very well then, kick me aside," I replied, "when you are tired of
+me. I want to be your slave."
+
+"Dangerous forces lie within me," said Wanda, after we had gone a
+few steps further. "You awaken them, and not to your advantage. You
+know how to paint pleasure, cruelty, arrogance in glowing colors.
+What would you say should I try my hand at them, and make you the
+first object of my experiments. I would be like Dionysius who had the
+inventor of the iron ox roasted within it in order to see whether his
+wails and groans really resembled the bellowing of an ox.
+
+"Perhaps I am a female Dionysius?"
+
+"Be it," I exclaimed, "and my dreams will be fulfilled. I am yours
+for good or evil, choose. The destiny that lies concealed within my
+breast drives me on--demoniacally--relentlessly."
+
+"My Beloved,
+
+I do not care to see you to-day or to-morrow, and not until evening
+the day after tomorrow, and then _as my slave_.
+
+Your mistress
+
+Wanda."
+
+"As my slave" was underlined. I read the note which I received early
+in the morning a second time. Then I had a donkey saddled, an animal
+symbolic of learned professors, and rode into the mountains. I wanted
+to numb my desire, my yearning, with the magnificent scenery of the
+Carpathians. I am back, tired, hungry, thirsty, and more in love than
+ever. I quickly change my clothes, and a few moments later knock at
+her door.
+
+"Come in!"
+
+I enter. She is standing in the center of the room, dressed in a gown
+of white satin which floods down her body like light. Over it she
+wears a scarlet _kazabaika_, richly edged with ermine. Upon her
+powdered, snowy hair is a little diadem of diamonds. She stands with
+her arms folded across her breast, and with her brows contracted.
+
+"Wanda!" I run toward her, and am about to throw my arm about her to
+kiss her. She retreats a step, measuring me from top to bottom.
+
+"Slave!"
+
+"Mistress!" I kneel down, and kiss the hem of her garment.
+
+"That is as it should be."
+
+"Oh, how beautiful you are."
+
+"Do I please you?" She stepped before the mirror, and looked at
+herself with proud satisfaction.
+
+"I shall become mad!"
+
+Her lower lip twitched derisively, and she looked at me mockingly
+from behind half-closed lids.
+
+"Give me the whip."
+
+I looked about the room.
+
+"No," she exclaimed, "stay as you are, kneeling." She went over to
+the fire-place, took the whip from the mantle-piece, and, watching
+me with a smile, let it hiss through the air; then she slowly rolled
+up the sleeve of her fur-jacket.
+
+"Marvellous woman!" I exclaimed.
+
+"Silence, slave!" She suddenly scowled, looked savage, and struck me
+with the whip. A moment later she threw her arm tenderly about me, and
+pityingly bent down to me. "Did I hurt you?" she asked, half-shyly,
+half-timidly.
+
+"No," I replied, "and even if you had, pains that come through you
+are a joy. Strike again, if it gives you pleasure."
+
+"But it doesn't give me pleasure."
+
+Again I was seized with that strange intoxication.
+
+"Whip me," I begged, "whip me without mercy."
+
+Wanda swung the whip, and hit me twice. "Are you satisfied now?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Seriously, no?"
+
+"Whip me, I beg you, it is a joy to me."
+
+"Yes, because you know very well that it isn't serious," she
+replied, "because I haven't the heart to hurt you. This brutal game
+goes against my grain. Were I really the woman who beats her slaves
+you would be horrified."
+
+"No, Wanda," I replied, "I love you more than myself; I am devoted
+to you for death and life. In all seriousness, you can do with me
+whatever you will, whatever your caprice suggests."
+
+"Severin!"
+
+"Tread me underfoot!" I exclaimed, and flung myself face to the
+floor before her.
+
+"I hate all this play-acting," said Wanda impatiently.
+
+"Well, then maltreat me seriously."
+
+An uncanny pause.
+
+"Severin, I warn you for the last time," began Wanda.
+
+"If you love me, be cruel towards me," I pleaded with upraised eyes.
+
+"If I love you," repeated Wanda. "Very well!" She stepped back and
+looked at me with a sombre smile. _"Be then my slave, and know what
+it means to be delivered into the hands of a woman."_ And at the
+same moment she gave me a kick.
+
+"How do you like that, slave?"
+
+Then she flourished the whip.
+
+"Get up!"
+
+I was about to rise.
+
+"Not that way," she commanded, "on your knees."
+
+I obeyed, and she began to apply the lash.
+
+The blows fell rapidly and powerfully on my back and arms. Each one
+cut into my flesh and burned there, but the pains enraptured me. They
+came from her whom I adored, and for whom I was ready at any hour to
+lay down my life.
+
+She stopped. "I am beginning to enjoy it," she said, "but enough for
+to-day. I am beginning to feel a demonic curiosity to see how far
+your strength goes. I take a cruel joy in seeing you tremble and
+writhe beneath my whip, and in hearing your groans and wails; I want
+to go on whipping without pity until you beg for mercy, until you
+lose your senses. You have awakened dangerous elements in my being.
+But now get up."
+
+I seized her hand to press it to my lips.
+
+"What impudence."
+
+She shoved me away with her foot.
+
+"Out of my sight, slave!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After having spent a feverish night filled with confused dreams, I
+awoke. Dawn was just beginning to break.
+
+How much of what was hovering in my memory was true; what had I
+actually experienced and what had I dreamed? That I had been whipped
+was certain. I can still feel each blow, and count the burning red
+stripes on my body. And _she_ whipped me. Now I know everything.
+
+My dream has become truth. How does it make me feel? Am I
+disappointed in the realization of my dream?
+
+No, I am merely somewhat tired, but her cruelty has enraptured me.
+Oh, how I love her, adore her! All this cannot express in the
+remotest way my feeling for her, my complete devotion to her. What
+happiness to be her slave!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She calls to me from her balcony. I hurry upstairs. She is standing
+on the threshold, holding out her hand in friendly fashion. "I am
+ashamed of myself," she says, while I embrace her, and she hides her
+head against my breast.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Please try to forget the ugly scene of yesterday," she said with
+quivering voice, "I have fulfilled your mad wish, now let us be
+reasonable and happy and love each other, and in a year I will be
+your wife."
+
+"My mistress," I exclaimed, "and I your slave!"
+
+"Not another word of slavery, cruelty, or the whip," interrupted
+Wanda. "I shall not grant you any of those favors, none except
+wearing my fur-jacket; come and help me into it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little bronze clock on which stood a cupid who had just shot his
+bolt struck midnight.
+
+I rose, and wanted to leave.
+
+Wanda said nothing, but embraced me and drew me back on the ottoman.
+She began to kiss me anew, and this silent language was so
+comprehensible, so convincing--
+
+And it told me more than I dared to understand.
+
+A languid abandonment pervaded Wanda's entire being. What a
+voluptuous softness there was in the gloaming of her half-closed
+eyes, in the red flood of her hair which shimmered faintly under the
+white powder, in the red and white satin which crackled about her
+with every movement, in the swelling ermine of the _kazabaika_
+in which she carelessly nestled.
+
+"Please," I stammered, "but you will be angry with me."
+
+"Do with me what you will," she whispered.
+
+"Well, then whip me, or I shall go mad."
+
+"Haven't I forbidden you," said Wanda sternly, "but you are
+incorrigible."
+
+"Oh, I am so terribly in love." I had sunken on my knees, and was
+burying my glowing face in her lap.
+
+"I really believe," said Wanda thoughtfully, "that your madness is
+nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. _Our unnatural way
+of life must generate such illnesses._ Were you less virtuous, you
+would be completely sane."
+
+"Well then, make me sane," I murmured. My hands were running through
+her hair and playing tremblingly with the gleaming fur, which rose
+and fell like a moonlit wave upon her heaving bosom, and drove all
+my senses into confusion.
+
+And I kissed her. No, she kissed me savagely, pitilessly, as if she
+wanted to slay me with her kisses. I was as in a delirium, and had
+long since lost my reason, but now I, too, was breathless. I sought
+to free myself.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked Wanda.
+
+"I am suffering agonies."
+
+"You are suffering--" she broke out into a loud amused laughter.
+
+"You laugh!" I moaned, "have you no idea--"
+
+She was serious all of a sudden. She raised my head in her hands,
+and with a violent gesture drew me to her breast.
+
+"Wanda," I stammered.
+
+"Of course, you enjoy suffering," she said, and laughed again, "but
+wait, I'll bring you to your senses."
+
+"No, I will no longer ask," I exclaimed, "whether you want to belong
+to me for always or for only a brief moment of intoxication. I want
+to drain my happiness to the full. You are mine now, and I would
+rather lose you than never to have had you."
+
+"Now you are sensible," she said. She kissed me again with her
+murderous lips. I tore the ermine apart and the covering of lace and
+her naked breast surged against mine.
+
+Then my senses left me--
+
+The first thing I remember is the moment when I saw blood dripping
+from my hand, and she asked apathetically: "Did you scratch me?"
+
+"No, I believe, I have bitten you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is strange how every relation in life assumes a different face as
+soon as a new person enters.
+
+We spent marvellous days together; we visited the mountains and
+lakes, we read together, and I completed Wanda's portrait. And how
+we loved one another, how beautiful her smiling face was!
+
+Then a friend of hers arrived, a divorced woman somewhat older, more
+experienced, and less scrupulous than Wanda. Her influence is already
+making itself felt in every direction.
+
+Wanda wrinkles her brows, and displays a certain impatience with me.
+
+Has she ceased loving me?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For almost a fortnight this unbearable restraint has lain upon us.
+Her friend lives with her, and we are never alone. A circle of men
+surrounds the young women. With my seriousness and melancholy I am
+playing an absurd role as lover. Wanda treats me like a stranger.
+
+To-day, while out walking, she staid behind with me. I saw that this
+was done intentionally, and I rejoiced. But what did she tell me?
+
+"My friend doesn't understand how I can love you. She doesn't think
+you either handsome or particularly attractive otherwise. She is
+telling me from morning till night about the glamour of the frivolous
+life in the capital, hinting at the advantages to which I could lay
+claim, the large parties which I would find there, and the
+distinguished and handsome admirers which I would attract. But of
+what use is all this, since it happens that I love you."
+
+For a moment I lost my breath, then I said: "I have no wish to stand
+in the way of your happiness, Wanda. Do not consider me." Then I
+raised my hat, and let her go ahead. She looked at me surprised, but
+did not answer a syllable.
+
+When by chance I happened to be close to her on the way back, she
+secretly pressed my hand. Her glance was so radiant, so full of
+promised happiness, that in a moment all the torments of these days
+were forgotten and all their wounds healed.
+
+I now am aware again of how much I love her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"My friend has complained about you," said Wanda to-day.
+
+"Perhaps she feels that I despise her."
+
+"But why do you despise her, you foolish young man?" exclaimed
+Wanda, pulling my ears with both hands.
+
+"Because she is a hypocrite," I said. "I respect only a woman who is
+actually virtuous, or who openly lives for pleasure's sake."
+
+"Like me, for instance," replied Wanda jestingly, "but you see,
+child, a woman can only do that in the rarest cases. She can neither
+be as gaily sensual, nor as spiritually free as man; her state is
+always a mixture of the sensual and spiritual. Her heart desires to
+enchain man permanently, while she herself is ever subject to the
+desire for change. The result is a conflict, and thus usually against
+her wishes lies and deception enter into her actions and personality
+and corrupt her character."
+
+"Certainly that is true," I said. "The transcendental character with
+which woman wants to stamp love leads her to deception."
+
+"But the world likewise demands it," Wanda interrupted. "Look at
+this woman. She has a husband and a lover in Lemberg and has found
+a new admirer here. She deceives all three and yet is honored by all
+and respected by the world."
+
+"I don't care," I exclaimed, "but she is to leave you alone; she
+treats you like an article of commerce."
+
+"Why not?" the beautiful woman interrupted vivaciously. "Every woman
+has the instinct or desire to draw advantage out of her attractions,
+and much is to be said for giving one's self without love or pleasure
+because if you do it in cold blood, you can reap profit to best
+advantage."
+
+"Wanda, what are you saying?"
+
+"Why not?" she said, "and take note of what I am about to say to you.
+_Never feel secure with the woman you love,_ for there are more
+dangers in woman's nature than you imagine. Women are neither as
+_good_ as their admirers and defenders maintain, nor as _bad_ as their
+enemies make them out to be. _Woman's character is characterlessness._
+The best woman will momentarily go down into the mire, and the worst
+unexpectedly rises to deeds of greatness and goodness and puts to
+shame those that despise her. No woman is so good or so bad, but that
+at any moment she is capable of the most diabolical as well as of the
+most divine, of the filthiest as well as of the purest, thoughts,
+emotions, and actions. In spite of all the advances of civilization,
+woman has remained as she came out of the hand of nature. She has the
+nature of a savage, who is faithful or faithless, magnanimous or
+cruel, according to the impulse that dominates at the moment.
+Throughout history it has always been a serious deep culture which has
+produced moral character. Man even when he is selfish or evil always
+follows _principles,_ woman never follows anything but _impulses._
+Don't ever forget that, and never feel secure with the woman you
+love."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her friend has left. At last an evening alone with her again. It
+seems as if Wanda had saved up all the love, which had been kept from
+her, for this superlative evening; never had she been so kind, so
+near, so full of tenderness.
+
+What happiness to cling to her lips, and to die away in her arms! In
+a state of relaxation and wholly mine, her head rests against my
+breast, and with drunken rapture our eyes seek each other.
+
+I cannot yet believe, comprehend, that this woman is mine, wholly
+mine.
+
+"She is right on one point," Wanda began, without moving, without
+opening her eyes, as if she were asleep.
+
+"Who?"
+
+She remained silent.
+
+"Your friend?"
+
+She nodded. "Yes, she is right, you are not a man, you are a
+dreamer, a charming cavalier, and you certainly would be a priceless
+slave, but I cannot imagine you as husband."
+
+I was frightened.
+
+"What is the matter? You are trembling?"
+
+"I tremble at the thought of how easily I might lose you," I replied.
+
+"Are you made less happy now, because of this?" she replied. "Does
+it rob you of any of your joys, that I have belonged to another
+before I did to you, that others after you will possess me, and would
+you enjoy less if another were made happy simultaneously with you?"
+
+"Wanda!"
+
+"You see," she continued, "that would be a way out. You won't ever
+lose me then. I care deeply for you and intellectually we are
+harmonious, and I should like to live with you always, if in addition
+to you I might have--"
+
+"What an idea," I cried. "You fill me with a sort of horror."
+
+"Do you love me any the less?"
+
+"On the contrary."
+
+Wanda had raised herself on her left arm. "I believe," she said,
+"that to hold a man permanently, it is vitally important not to be
+faithful to him. What honest woman has ever been as devotedly loved
+as a hetaira?"
+
+"There is a painful stimulus in the unfaithfulness of a beloved
+woman. It is the highest kind of ecstacy."
+
+"For you, too?" Wanda asked quickly.
+
+"For me, too."
+
+"And if I should give you that pleasure," Wanda exclaimed mockingly.
+
+"I shall suffer terrible agonies, but I shall adore you the more,"
+I replied. "But you would never deceive me, you would have the daemonic
+greatness of saying to me: I shall love no one but you, but I shall
+make happy whoever pleases me."
+
+Wanda shook her head. "I don't like deception, I am honest, but what
+man exists who can support the burden of truth. Were I say to you:
+this serene, sensual life, this paganism is my ideal, would you be
+strong enough to bear it?"
+
+"Certainly. I could endure anything so as not to lose you. I feel
+how little I really mean to you."
+
+"But Severin--"
+
+"But it is so," said I, "and just for that reason--"
+
+"For that reason you would--" she smiled roguishly--"have I guessed
+it?"
+
+"Be your slave!" I exclaimed. "Be your unrestricted property,
+without a will of my own, of which you could dispose as you wished,
+and which would therefore never be a burden to you. While you drink
+life at its fullness, while surrounded by luxury, you enjoy the
+serene happiness and Olympian love, I want to be your servant, put
+on and take off your shoes."
+
+"You really aren't so far from wrong," replied Wanda, "for only as
+my slave could you endure my loving others. Furthermore the freedom
+of enjoyment of the ancient world is unthinkable without slavery. It
+must give one a feeling of like unto a god to see a man kneel before
+one and tremble. I want a slave, do you hear, Severin?"
+
+"Am I not your slave?"
+
+"Then listen to me," said Wanda excitedly, seizing my hand. "I want
+to be yours, as long as I love you."
+
+"A month?"
+
+"Perhaps, even two."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Then you become my slave."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I? Why do you ask? I am a goddess and sometimes I descend from my
+Olympian heights to you, softly, very softly, and secretly.
+
+"But what does all this mean," said Wanda, resting her head in both
+hands with her gaze lost in the distance, "a golden fancy which never
+can become true." An uncanny brooding melancholy seemed shed over her
+entire being; I have never seen her like that.
+
+"Why unachievable?" I began.
+
+"Because slavery doesn't exist any longer."
+
+"Then we will go to a country where it still exists, to the Orient,
+to Turkey," I said eagerly.
+
+"You would--Severin--in all seriousness," Wanda replied. Her eyes
+burned.
+
+"Yes, in all seriousness, I want to be your slave," I continued. "I
+want your power over me to be sanctified by law; I want my life to
+be in your hands, I want nothing that could protect or save me from
+you. Oh, what a voluptuous joy when once I feel myself entirely dependent
+upon your absolute will, your whim, at your beck and call. And then
+what happiness, when at some time you deign to be gracious, and the
+slave may kiss the lips which mean life and death to him." I knelt
+down, and leaned my burning forehead against her knee.
+
+"You are talking as in a fever," said Wanda agitatedly, "and you
+really love me so endlessly." She held me to her breast, and covered
+me with kisses.
+
+"You really want it?"
+
+"I swear to you now by God and my honor, that I shall be your slave,
+wherever and whenever you wish it, as soon as you command," I
+exclaimed, hardly master of myself.
+
+"And if I take you at your word?" said Wanda.
+
+"Please do!"
+
+"All this appeals to me," she said then. "It is different from
+anything else--to know that a man who worships me, and whom I love
+with all my heart, is so wholly mine, dependent on my will and
+caprice, my possession and slave, while I--"
+
+She looked strangely at me.
+
+"If I should become frightfully frivolous you are to blame," she
+continued. "It almost seems as if you were afraid of me already, but
+you have sworn."
+
+"And I shall keep my oath."
+
+"I shall see to that," she replied. "I am beginning to enjoy it,
+and, heaven help me, we won't stick to fancies now. You shall become
+my slave, and I--I shall try to be _Venus in Furs_."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I thought that at last I knew this woman, understood her, and now I
+see I have to begin at the very beginning again. Only a little while
+ago her reaction to my dreams was violently hostile, and now she
+tries to carry them into execution with the soberest seriousness.
+
+She has drawn up a contract according to which I give my word of
+honor and agree under oath to be her slave, as long as she wishes.
+
+With her arm around my neck she reads this, unprecedented,
+incredible document to me. The end of each sentence she punctuates
+with a kiss.
+
+"But all the obligations in the contract are on my side," I said,
+teasing her.
+
+"Of course," she replied with great seriousness, "you cease to be my
+lover, and consequently I am released from all duties and obligations
+towards you. You will have to look upon my favors as pure
+benevolence. You no longer have any rights, and no longer can lay
+claim to any. There can be no limit to my power over you. Remember,
+that you won't be much better than a dog, or some inanimate object.
+You will be mine, my plaything, which I can break to pieces, whenever
+I want an hour's amusement. You are nothing, I am everything. Do you
+understand?" She laughed and kissed me again, and yet a sort of cold
+shiver ran through me.
+
+"Won't you allow me a few conditions--" I began.
+
+"Conditions?" She contracted her forehead. "Ah! You are afraid
+already, or perhaps you regret, but it is too late now. You have
+sworn, I have your word of honor. But let me hear them."
+
+"First of all I should like to have it included in our contract,
+that you will never completely leave me, and then that you will never
+give me over to the mercies of any of your admirers--"
+
+"But Severin," exclaimed Wanda with her voice full of emotion and
+with tears in her eyes, "how can you imagine that I--and you, a man
+who loves me so absolutely, who puts himself so entirely in my power--"
+She halted.
+
+"No, no!" I said, covering her hands with kisses. "I don't fear
+anything from you that might dishonor me. Forgive me the ugly
+thought."
+
+Wanda smiled happily, leaned her cheek against mine, and seemed to
+reflect.
+
+"You have forgotten something," she whispered coquettishly, "the
+most important thing!"
+
+"A condition?"
+
+"Yes, that I must always wear my furs," exclaimed Wanda. "But I
+promise you I'll do that anyhow because they give me a despotic
+feeling. And I shall be very cruel to you, do you understand?"
+
+"Shall I sign the contract?" I asked.
+
+"Not yet," said Wanda. "I shall first add your conditions, and the
+actual signing won't occur until the proper time and place."
+
+"In Constantinople?"
+
+"No. I have thought things over. What special value would there be
+in owning a slave where everyone owns slaves. What I want is to
+_have a slave, I alone,_ here in our civilized sober, Philistine
+world, and a slave who submits helplessly to my power solely on
+account of my beauty and personality, not because of law, of property
+rights, or compulsions. This attracts me. But at any rate we will go
+to a country where we are not known and where you can appear before
+the world as my servant without embarrassment. Perhaps to Italy, to
+Rome or Naples."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were sitting on Wanda's ottoman. She wore her ermine jacket, her
+hair was loose and fell like a lion's mane down her back. She clung
+to my lips, drawing my soul from my body. My head whirled, my blood
+began to seethe, my heart beat violently against hers.
+
+"I want to be absolutely in your power, Wanda," I exclaimed
+suddenly, seized by that frenzy of passion when I can scarcely think
+clearly or decide freely. "I want to put myself absolutely at your
+mercy for good or evil without any condition, without any limit to
+your power."
+
+While saying this I had slipped from the ottoman, and lay at her
+feet looking up at her with drunken eyes.
+
+"How beautiful you now are," she exclaimed, "your eyes half-broken
+in ecstacy fill me with joy, carry me away. How wonderful your look
+would be if you were being beaten to death, in the extreme agony. You
+have the eye of a martyr."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sometimes, nevertheless, I have an uneasy feeling about placing
+myself so absolutely, so unconditionally into a woman's hands.
+Suppose she did abuse my passion, her power?
+
+Well, then I would experience what has occupied my imagination since
+my childhood, what has always given me the feeling of seductive
+terror. A foolish apprehension! It will be a wanton game she will play
+with me, nothing more. She loves me, and she is good, a noble
+personality, incapable of a breach of faith. But it lies in her hands
+--_if she wants to she can._ What a temptation in this doubt, this
+fear!
+
+Now I understand Manon l'Escault and the poor chevalier, who, even
+in the pillory, while she was another man's mistress, still adored
+her.
+
+Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves and forgives and suffers
+everything, because it must. It is not our judgment that leads us;
+it is neither the advantages nor the faults which we discover, that
+make us abandon ourselves, or that repel us.
+
+It is a sweet, soft, enigmatic power that drives us on. We cease to
+think, to feel, to will; we let ourselves be carried away by it, and
+ask not whither?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A Russian prince made his first appearance today on the promenade.
+He aroused general interest on account of his athletic figure,
+magnificent face, and splendid bearing. The women particularly gaped
+at him as though he were a wild animal, but he went his way gloomily
+without paying attention to any one. He was accompanied by two
+servants, one a negro, completely dressed in red satin, and the other
+a Circassian in his full gleaming uniform. Suddenly he saw Wanda, and
+fixed his cold piercing look upon her; he even turned his head after
+her, and when she had passed, he stood still and followed her with
+his eyes.
+
+And she--she veritably devoured him with her radiant green eyes--and
+did everything possible to meet him again.
+
+The cunning coquetry with which she walked, moved, and looked at
+him, almost stifled me. On the way home I remarked about it. She knit
+her brows.
+
+"What do you want," she said, "the prince is a man whom I might
+like, who even dazzles me, and I am free. I can do what I please--"
+
+"Don't you love me any longer--" I stammered, frightened.
+
+"I love only you," she replied, "but I shall have the prince pay
+court to me."
+
+"Wanda!"
+
+"Aren't you my slave?" she said calmly. "Am I not Venus, the cruel
+northern Venus in Furs?"
+
+I was silent. I felt literally crushed by her words; her cold look
+entered my heart like a dagger.
+
+"You will find out immediately the prince's name, residence, and
+circumstances," she continued. "Do you understand?"
+
+"But--"
+
+"No argument, obey!" exclaimed Wanda, more sternly than I would have
+thought possible for her, "and don't dare to enter my sight until you
+can answer my questions."
+
+It was not till afternoon that I could obtain the desired
+information for Wanda. She let me stand before her like a servant,
+while she leaned back in her arm-chair and listened to me, smiling.
+Then she nodded; she seemed to be satisfied.
+
+"Bring me my footstool," she commanded shortly.
+
+I obeyed, and after having put it before her and having put her feet
+on it, I remained kneeling.
+
+"How will this end?" I asked sadly after a short pause.
+
+She broke into playful laughter. "Why things haven't even begun yet."
+
+"You are more heartless than I imagined," I replied, hurt.
+
+"Severin," Wanda began earnestly. "I haven't done anything yet, not
+the slightest thing, and you are already calling me heartless. What
+will happen when I begin to carry your dreams to their realization,
+when I shall lead a gay, free life and have a circle of admirers
+about me, when I shall actually fulfil your ideal, tread you
+underfoot and apply the lash?"
+
+"You take my dreams too seriously."
+
+"Too seriously? I can't stop at make-believe, when once I begin,"
+she replied. "You know I hate all play-acting and comedy. You have
+wished it. Was it my idea or yours? Did I persuade you or did you
+inflame my imagination? I am taking things seriously now."
+
+"Wanda," I replied, caressingly, "listen quietly to me. We love each
+other infinitely, we are very happy, will you sacrifice our entire
+future to a whim?"
+
+"It is no longer a whim," she exclaimed.
+
+"What is it?" I asked frightened.
+
+"Something that was probably latent in me," she said quietly and
+thoughtfully. "Perhaps it would never have come to light, if you had
+not called it to life, and made it grow. Now that it has become a
+powerful impulse, fills my whole being, now that I enjoy it, now that
+I cannot and do not want to do otherwise, now you want to back out--
+you--are you a man?"
+
+"Dear, sweet Wanda!" I began to caress her, kiss her.
+
+"Don't--you are not a man--"
+
+"And you," I flared up.
+
+"I am stubborn," she said, "you know that. I haven't a strong
+imagination, and like you I am weak in execution. But when I make up
+my mind to do something, I carry it through, and the more certainly,
+the more opposition I meet. Leave me alone!"
+
+She pushed me away, and got up.
+
+"Wanda!" I likewise rose, and stood facing her.
+
+"Now you know what I am," she continued. "Once more I warn you. You
+still have the choice. I am not compelling you to be my slave."
+
+"Wanda," I replied with emotion and tears filling my eyes, "don't
+you know how I love you?"
+
+Her lips quivered contemptuously.
+
+"You are mistaken, you make yourself out worse than you are; you are
+good and noble by nature--"
+
+"What do you know about my nature," she interrupted vehemently, "you
+will get to know me as I am."
+
+"Wanda!"
+
+"Decide, will you submit, unconditionally?"
+
+"And if I say no."
+
+"Then--"
+
+She stepped close up to me, cold and contemptuous. As she stood
+before me now, the arms folded across her breast, with an evil smile
+about her lips, she was in fact the despotic woman of my dreams. Her
+expression seemed hard, and nothing lay in her eyes that promised
+kindness or mercy.
+
+"Well--" she said at last.
+
+"You are angry," I cried, "you will punish me."
+
+"Oh no!" she replied, "I shall let you go. You are free. I am not
+holding you."
+
+"Wanda--I, who love you so--"
+
+"Yes, you, my dear sir, you who adore me," she exclaimed
+contemptuously, "but who are a coward, a liar, and a breaker of
+promises. Leave me instantly--"
+
+"Wanda I--"
+
+"Wretch!"
+
+My blood rose in my heart. I threw myself down at her feet and began
+to cry.
+
+"Tears, too!" She began to laugh. Oh, this laughter was frightful.
+"Leave me--I don't want to see you again."
+
+"Oh my God!" I cried, beside myself. "I will do whatever you
+command, be your slave, a mere object with which you can do what you
+will--only don't send me away--I can't bear it--I cannot live without
+you." I embraced her knees, and covered her hand with kisses.
+
+"Yes, you must be a slave, and feel the lash, for you are not a
+man," she said calmly. She said this to me with perfect composure,
+not angrily, not even excitedly, and it was what hurt most. "Now I
+know you, your dog-like nature, that adores where it is kicked, and
+the more, the more it is maltreated. Now I know you, and now you
+shall come to know me."
+
+She walked up and down with long strides, while I remained crushed
+on my knees; my head was hanging supine, tears flowed from my eyes.
+
+"Come here," Wanda commanded harshly, sitting down on the ottoman.
+I obeyed her command, and sat down beside her. She looked at me
+sombrely, and then a light suddenly seemed to illuminate the interior
+of her eye. Smiling, she drew me toward her breast, and began to kiss
+the tears out of my eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The odd part of my situation is that I am like the bear in Lily's
+park. I can escape and don't want to; I am ready to endure everything
+as soon as she threatens to set me free.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If only she would use the whip again. There is something uncanny in
+the kindness with which she treats me. I seem like a little captive
+mouse with which a beautiful cat prettily plays. She is ready at any
+moment to tear it to pieces, and my heart of a mouse threatens to
+burst.
+
+What are her intentions? What does she purpose to do with me?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It seems she has completely forgotten the contract, my slavehood. Or
+was it actually only stubbornness? And she gave up her whole plan as
+soon as I no longer opposed her and submitted to her imperial whim?
+
+How kind she is to me, how tender, how loving! We are spending
+marvellously happy days.
+
+To-day she had me read to her the scene between Faust and
+Mephistopheles, in which the latter appears as a wandering scholar.
+Her glance hung on me with strange pleasure.
+
+"I don't understand," she said when I had finished, "how a man who
+can read such great and beautiful thoughts with such expression, and
+interpret them so clearly, concisely, and intelligently, can at the
+same time be such a visionary and supersensual ninny as you are."
+
+"Were you pleased," said I, and kissed her forehead.
+
+She gently stroked my brow. "I love you, Severin," she whispered. "I
+don't believe I could ever love any one more than you. Let us be
+sensible, what do you say?"
+
+Instead of replying I folded her in my arms; a deep inward, yet
+vaguely sad happiness filled my breast, my eyes grew moist, and a
+tear fell upon her hand.
+
+"How can you cry!" she exclaimed, "you are a child!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On a pleasure drive we met the Russian prince in his carriage. He
+seemed to be unpleasantly surprised to see me by Wanda's side, and
+looked as if he wanted to pierce her through and through with his
+electric gray eyes. She, however, did not seem to notice him. I felt
+at that moment like kneeling down before her and kissing her feet.
+She let her glance glide over him indifferently as though he were an
+inanimate object, a tree, for instance, and turned to me with her
+gracious smile.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I said good-night to her to-day she seemed suddenly
+unaccountably distracted and moody. What was occupying her?
+
+"I am sorry you are going," she said when I was already standing on
+the threshold.
+
+"It is entirely in your hands to shorten the hard period of my
+trial, to cease tormenting me--" I pleaded.
+
+"Do you imagine that this compulsion isn't a torment for me, too,"
+Wanda interjected.
+
+"Then end it," I exclaimed, embracing her, "be my wife."
+
+"_Never, Severin_," she said gently, but with great firmness.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+I was frightened in my innermost soul.
+
+"_You are not the man for me._"
+
+I looked at her, and slowly withdrew my arm which was still about
+her waist; then I left the room, and she--she did not call me back.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A sleepless night; I made countless decisions, only to toss them
+aside again. In the morning I wrote her a letter in which I declared
+our relationship dissolved. My hand trembled when I put on the seal,
+and I burned my fingers.
+
+As I went upstairs to hand it to the maid, my knees threatened to
+give way.
+
+The door opened, and Wanda thrust forth her head full of curling-papers.
+
+"I haven't had my hair dressed yet," she said, smiling. "What have
+you there?"
+
+"A letter--"
+
+"For me?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"Ah, you want to break with me," she exclaimed, mockingly.
+
+"Didn't you tell me yesterday that I wasn't the man for you?"
+
+_"I repeat it now!"_
+
+"Very well, then." My whole body was trembling, my voice failed me,
+and I handed her the letter.
+
+"Keep it," she said, measuring me coldly. "You forget that is no
+longer a question as to whether you satisfy me as a man; as a _slave_
+you will doubtless do well enough."
+
+"Madame!" I exclaimed, aghast.
+
+"That is what you will call me in the future," replied Wanda,
+throwing back her head with a movement of unutterable contempt. "Put
+your affairs in order within the next twenty-four hours. The day
+after to-morrow I shall start for Italy, and you will accompany me
+as my servant."
+
+"Wanda--"
+
+"I forbid any sort of familiarity," she said, cutting my words short,
+"likewise you are not to come in unless I call or ring for you, and
+you are not to speak to me until you are spoken to. From now on your
+name is no longer Severin, but _Gregor_."
+
+I trembled with rage, and yet, unfortunately, I cannot deny it, I
+also felt a strange pleasure and stimulation.
+
+"But, madame, you know my circumstances," I began in my confusion.
+"I am dependent on my father, and I doubt whether he will give me the
+large sum of money needed for this journey--"
+
+"That means you have no money, Gregor," said Wanda, delightedly, "so
+much the better, you are then entirely dependent on me, and in fact
+my slave."
+
+"You don't consider," I tried to object, "that as man of honor it is
+impossible for me--"
+
+"I have indeed considered it," she replied almost with a tone of
+command. "As a man of honor you must keep your oath and redeem your
+promise to follow me as slave whithersoever I demand and to obey
+whatever I command. Now leave me, Gregor!"
+
+I turned toward the door.
+
+"Not yet--you may first kiss my hand." She held it out to me with a
+certain proud indifference, and I the dilettante, the donkey, the
+miserable slave pressed it with intense tenderness against my lips
+which were dry and hot with excitement.
+
+There was another gracious nod of the head.
+
+Then I was dismissed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though it was late in the evening my light was still lit, and a fire
+was burning in the large green stove. There were still many things
+among my letters and documents to be put in order. Autumn, as is
+usually the case with us, had fallen with all its power.
+
+Suddenly she knocked at my window with the handle of her whip.
+
+I opened and saw her standing outside in her ermine-lined jacket and
+in a high round Cossack cap of ermine of the kind which the great
+Catherine favored.
+
+"Are you ready, Gregor?" she asked darkly.
+
+"Not yet, mistress," I replied.
+
+"I like that word," she said then, "you are always to call me
+mistress, do you understand? We leave here to-morrow morning at nine
+o'clock. As far as the district capital you will be my companion and
+friend, but from the moment that we enter the railway-coach you are
+my slave, my servant. Now close the window, and open the door."
+
+After I had done as she had demanded, and after she had entered, she
+asked, contracting her brows ironically, "well, how do you like me."
+
+"Wanda, you--"
+
+"Who gave you permission?" She gave me a blow with the whip.
+
+"You are very beautiful, mistress."
+
+Wanda smiled and sat down in the arm-chair. "Kneel down--here beside
+my chair."
+
+I obeyed.
+
+"Kiss my hand."
+
+I seized her small cold hand and kissed it.
+
+"And the mouth--"
+
+In a surge of passion I threw my arms around the beautiful cruel
+woman, and covered her face, arms, and breast with glowing kisses.
+She returned them with equal fervor--the eyelids closed as in a
+dream. It was after midnight when she left.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At nine o'clock sharp in the morning everything was ready for departure,
+as she had ordered. We left the little Carpathian health-resort in a
+comfortable light carriage. The most interesting drama of my life had
+reached a point of development whose denouement it was then impossible
+to foretell.
+
+So far everything went well. I sat beside Wanda, and she chatted
+very graciously and intelligently with me, as with a good friend,
+concerning Italy, Pisemski's new novel, and Wagner's music. She wore
+a sort of Amazonesque travelling-dress of black cloth with a short
+jacket of the same material, set with dark fur. It fitted closely and
+showed her figure to best advantage. Over it she wore dark furs. Her
+hair wound into an antique knot, lay beneath a small dark fur-hat
+from which a black veil hung. Wanda was in very good humor; she fed
+me candies, played with my hair, loosened my neck cloth and made a
+pretty cockade of it; she covered my knees with her furs and
+stealthily pressed the fingers of my hand. When our Jewish driver
+persistently went on nodding to himself, she even gave me a kiss, and
+her cold lips had the fresh frosty fragrance of a young autumnal
+rose, which blossoms alone amid bare stalks and yellow leaves and
+upon whose calyx the first frost has hung tiny diamonds of ice.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We are at the district capital. We get out at the railway station.
+Wanda throws off her furs and places them over my arm, and goes
+to secure the tickets.
+
+When she returns she has completely changed.
+
+"Here is your ticket, Gregor," she says in a tone which supercilious
+ladies use to their servants.
+
+"A third-class ticket," I reply with comic horror.
+
+"Of course," she continues, "but now be careful. You won't get on
+until I am settled in my compartment and don't need you any longer.
+At each station you will hurry to my car and ask for my orders. Don't
+forget. And now give me my furs."
+
+After I had helped her into them, humbly like a slave, she went to
+find an empty first-class coupe. I followed. Supporting herself on
+my shoulder, she got on and I wrapped her feet in bear-skins and placed
+them on the warming bottle.
+
+Then she nodded to me, and dismissed me. I slowly ascended a third-class
+carriage, which was filled with abominable tobacco-smoke that seemed
+like the fogs of Acheron at the entrance to Hades. I now had the leisure
+to muse about the riddle of human existence, and about its greatest
+riddle of all--_woman_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Whenever the train stops, I jump off, run to her carriage, and with
+drawn cap await her orders. She wants coffee and then a glass of
+water, at another time a bowl of warm water to wash her hands, and
+thus it goes on. She lets several men who have entered her
+compartment pay court to her. I am dying of jealousy and have to leap
+about like an antelope so as to secure what she wants quickly and
+not miss the train.
+
+In this way the night passes. I haven't had time to eat a mouthful
+and I can't sleep, I have to breathe the same oniony air with Polish
+peasants, Jewish peddlers, and common soldiers.
+
+When I mount the steps of her coupe, she is lying stretched out
+on cushions in her comfortable furs, covered up with the skins of
+animals. She is like an oriental despot, and the men sit like Indian
+deities, straight upright against the walls and scarcely dare to
+breathe.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She stops over in Vienna for a day to go shopping, and particularly
+to buy series of luxurious gowns. She continues to treat me as her
+servant. I follow her at the respectful distance of ten paces. She
+hands me her packages without so much as even deigning a kind look,
+and laden down like a donkey I pant along behind.
+
+Before leaving she takes all my clothes and gives them to the hotel
+waiters. I am ordered to put on her livery. It is a Cracovian costume
+in her colors, light-blue with red facings, and red quadrangular cap,
+ornamented with peacock-feathers. The costume is rather becoming to
+me.
+
+The silver buttons bear her coat of arms. I have the feeling of having
+been sold or of having bonded myself to the devil. My fair demon leads
+me from Vienna to Florence. Instead of linen-garbed Mazovians and
+greasy-haired Jews, my companions now are curly-haired Contadini, a
+magnificent sergeant of the first Italian Grenadiers, and a poor German
+painter. The tobacco smoke no longer smells of onions, but of salami and
+cheese.
+
+Night has fallen again. I lie on my wooden bed as on a rack; my arms and
+legs seem broken. But there nevertheless is an element of poetry in the
+affair. The stars sparkle round about, the Italian sergeant has a face
+like Apollo Belvedere, and the German painter sings a lovely German
+song.
+
+  "Now that all the shadows gather
+  And endless stars grow light,
+  Deep yearning on me falls
+  And softly fills the night."
+
+  "Through the sea of dreams
+  Sailing without cease,
+  Sailing goes my soul
+  In thine to find release."
+
+And I am thinking of the beautiful woman who is sleeping in regal
+comfort among her soft furs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Florence! Crowds, cries, importunate porters and cab-drivers. Wanda
+chooses a carriage, and dismisses the porters.
+
+"What have I a servant for," she says, "Gregor--here is the ticket--
+get the luggage."
+
+She wraps herself in her furs and sits quietly in the carriage while I
+drag the heavy trunks hither, one after another. I break down for a
+moment under the last one; a good-natured _carabiniere_ with an
+intelligent face comes to my assistance. She laughs.
+
+"It must be heavy," said she, "all my furs are in it."
+
+I get up on the driver's seat, wiping drops of perspiration from my
+brow. She gives the name of the hotel, and the driver urges on his
+horse. In a few minutes we halt at the brilliantly illuminated
+entrance.
+
+"Have you any rooms?" she asks the portier.
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"Two for me, one for my servant, all with stoves."
+
+"Two first-class rooms for you, madame, both with stoves," replied
+the waiter who had hastily come up, "and one without heat for your
+servant."
+
+She looked at them, and then abruptly said: "they are satisfactory,
+have fires built at once; my servant can sleep in the unheated room."
+
+I merely looked at her.
+
+"Bring up the trunks, Gregor," she commands, paying no attention to
+my looks. "In the meantime I'll be dressing, and then will go down
+to the dining-room, and you can eat something for supper."
+
+As she goes into the adjoining room, I drag the trunks upstairs and
+help the waiter build a fire in her bed-room. He tries to question
+me in bad French about my employer. With a brief glance I see the
+blazing fire, the fragrant white poster-bed, and the rugs which cover
+the floor. Tired and hungry I then descend the stairs, and ask for
+something to eat. A good-natured waiter, who used to be in the
+Austrian army and takes all sorts of pains to entertain me in German,
+shows me the dining-room and waits on me. I have just had the first
+fresh drink in thirty-six hours and the first bite of warm food on
+my fork, when she enters.
+
+I rise.
+
+"What do you mean by taking me into a dining-room in which my
+servant is eating," she snaps at the waiter, flaring with anger. She
+turns around and leaves.
+
+Meanwhile I thank heaven that I am permitted to go on eating. Later
+I climb the four flights upstairs to my room. My small trunk is
+already there, and a miserable little oil-lamp is burning. It is a
+narrow room without fire-place, without a window, but with a small
+air-hole. If it weren't so beastly cold, it would remind me of one
+of the Venetian _piombi_. [Footnote: These were notorious prisons
+under the leaden roof of the Palace of the Doges.] Involuntarily I
+have to laugh out aloud, so that it re-echoes, and I am startled by
+my own laughter.
+
+Suddenly the door is pulled open and the waiter with a theatrical
+Italian gesture calls "You are to come down to madame, at once." I
+pick up my cap, stumble down the first few steps, but finally arrive
+in front of her door on the first floor and knock.
+
+"Come in!"
+
+I enter, shut the door, and stand attention.
+
+Wanda has made herself comfortable. She is sitting in a neglige of
+white muslin and laces on a small red divan with her feet on a
+footstool that matches. She has thrown her fur-cloak about her. It
+is the identical cloak in which she appeared to me for the first time,
+as goddess of love.
+
+The yellow lights of the candelabra which stand on projections,
+their reflections in the large mirrors, and the red flames from the
+open fireplace play beautifully on the green velvet, the dark-brown
+sable of the cloak, the smooth white skin, and the red, flaming hair
+of the beautiful woman. Her clear, but cold face is turned toward me,
+and her cold green eyes rest upon me.
+
+"I am satisfied with you, Gregor," she began.
+
+I bowed.
+
+"Come closer."
+
+I obeyed.
+
+"Still closer," she looked down, and stroked the sable with her
+hand. "Venus in Furs receives her slave. I can see that you are more
+than an ordinary dreamer, you don't remain far in arrears of your
+dreams; you are the sort of man who is ready to carry his dreams into
+effect, no matter how mad they are. I confess, I like this; it
+impresses me. There is strength in this, and strength is the only
+thing one respects. I actually believe that under unusual
+circumstances, in a period of great deeds, what seems to be your
+weakness would reveal itself as extraordinary power. Under the early
+emperors you would have been a martyr, at the time of the Reformation
+an anabaptist, during the French Revolution one of those inspired
+Girondists who mounted the guillotine with the marseillaise on their
+lips. But you are my slave, my--"
+
+She suddenly leaped up; the furs slipped down, and she threw her
+arms with soft pressure about my neck.
+
+"My beloved slave, Severin, oh, how I love you, how I adore you, how
+handsome you are in your Cracovian costume! You will be cold to-night
+up in your wretched room without a fire. Shall I give you one of my
+furs, dear heart, the large one there--"
+
+She quickly picked it up, throwing it over my shoulders, and before
+I knew what had happened I was completely wrapped up in it.
+
+"How wonderfully becoming furs are to your face, they bring out your
+noble lines. As soon as you cease being my slave, you must wear a
+velvet coat with sable, do you understand? Otherwise I shall never
+put on my fur-jacket again."
+
+And again she began to caress me and kiss me; finally she drew me
+down on the little divan.
+
+"You seem to be pleased with yourself in furs," she said. "Quick,
+quick, give them to me, or I will lose all sense of dignity."
+
+I placed the furs about her, and Wanda slipped her right arm into
+the sleeve.
+
+"This is the pose in Titian's picture. But now enough of joking.
+Don't always look so solemn, it makes me feel sad. As far as the
+world is concerned you are still merely my servant; you are not yet
+my slave, for you have not yet signed the contract. You are still
+free, and can leave me any moment. You have played your part
+magnificently. I have been delighted, but aren't you tired of it
+already, and don't you think I am abominable? Well, say something--I
+command it."
+
+"Must I confess to you, Wanda?" I began.
+
+"Yes, you must."
+
+"Even if you take advantage of it," I continued, "I shall love you
+the more deeply, adore you the more fanatically, the worse you treat
+me. What you have just done inflames my blood and intoxicates all my
+senses." I held her close to me and clung for several moments to her
+moist lips.
+
+"Oh, you beautiful woman," I then exclaimed, looking at her. In my
+enthusiasm I tore the sable from her shoulders and pressed my mouth
+against her neck.
+
+"You love me even when I am cruel," said Wanda, "now go!--you bore
+me--don't you hear?"
+
+She boxed my ears so that I saw stars and bells rang in my ears.
+
+"Help me into my furs, slave."
+
+I helped her, as well as I could.
+
+"How awkward," she exclaimed, and was scarcely in it before she
+struck me in the face again. I felt myself growing pale.
+
+"Did I hurt you?" she asked, softly touching me with her hand.
+
+"No, no," I exclaimed.
+
+"At any rate you have no reason to complain, you want it thus; now
+kiss me again."
+
+I threw my arms about her, and her lips clung closely to mine. As
+she lay against my breast in her large heavy furs, I had a curiously
+oppressive sensation. It was as if a wild beast, a she-bear, were
+embracing me. It seemed as if I were about to feel her claws in my
+flesh. But this time the she-bear let me off easily.
+
+With my heart filled with smiling hopes, I went up to my miserable
+servant's room, and threw myself down on my hard couch.
+
+"Life is really amazingly droll," I thought. "A short time ago the
+most beautiful woman, Venus herself, rested against your breast, and
+now you have an opportunity for studying the Chinese hell. Unlike us,
+they don't hurl the damned into flames, but they have devils chasing
+them out into fields of ice.
+
+"Very likely the founders of their religion also slept in unheated
+rooms."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the night I startled out of my sleep with a scream. I had
+been dreaming of an icefield in which I had lost my way; I had been
+looking in vain for a way out. Suddenly an eskimo drove up in a
+sleigh harnessed with reindeer; he had the face of the waiter who had
+shown me to the unheated room.
+
+"What are you looking for here, my dear sir?" he exclaimed. "This is
+the North Pole."
+
+A moment later he had disappeared, and Wanda flew over the smooth
+ice on tiny skates. Her white satin skirt fluttered and crackled; the
+ermine of her jacket and cap, but especially her face, gleamed whiter
+than the snow. She shot toward me, inclosed me in her arms, and began
+to kiss me. Suddenly I felt my blood running warm down my side.
+
+"What are you doing?" I asked horror-stricken.
+
+She laughed, and as I looked at her now, it was no longer Wanda, but
+a huge, white she-bear, who was digging her paws into my body.
+
+I cried out in despair, and still heard her diabolical laughter when
+I awoke, and looked about the room in surprise.
+
+Early in the morning I stood at Wanda's door, and the waiter brought
+the coffee. I took it from him, and served it to my beautiful
+mistress. She had already dressed, and looked magnificent, all fresh
+and roseate. She smiled graciously at me and called me back, when I
+was about to withdraw respectfully.
+
+"Come, Gregor, have your breakfast quickly too," she said, "then we
+will go house-hunting. I don't want to stay in the hotel any longer
+than I have to. It is very embarassing here. If I chat with you for
+more than a minute, people will immediately say: 'The fair Russian
+is having an affair with her servant, you see, the race of Catherines
+isn't extinct yet.'"
+
+Half an hour later we went out; Wanda was in her cloth-gown with the
+Russian cap, and I in my Cracovian costume. We created quite a stir. I
+walked about ten paces behind, looking very solemn, but expected
+momentarily to have to break out into loud laughter. There was scarcely
+a street in which one or the other of the attractive houses did not bear
+the sign _camere ammobiliate_. Wanda always sent me upstairs, and only
+when the apartment seemed to answer her requirements did she herself
+ascend. By noon I was as tired as a stag-hound after the hunt.
+
+We entered a new house and left it again without having found a suitable
+habitation. Wanda was already somewhat out of humor. Suddenly she said
+to me: "Severin, the seriousness with which you play your part is
+charming, and the restrictions, which we have placed upon each other are
+really annoying me. I can't stand it any longer, I do love you, I must
+kiss you. Let's go into one of the houses."
+
+"But, my lady--" I interposed.
+
+"Gregor?" She entered the next open corridor and ascended a few
+steps of the dark stair-way; then she threw her arms about me with
+passionate tenderness and kissed me.
+
+"Oh, Severin, you were very wise. You are much more dangerous as
+slave than I would have imagined; you are positively irrestible, and
+I am afraid I shall have to fall in love with you again."
+
+"Don't you love me any longer then," I asked seized by a sudden
+fright.
+
+She solemnly shook her head, but kissed me again with her swelling,
+adorable lips.
+
+We returned to the hotel. Wanda had luncheon, and ordered me also
+quickly to get something to eat.
+
+Of course, I wasn't served as quickly as she, and so it happened
+that just as I was carrying the second bite of my steak to my mouth,
+the waiter entered and called out with his theatrical gesture:
+"Madame wants you, at once."
+
+I took a rapid and painful leave of my food, and, tired and hungry,
+hurried toward Wanda, who was already on the street.
+
+"I wouldn't have imagined you could be so cruel," I said
+reproachfully. "With all these, fatiguing duties you don't even leave
+me time to eat in peace."
+
+Wanda laughed gaily. "I thought you had finished," she said, "but
+never mind. Man was born to suffer, and you in particular. The
+martyrs didn't have any beefsteaks either."
+
+I followed her resentfully, gnawing at my hunger.
+
+"I have given up the idea of finding a place in the city," Wanda
+continued. "It will be difficult to find an entire floor which is
+shut off and where you can do as you please. In such a strange, mad
+relationship as ours there must be no jarring note. I shall rent an
+entire villa--and you will be surprised. You have my permission now
+to satisfy your hunger, and look about a bit in Florence. I won't be
+home till evening. If I need you then, I will have you called."
+
+I looked at the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Logia di Lanzi, and
+then I stood for a long time on the banks of the Arno. Again and
+again I let my eyes rest on the magnificent ancient Florence, whose
+round cupolas and towers were drawn in soft lines against the blue,
+cloudless sky. I watched its splendid bridges beneath whose wide
+arches the lively waves of the beautiful, yellow river ran, and the
+green hills which surrounded the city, bearing slender cypresses and
+extensive buildings, palaces and monasteries.
+
+It is a different world, this one in which we are--a gay, sensuous,
+smiling world. The landscape too has nothing of the seriousness and
+somberness of ours. It is a long ways off to the last white villas
+scattered among the pale green of the mountains, and yet there isn't
+a spot that isn't bright with sunlight. The people are less serious
+than we; perhaps, they think less, but they all look as though they
+were happy.
+
+It is also maintained that death is easier in the South.
+
+I have a vague feeling now that such a thing as beauty without thorn
+and love of the senses without torment does exist.
+
+Wanda has discovered a delightful little villa and rented it for the
+winter. It is situated on a charming hill on the left bank of the
+Arno, opposite the Cascine. It is surrounded by an attractive garden
+with lovely paths, grass plots, and magnificent meadow of camelias.
+It is only two stories high, quadrangular in the Italian fashion. An
+open gallery runs along one side, a sort of loggia with plaster-casts
+of antique statues; stone steps lead from it down into the garden.
+From the gallery you enter a bath with a magnificent marble basin,
+from which winding stairs lead to my mistress' bed-chamber.
+
+Wanda occupies the second story by herself.
+
+A room on the ground floor has been assigned to me; it is very
+attractive, and even has a fireplace.
+
+I have roamed through the garden. On a round hillock I discovered a
+little temple, but I found its door locked. However, there is a chink
+in the door and when I glue my eye to it, I see the goddess of love
+on a white pedestal.
+
+A slight shudder passes over me. It seems to me as if she were
+smiling at me saying: "Are you there? I have been expecting you."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is evening. An attractive maid brings me orders to appear before
+my mistress. I ascend the wide marble stairs, pass through the
+anteroom, a large salon furnished with extravagant magnificence, and
+knock at the door of the bedroom. I knock very softly for the luxury
+displayed everywhere intimidates me. Consequently no one hears me,
+and I stand for some time in front of the door. I have a feeling as
+if I were standing before the bed-room of the great Catherine, and
+it seems as if at any moment she might come out in her green sleeping
+furs, with the red ribbon and decoration on her bare breast, and with
+her little white powdered curls.
+
+I knocked again. Wanda impatiently pulls the door open.
+
+"Why so late?" she asks.
+
+"I was standing in front of the door, but you didn't hear me knock,"
+I reply timidly. She closes the door, and clinging to me, she leads
+me to the red damask ottoman on which she had been resting. The
+entire arrangement of the room is in red damask--wall-paper,
+curtains, portieres, hangings of the bed. A magnificent painting of
+Samson and Delilah forms the ceiling.
+
+Wanda receives me in an intoxicating dishabille. Her white satin
+dress flows gracefully and picturesquely down her slender body,
+leaving her arms and breast bare, and carelessly they nestle amid the
+dark hair of the great fur of sable, lined with green velvet. Her red
+hair falls down her back as far as the hips, only half held by
+strings of black pearls.
+
+"Venus in Furs," I whisper, while she draws me to her breast and
+threatens to stifle me with her kisses. Then I no longer speak and
+neither do I think; everything is drowned out in an ocean of
+unimagined bliss.
+
+"Do you still love me?" she asks, her eye softening in passionate
+tenderness.
+
+"You ask!" I exclaimed.
+
+"You still remember your oath," she continued with an alluring
+smile, "now that everything is prepared, everything in readiness, I
+ask you once more, is it still your serious wish to become my slave?"
+
+"Am I not ready?" I asked in surprise.
+
+"You have not yet signed the papers."
+
+"Papers--what papers?"
+
+"Oh, I see, you want to give it up," she said, "well then, we will
+let it go."
+
+"But Wanda," I said, "you know that nothing gives me greater
+happiness than to serve you, to be your slave. I would give
+everything for the sake of feeling myself wholly in your power, even
+unto death--"
+
+"How beautiful you are," she whispered, "when you speak so
+enthusiastically, so passionately. I am more in love with you than
+ever and you want me to be dominant, stern, and cruel. I am afraid,
+it will be impossible for me to be so."
+
+"I am not afraid," I replied smiling, "where are the papers?'"
+
+"So that you may know what it means to be absolutely in my power, I
+have drafted a second agreement in which you declare that you have
+decided to kill yourself. In that way I can even kill you, if I so
+desire."
+
+"Give them to me."
+
+While I was unfolding the documents and reading them, Wanda got pen
+and ink. She then sat down beside me with her arm about my neck, and
+looked over my shoulder at the paper.
+
+The first one read:
+
+AGREEMENT BETWEEN MME. VON DUNAJEW AND SEVERIN VON KUSIEMSKI
+
+"Severin von Kusiemski ceases with the present day being the affianced
+of Mme. Wanda von Dunajew, and renounces all the rights appertaining
+thereunto; he on the contrary binds himself on his word of honor as a
+man and nobleman, that hereafter he will be her _slave_ until such
+time that she herself sets him at liberty again.
+
+"As the slave of Mme. von Dunajew he is to bear the name Gregor, and
+he is unconditionally to comply with every one of her wishes, and to
+obey every one of her commands; he is always to be submissive to his
+mistress, and is to consider her every sign of favor as an
+extraordinary mercy.
+
+"Mme. von Dunajew is entitled not only to punish her slave as she
+deems best, even for the slightest inadvertence or fault, but also
+is herewith given the right to torture him as the mood may seize her
+or merely for the sake of whiling away the time. Should she so desire,
+she may kill him whenever she wishes; in short, he is her
+unrestricted property.
+
+"Should Mme. von Dunajew ever set her slave at liberty, Severin von
+Kusiemski agrees to forget everything that he has experienced or
+suffered as her slave, and promises _never under any circumstances and
+in no wise to think of vengeance or retaliation_.
+
+"Mme. von Dunajew on her behalf agrees as his mistress to appear as
+often as possible in her furs, especially when she purposes some
+cruelty toward her slave."
+
+Appended at the bottom of the agreement was the date of the present
+day.
+
+The second document contained only a few words.
+
+"Having since many years become weary of existence and its
+illusions, I have of my own free will put an end to my worthless
+life."
+
+I was seized with a deep horror when I had finished. There was still
+time, I could still withdraw, but the madness of passion and the
+sight of the beautiful woman that lay all relaxed against my shoulder
+carried me away.
+
+"This one you will have to copy, Severin," said Wanda, indicating
+the second document. "It has to be entirely in your own handwriting;
+this, of course, isn't necessary in the case of the agreement."
+
+I quickly copied the few lines in which I designated myself a
+suicide, and handed them to Wanda. She read them, and put them on the
+table with a smile.
+
+"Now have you the courage to sign it?" she asked with a crafty
+smile, inclining her head.
+
+I took the pen.
+
+"Let me sign first," said Wanda, "your hand is trembling, are you
+afraid of the happiness that is to be yours?"
+
+She took the agreement and pen. While engaging in my internal struggle,
+I looked upward for a moment. It occurred to me that the painting on the
+ceiling, like many of those of the Italian and Dutch schools, was
+utterly unhistorical, but this very fact gave it a strange mood which
+had an almost uncanny effect on me. Delilah, an opulent woman with
+flaming red hair, lay extended, half-disrobed, in a dark fur-cloak, upon
+a red ottoman, and bent smiling over Samson who had been overthrown and
+bound by the Philistines. Her smile in its mocking coquetry was full of
+a diabolical cruelty; her eyes, half-closed, met Samson's, and his with
+a last look of insane passion cling to hers, for already one of his
+enemies is kneeling on his breast with the red-hot iron to blind him.
+
+"Now--" said Wanda. "Why you are all lost in thought. What is the
+matter with you, everything will remain just as it was, even after
+you have signed, don't you know me yet, dear heart?"
+
+I looked at the agreement. Her name was written there in bold
+letters. I peered once more into her eyes with their potent magic,
+then I took the pen and quickly signed the agreement.
+
+"You are trembling," said Wanda calmly, "shall I help you?"
+
+She gently took hold of my hand, and my name appeared at the bottom
+of the second paper. Wanda looked once more at the two documents, and
+then locked them in the desk which stood at the head of the ottoman.
+
+"Now then, give me your passport and money."
+
+I took out my wallet and handed it to her. She inspected it, nodded,
+and put it with other things while in a sweet drunkenness I kneeled
+before her leaning my head against her breast.
+
+Suddenly she thrusts me away with her foot, leaps up, and pulls the
+bell-rope. In answer to its sound three young, slender negresses
+enter; they are as if carved of ebony, and are dressed from head to
+foot in red satin; each one has a rope in her hand.
+
+Suddenly I realize my position, and am about to rise. Wanda stands
+proudly erect, her cold beautiful face with its sombre brows and
+contemptous eyes is turned toward me. She stands before me as
+mistress, commanding, gives a sign with her hand, and before I really
+know what has happened to me the negresses have dragged me to the
+ground, and have tied me hand and foot. As in the case of one about
+to be executed my arms are bound behind my back, so that I can
+scarcely move.
+
+"Give me the whip, Haydee," commands Wanda, with unearthly calm.
+
+The negress hands it to her mistress, kneeling.
+
+"And now take off my heavy furs," she continues, "they impede me."
+
+The negress obeyed.
+
+"The jacket there!" Wanda commanded.
+
+Haydee quickly brought her the _kazabaika_, set with ermine, which lay
+on the bed, and Wanda slipped into it with two inimitably graceful
+movements.
+
+"Now tie him to the pillar here!"
+
+The negresses lifted me up, and twisting a heavy rope around my
+body, tied me standing against one of the massive pillars which
+supported the top of the wide Italian bed.
+
+Then they suddenly disappeared, as if the earth had swallowed them.
+
+Wanda swiftly approached me. Her white satin dress flowed behind her
+in a long train, like silver, like moonlight; her hair flared like
+flames against the white fur of her jacket. Now she stood in front
+of me with her left hand firmly planted on her hips, in her right hand
+she held the whip. She uttered an abrupt laugh.
+
+"Now play has come to an end between us," she said with heartless
+coldness. "Now we will begin in dead earnest. You fool, I laugh at you
+and despise you; you who in your insane infatuation have given
+yourself as a plaything to _me_, the frivolous and capricious woman.
+You are no longer the man I love, but _my slave_, at my mercy even
+unto life and death.
+
+"You shall know me!
+
+"First of all you shall have a taste of the whip in all seriousness,
+without having done anything to deserve it, so that you may
+understand what to expect, if you are awkward, disobedient, or
+refractory."
+
+With a wild grace she rolled back her fur-lined sleeve, and struck
+me across the back.
+
+I winced, for the whip cut like a knife into my flesh.
+
+"Well, how do you like that?" she exclaimed.
+
+I was silent.
+
+"Just wait, you will yet whine like a dog beneath my whip," she
+threatened, and simultaneously began to strike me again.
+
+The blows fell quickly, in rapid succession, with terrific force
+upon my back, arms, and neck; I had to grit my teeth not to scream
+aloud. Now she struck me in the face, warm blood ran down, but she
+laughed, and continued her blows.
+
+"It is only now I understand you," she exclaimed. "It really is a
+joy to have some one so completely in one's power, and a man at that,
+who loves you--you do love me?--No--Oh! I'll tear you to shreds yet,
+and with each blow my pleasure will grow. Now, twist like a worm,
+scream, whine! You will find no mercy in me!"
+
+Finally she seemed tired.
+
+She tossed the whip aside, stretched out on the ottoman, and rang.
+
+The negresses entered.
+
+"Untie him!"
+
+As they loosened the rope, I fell to the floor like a lump of wood.
+The black women grinned, showing their white teeth.
+
+"Untie the rope around his feet."
+
+They did it, but I was unable to rise.
+
+"Come over here, Gregor."
+
+I approached the beautiful woman. Never did she seem more seductive
+to me than to-day in spite of all her cruelty and contempt.
+
+"One step further," Wanda commanded. "Now kneel down, and kiss my
+foot."
+
+She extended her foot beyond the hem of white satin, and I, the
+supersensual fool, pressed my lips upon it.
+
+"Now, you won't lay eyes on me for an entire month, Gregor," she
+said seriously. "I want to become a stranger to you, so you will more
+easily adjust yourself to our new relationship. In the meantime you
+will work in the garden, and await my orders. Now, off with you,
+slave!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A month has passed with monotonous regularity, heavy work, and a
+melancholy hunger, hunger for her, who is inflicting all these
+torments on me.
+
+I am under the gardener's orders; I help him lop the trees and prune
+the hedges, transplant flowers, turn over the flower beds, sweep the
+gravel paths; I share his coarse food and his hard cot; I rise and
+go to bed with the chickens. Now and then I hear that our mistress
+is amusing herself, surrounded by admirers. Once I heard her gay
+laughter even down here in the garden.
+
+I seem awfully stupid to myself. Was it the result of my present
+life, or was I so before? The month is drawing to a close--the day
+after to-morrow. What will she do with me now, or has she forgotten
+me, and left me to trim hedges and bind bouquets till my dying day?
+
+A written order.
+
+"The slave Gregor is herewith ordered to my personal service.
+
+Wanda Dunajew."
+
+With a beating heart I draw aside the damask curtain on the
+following morning, and enter the bed-room of my divinity. It is still
+filled with a pleasant half darkness.
+
+"Is it you, Gregor?" she asks, while I kneel before the fire-place,
+building a fire. I tremble at the sound of the beloved voice. I
+cannot see her herself; she is invisible behind the curtains of the
+four-poster bed.
+
+"Yes, my mistress," I reply.
+
+"How late is it?"
+
+"Past nine o'clock."
+
+"Breakfast."
+
+I hasten to get it, and then kneel down with the tray beside her bed.
+
+"Here is breakfast, my mistress."
+
+Wanda draws back the curtains, and curiously enough at the first
+glance when I see her among the pillows with loosened flowing hair,
+she seems an absolute stranger, a beautiful woman, but the beloved
+soft lines are gone. This face is hard and has an expression of
+weariness and satiety.
+
+Or is it simply that formerly my eye did not see this?
+
+She fixes her green eyes upon me, more with curiosity than with
+menace, perhaps even somewhat pityingly, and lazily pulls the dark
+sleeping fur on which she lies over the bared shoulder.
+
+At this moment she is very charming, very maddening, and I feel my
+blood rising to my head and heart. The tray in my hands begins to
+sway. She notices it and reached out for the whip which is lying on
+the toilet-table.
+
+"You are awkward, slave," she says furrowing her brow.
+
+I lower my looks to the ground, and hold the tray as steadily as
+possible. She eats her breakfast, yawns, and stretches her opulent
+limbs in the magnificent furs.
+
+She has rung. I enter.
+
+"Take this letter to Prince Corsini."
+
+I hurry into the city, and hand the letter to the Prince. He is a
+handsome young man with glowing black eyes. Consumed with jealousy,
+I take his answer to her.
+
+"What is the matter with you?" she asks with lurking spitefulness.
+"You are very pale."
+
+"Nothing, mistress, I merely walked rather fast."
+
+At luncheon the prince is at her side, and I am condemned to serve
+both her and him. They joke, and I am, as if non-existent, for both.
+For a brief moment I see black; I was just pouring some Bordeaux into
+his glass, and spilled it over the table-cloth and her gown.
+
+"How awkward," Wanda exclaimed and slapped my face. The prince
+laughed, and she also, but I felt the blood rising to my face.
+
+After luncheon she drove in the Cascine. She has a little carriage
+with a handsome, brown English horse, and holds the reins herself.
+I sit behind and notice how coquettishly she acts, and nods with a
+smile when one of the distinguished gentlemen bows to her.
+
+As I help her out of the carriage, she leans lightly on my arm; the
+contact runs through me like an electric shock. She _is_ a wonderful
+woman, and I love her more than ever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For dinner at six she has invited a small group of men and women. I
+serve, but this time I do not spill any wine over the table-cloth.
+
+A slap in the face is more effective than ten lectures. It makes you
+understand very quickly, especially when the instruction is by the
+way of a small woman's hand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After dinner she drives to the Pergola Theater. As she descends the
+stairs in her black velvet dress with its large collar of ermine and
+with a diadem of white roses on her hair, she is literally stunning.
+I open the carriage-door, and help her in. In front of the theater
+I leap from the driver's seat, and in alighting she leaned on my arm,
+which trembled under the sweet burden. I open the door of her box,
+and then wait in the vestibule. The performance lasts four hours; she
+receives visits from her cavaliers, the while I grit my teeth with
+rage.
+
+It is way beyond midnight when my mistress's bell sounds for the
+last time.
+
+"Fire!" she orders abruptly, and when the fire-place crackles, "Tea!"
+
+When I return with the samovar, she has already undressed, and with
+the aid of the negress slipped into a white negligee.
+
+Haydee thereupon leaves.
+
+"Hand me the sleeping-furs," says Wanda, sleepily stretching her
+lovely limbs. I take them from the arm-chair, and hold them while she
+slowly and lazily slides into the sleeves. She then throws herself
+down on the cushions of the ottoman.
+
+"Take off my shoes, and put on my velvet slippers."
+
+I kneel down and tug at the little shoe which resists my efforts.
+"Hurry, hurry!" Wanda exclaims, "you are hurting me! just you wait--I
+will teach you." She strikes me with the whip, but now the shoe is
+off.
+
+"Now get out!" Still a kick--and then I can go to bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-night I accompanied her to a soiree. In the entrance-hall she
+ordered me to help her out of her furs; then with a proud smile,
+confident of victory, she entered the brilliantly illuminated room.
+I again waited with gloomy and monotonous thoughts, watching hour after
+hour run by. From time to time the sounds of music reached me, when
+the door remained open for a moment. Several servants tried to start
+a conversation with me, but soon desisted, since I knew only a few
+words of Italian.
+
+Finally I fell asleep, and dreamed that I murdered Wanda in a
+violent attack of jealousy. I was condemned to death, and saw myself
+strapped on the board; the knife fell, I felt it on my neck, but I
+was still alive--
+
+Then the executioner slapped my face.
+
+No, it wasn't the executioner; it was Wanda who stood wrathfully
+before me demanding her furs. I am at her side in a moment, and help
+her on with it.
+
+There is a deep joy in wrapping a beautiful woman into her furs, and
+in seeing and feeling how her neck and magnificent limbs nestle in
+the precious soft furs, and to lift the flowing hair over the collar.
+When she throws it off a soft warmth and a faint fragrance of her
+body still clings to the ends of the hairs of sable. It is enough to
+drive one mad.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Finally a day came when there were neither guests, nor theater, nor
+other company. I breathed a sigh of relief. Wanda sat in the gallery,
+reading, and apparently had no orders for me. At dusk when the
+silvery evening mists fell she withdrew. I served her at dinner, she
+ate by herself, but had not a look, not a syllable for me, not even
+a slap in the face.
+
+I actually desire a slap from her hand. Tears fill my eyes, and I
+feel that she has humiliated me so deeply, that she doesn't even find
+it worth while to torture or maltreat me any further.
+
+Before she goes to bed, her bell calls me.
+
+"You will sleep here to-night, I had horrible dreams last night, and
+am afraid of being alone. Take one of the cushions from the ottoman,
+and lie down on the bearskin at my feet."
+
+Then Wanda put out the lights. The only illumination in the room was
+from a small lamp suspended from the ceiling. She herself got into
+bed. "Don't stir, so as not to wake me."
+
+I did as she had commanded, but could not fall asleep for a long
+time. I saw the beautiful woman, beautiful as a goddess, lying on her
+back on the dark sleeping-furs; her arms beneath her neck, with a
+flood of red hair over them. I heard her magnificent breast rise in
+deep regular breathing, and whenever she moved ever so slightly. I
+woke up and listened to see whether she needed me.
+
+But she did not require me.
+
+No task was required of me; I meant no more to her than a night-lamp, or
+a revolver which one places under one's pillow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Am I mad or is she? Does all this arise out of an inventive, wanton
+woman's brain with the intention of surpassing my supersensual
+fantasies, or is this woman really one of those Neronian characters
+who take a diabolical pleasure in treading underfoot, like a worm,
+human beings, who have thoughts and feelings and a will like theirs?
+
+What have I experienced?
+
+When I knelt with the coffee-tray beside her bed, Wanda suddenly
+placed her hand on my shoulder and her eyes plunged deep into mine.
+
+"What beautiful eyes you have," she said softly, "and especially now
+since you suffer. Are you very unhappy?"
+
+I bowed my head, and kept silent.
+
+"Severin, do you still love me," she suddenly exclaimed
+passionately, "can you still love me?"
+
+She drew me close with such vehemence that the coffee-tray upset,
+the can and cups fell to the floor, and the coffee ran over the
+carpet.
+
+"Wanda--my Wanda," I cried out and held her passionately against me;
+I covered her mouth, face, and breast with kisses.
+
+"It is my unhappiness that I love you more and more madly the worse
+you treat me, the more frequently you betray me. Oh, I shall die of
+pain and love and jealousy."
+
+"But I haven't betrayed you, as yet, Severin," replied Wanda smiling.
+
+"Not? Wanda! Don't jest so mercilessly with me," I cried. "Haven't
+I myself taken the letter to the Prince--"
+
+"Of course, it was an invitation for luncheon."
+
+"You have, since we have been in Florence--"
+
+"I have been absolutely faithful to you," replied Wanda, "I swear it
+by all that is holy to me. All that I have done was merely to fulfill
+your dream and it was done for your sake.
+
+"However, I shall take a lover, otherwise things will be only half
+accomplished, and in the end you will yet reproach me with not having
+treated you cruelly enough, my dear beautiful slave! But to-day you
+shall be Severin again, the only one I love. I haven't given away
+your clothes. They are here in the chest. Go and dress as you used
+to in the little Carpathian health-resort when our love was so intimate.
+Forget everything that has happened since; oh, you will forget it
+easily in my arms; I shall kiss away all your sorrows."
+
+She began to treat me tenderly like a child, to kiss me and caress
+me. Finally she said with a gracious smile, "Go now and dress, I too
+will dress. Shall I put on my fur-jacket? Oh yes, I know, now run
+along!"
+
+When I returned she was standing in the center of the room in her
+white satin dress, and the red _kazabaika_ edged with ermine; her hair
+was white with powder and over her forehead she wore a small diamond
+diadem. For a moment she reminded me in an uncanny way of Catherine
+the Second, but she did not give me much time for reminiscences. She
+drew me down on the ottoman beside her and we enjoyed two blissful
+hours. She was no longer the stern capricious mistress, she was
+entirely a fine lady, a tender sweetheart. She showed me photographs
+and books which had just appeared, and talked about them with so much
+intelligence, clarity, and good taste, that I more than once carried
+her hand to my lips, enraptured. She then had me recite several of
+Lermontov's poems, and when I was all afire with enthusiasm, she
+placed her small hand gently on mine. Her expression was soft, and her
+eyes were filled with tender pleasure.
+
+"Are you happy?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+She then leaned back on the cushions, and slowly opened her
+_kazabaika_.
+
+But I quickly covered the half-bared breast again with the ermine.
+"You are driving me mad." I stammered.
+
+"Come!"
+
+I was already lying in her arms, and like a serpent she was kissing
+me with her tongue, when again she whispered, "Are you happy?"
+
+"Infinitely!" I exclaimed.
+
+She laughed aloud. It was an evil, shrill laugh which made cold
+shivers run down by back.
+
+"You used to dream of being the slave, the plaything of a beautiful
+woman, and now you imagine you are a free human being, a man, my
+lover-you fool! A sign from me, and you are a slave again. Down on
+your knees!"
+
+I sank down from the ottoman to her feet, but my eye still clung
+doubtingly on hers.
+
+"You can't believe it," she said, looking at me with her arms folded
+across her breast. "I am bored, and you will just do to while away
+a couple of hours of time. Don't look at me that way--"
+
+She kicked me with her foot.
+
+"You are just what I want, a human being, a thing, an animal--"
+
+She rang. The three negresses entered.
+
+"Tie his hands behind his back."
+
+I remained kneeling and unresistingly let them do this. They led me
+into the garden, down to the little vineyard, which forms the
+southern boundary. Corn had been planted between the espaliers, and
+here and there a few dead stalks still stood. To one side was a
+plough.
+
+The negresses tied me to a post, and amused themselves sticking me
+with their golden hair-needles. But this did not last long, before
+Wanda appeared with her ermine cap on her head, and with her hands
+in the pockets of her jacket. She had me untied, and then my hands
+were fastened together on my back. She finally had a yoke put around
+my neck, and harnessed me to the plough.
+
+Then her black demons drove me out into the field. One of them held
+the plough, the other one led me by a line, the third applied the
+whip, and Venus in Furs stood to one side and looked on.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When I was serving dinner on the following day Wanda said: "Bring
+another cover, I want you to dine with me to-day," and when I was
+about to sit down opposite her, she added, "No, over here, close by
+my side."
+
+She is in the best of humors, gives me soup with her spoon, feeds me
+with her fork, and places her head on the table like a playful kitten
+and flirts with me. I have the misfortune of looking at Haydee, who
+serves in my place, perhaps a little longer than is necessary. It is
+only now that I noticed her noble, almost European cast of
+countenance and her magnificent statuesque bust, which is as if hewn
+out of black marble. The black devil observes that she pleases me,
+and, grinning, shows her teeth. She has hardly left the room, before
+Wanda leaps up in a rage.
+
+"What, you dare to look at another woman besides me! Perhaps you
+like her even better than you do me, she is even more demonic!"
+
+I am frightened; I have never seen her like this before; she is
+suddenly pale even to the lips and her whole body trembles. Venus in
+Furs is jealous of her slave. She snatches the whip from its hook and
+strikes me in the face; then she calls her black servants, who bind
+me, and carry me down into the cellar, where they throw me into a
+dark, dank, subterranean compartment, a veritable prison-cell.
+
+Then the lock of the door clicks, the bolts are drawn, a key sings
+in the lock. I am a prisoner, buried.
+
+I have been lying here for I don't know how long, bound like a calf
+about to be hauled to the slaughter, on a bundle of damp straw,
+without any light, without food, without drink, without sleep. It
+would be like her to let me starve to death, if I don't freeze to
+death before then. I am shaking with cold. Or is it fever? I believe
+I am beginning to hate this woman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A red streak, like blood, floods across the floor; it is a light
+falling through the door which is now thrust open.
+
+Wanda appears on the threshold, wrapped in her sables, holding a
+lighted torch.
+
+"Are you still alive?" she asks.
+
+"Are you coming to kill me?" I reply with a low, hoarse voice.
+
+With two rapid strides Wanda reaches my side, she kneels down beside
+me, and places my head in her lap. "Are you ill? Your eyes glow so,
+do you love me? I want you to love me."
+
+She draws forth a short dagger. I start with fright when its blade
+gleams in front of my eyes. I actually believe that she is about to
+kill me. She laughs, and cuts the ropes that bind me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Every evening after dinner she now has me called. I have to read to
+her, and she discusses with me all sorts of interesting problems and
+subjects. She seems entirely transformed; it is as if she were
+ashamed of the savagery which she betrayed to me and of the cruelty
+with which she treated me. A touching gentleness transfigures her
+entire being, and when at the good-night she gives me her hand, a
+superhuman power of goodness and love lies in her eyes, of the kind
+which calls forth tears in us and causes us to forget all the
+miseries of existence and all the terrors of death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am reading _Manon l'Escault_ to her. She feels the association, she
+doesn't say a word, but she smiles from time to time, and finally she
+shuts up the little book.
+
+"Don't you want to go on reading?"
+
+"Not to-day. We will ourselves act _Manon l'Escault_ to-day. I have a
+rendezvous in the Cascine, and you, my dear Chevalier, will accompany
+me; I know, you will do it, won't you?"
+
+"You command it."
+
+"I do not command it, I beg it of you," she says with irresistible
+charm. She then rises, puts her hands on my shoulders, and looks at
+me.
+
+"Your eyes!" she exclaims. "I love you, Severin, you have no idea
+how I love you!"
+
+"Yes, I have!" I replied bitterly, "so much so that you have
+arranged for a rendezvous with some one else."
+
+"I do this only to allure you the more," she replied vivaciously. "I
+must have admirers, so as not to lose you. I don't ever want to lose
+you, never, do you hear, for I love only you, you alone."
+
+She clung passionately to my lips.
+
+"Oh, if I only could, as I would, give you all of my soul in a kiss--
+thus--but now come."
+
+She slipped into a simple black velvet coat, and put a dark _bashlyk_
+[Footnote: A kind of Russian cap.] on her head. Then she rapidly went
+through the gallery, and entered the carriage.
+
+"Gregor will drive," she called out to the coachman who withdrew in
+surprise.
+
+I ascended the driver's seat, and angrily whipped up the horses.
+
+In the Cascine where the main roadway turns into a leafy path, Wanda
+got out. It was night, only occasional stars shone through the gray
+clouds that fled across the sky. By the bank of the Arno stood a man
+in a dark cloak, with a brigand's hat, and looked at the yellow
+waves. Wanda rapidly walked through the shrubbery, and tapped him on
+the shoulder. I saw him turn and seize her hand, and then they
+disappeared behind the green wall.
+
+An hour full of torments. Finally there was a rustling in the bushes
+to one side, and they returned.
+
+The man accompanied her to the carriage. The light of the lamp fell
+full and glaringly upon an infinitely young, soft and dreamy face
+which I had never before seen, and played in his long, blond curls.
+
+She held out her hand which he kissed with deep respect, then she
+signaled to me, and immediately the carriage flew along the leafy
+wall which follows the river like a long green screen.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The bell at the garden-gate rings. It is a familiar face. The man
+from the Cascine.
+
+"Whom shall I announce?" I ask him in French. He timidly shakes his
+head.
+
+"Do you, perhaps, understand some German?" he asks shyly.
+
+"Yes. Your name, please."
+
+"Oh! I haven't any yet," he replies, embarrassed--"Tell your
+mistress the German painter from the Cascine is here and would like--
+but there she is herself."
+
+Wanda had stepped out on the balcony, and nodded toward the stranger.
+
+"Gregor, show the gentleman in!" she called to me.
+
+I showed the painter the stairs.
+
+"Thanks, I'll find her now, thanks, thanks very much." He ran up the
+steps. I remained standing below, and looked with deep pity on the
+poor German.
+
+Venus in Furs has caught his soul in the red snares of hair. He will
+paint her, and go mad.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is a sunny winter's day. Something that looks like gold trembles
+on the leaves of the clusters of trees down below in the green level
+of the meadow. The camelias at the foot of the gallery are glorious
+in their abundant buds. Wanda is sitting in the loggia; she is
+drawing. The German painter stands opposite her with his hands folded
+as in adoration, and looks at her. No, he rather looks at her face,
+and is entirely absorbed in it, enraptured.
+
+But she does not see him, neither does she see me, who with the
+spade in my hand am turning over the flower-bed, solely that I may
+see her and feel her nearness, which produces an effect on me like
+poetry, like music.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The painter has gone. It is a hazardous thing to do, but I risk it.
+I go up to the gallery, quite close, and ask Wanda "Do you love the
+painter, mistress?"
+
+She looks at me without getting angry, shakes her head, and finally
+even smiles.
+
+"I feel sorry for him," she replies, "but I do not love him. I love no
+one. _I used to love you, as ardently, as passionately, as deeply as
+it was possible for me to love,_ but now I don't love even you any
+more; my heart is a void, dead, and this makes me sad."
+
+"Wanda!" I exclaimed, deeply moved.
+
+"Soon, you too will no longer love me," she continued, "tell me when
+you have reached that point, and I will give back to you your
+freedom."
+
+"Then I shall remain your slave, all my life long, for I adore you
+and shall always adore you," I cried, seized by that fanaticism of
+love which has repeatedly been so fatal to me.
+
+Wanda looked at me with a curious pleasure. "Consider well what you
+do," she said. "I have loved you infinitely and have been despotic
+towards you so that I might fulfil your dream. Something of my old
+feeling, a sort of real sympathy for you, still trembles in my
+breast. When that too has gone who knows whether then I shall give
+you your liberty; whether I shall not then become really cruel,
+merciless, even brutal toward; whether I shall not take a diabolical
+pleasure in tormenting and putting on the rack the man who worships
+me idolatrously, the while I remain indifferent or love someone else;
+perhaps, I shall enjoy seeing him die of his love for me. Consider
+this well."
+
+"I have long since considered all that," I replied as in a glow of
+fever. "I cannot exist, cannot live without you; I shall die if you
+set me at liberty; let me remain your slave, kill me, but do not
+drive me away."
+
+"Very well then, be my slave," she replied, "but don't forget that
+I no longer love you, and your love doesn't mean any more to me than
+a dog's, and dogs are kicked."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-day I visited the Venus of Medici.
+
+It was still early, and the little octagonal room in the Tribuna was
+filled with half-lights like a sanctuary; I stood with folded hands
+in deep adoration before the silent image of the divinity.
+
+But I did not stand for long.
+
+Not a human soul was in the gallery, not even an Englishman, and I
+fell down on my knees. I looked up at the lovely slender body, the
+budding breasts, the virginal and yet voluptuous face, the fragrant
+curls which seemed to conceal tiny horns on each side of the forehead.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My mistress's bell.
+
+It is noonday. She, however, is still abed with her arms intertwined
+behind her neck.
+
+"I want to bathe," she says, "and you will attend me. Lock the door!"
+
+I obey.
+
+"Now go downstairs and make sure the door below is also locked."
+
+I descended the winding stairs that lead from her bedroom to the
+bath; my feet gave way beneath me, and I had to support myself
+against the iron banister. After having ascertained that the door
+leading to the Loggia and the garden was locked, I returned. Wanda
+was now sitting on the bed with loosened hair, wrapped in her green
+velvet furs. When she made a rapid movement, I noticed that the furs
+were her only covering. It made me start terribly, I don't know why?
+I was like one condemned to death, who knows he is on the way to the
+scaffold, and yet begins to tremble when he sees it.
+
+"Come, Gregor, take me on your arms."
+
+"You mean, mistress?"
+
+"You are to carry me, don't you understand?"
+
+I lifted her up, so that she rested in my arms, while she twined
+hers around my neck. Slowly, step by step, I went down the stairs
+with her and her hair beat from time to time against my cheek and her
+foot sought support against my knee. I trembled under the beautiful
+burden I was carrying, and every moment it seemed as if I had to
+break down beneath it.
+
+The bath consisted of a wide, high rotunda, which received a soft
+quiet light from a red glass cupola above. Two palms extended their
+broad leaves like a roof over a couch of velvet cushions. From here
+steps covered with Turkish rugs led to the white marble basin which
+occupied the center.
+
+"There is a green ribbon on my toilet-table upstairs," said Wanda,
+as I let her down on the couch, "go get it, and also bring the whip."
+
+I flew upstairs and back again, and kneeling put both in my mistress's
+hands. She then had me twist her heavy electric hair into a large knot
+which I fastened with the green ribbon. Then I prepared the bath. I did
+this very awkwardly because my hands and feet refused to obey me. Again
+and again I had to look at the beautiful woman lying on the red velvet
+cushions, and from time to time her wonderful body gleamed here and
+there beneath the furs. Some magnetic power stronger than my will
+compelled me to look. I felt that all sensuality and lustfulness lies in
+that which is half-concealed or intentionally disclosed; and the truth
+of this I recognized even more acutely, when the basin at last was full,
+and Wanda threw off the fur-cloak with a single gesture, and stood
+before me like the goddess in the Tribuna.
+
+At that moment she seemed as sacred and chaste to me in her unveiled
+beauty, as did the divinity of long ago. I sank down on my knees
+before her, and devoutly pressed my lips on her foot.
+
+My soul which had been storm-tossed only a little while earlier,
+suddenly was perfectly calm, and I now felt no element of cruelty in
+Wanda.
+
+She slowly descended the stairs, and I could watch her with a
+calmness in which not a single atom of torment or desire was
+intermingled. I could see her plunge into and rise out of the
+crystalline water, and the wavelets which she herself raised played
+about her like tender lovers.
+
+Our nihilistic aesthetician is right when he says: a real apple is
+more beautiful than a painted one, and a living woman is more
+beautiful than a Venus of stone.
+
+And when she left the bath, and the silvery drops and the roseate
+light rippled down her body, I was seized with silent rapture. I
+wrapped the linen sheets about her, drying her glorious body. The
+calm bliss remained with me, even now when one foot upon me as upon
+a footstool, she rested on the cushions in her large velvet cloak.
+The lithe sables nestled desirously against her cold marble-like body.
+Her left arm on which she supported herself lay like a sleeping swan
+in the dark fur of the sleeve, while her left hand played carelessly
+with the whip.
+
+By chance my look fell on the massive mirror on the wall opposite,
+and I cried out, for I saw the two of us in its golden frame as in
+a picture. The picture was so marvellously beautiful, so strange, so
+imaginative, that I was filled with deep sorrow at the thought that
+its lines and colors would have to dissolve like mist.
+
+"What is the matter?" asked Wanda.
+
+I pointed to the mirror.
+
+"Ah, that is really beautiful," she exclaimed, "too bad one can't
+capture the moment and make it permanent."
+
+"And why not?" I asked. "Would not any artist, even the most famous,
+be proud if you gave him leave to paint you and make you immortal by
+means of his brush.
+
+"The very thought that this extra-ordinary beauty is to be lost to
+the world," I continued still watching her enthusiastically, "is
+horrible--all this glorious facial expression, this mysterious eye
+with its green fires, this demonic hair, this magnificence of body.
+The idea fills me with a horror of death, of annihilation. But the
+hand of an artist shall snatch you from this. You shall not like the
+rest of us disappear absolutely and forever, without leaving a trace
+of your having been. Your picture must live, even when you yourself
+have long fallen to dust; your beauty must triumph beyond death!"
+
+Wanda smiled.
+
+"Too bad, that present-day Italy hasn't a Titian or Raphael," she
+said, "but, perhaps, love will make amends for genius, who knows; our
+little German might do?" She pondered.
+
+"Yes, he shall paint you, and I will see to it that the god of love
+mixes his colors."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The young painter has established his studio in her villa; he is
+completely in her net. He has just begun a Madonna, a Madonna with
+red hair and green eyes! Only the idealism of a German would attempt
+to use this thorough-bred woman as a model for a picture of
+virginity. The poor fellow really is an almost bigger donkey than I
+am. Our misfortune is that our Titania has discovered our ass's ears
+too soon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now she laughs derisively at us, and how she laughs! I hear her
+insolent melodious laughter in his studio, under the open window of
+which I stand, jealously listening.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Are you mad, me--ah, it is unbelievable, me as the Mother of God!"
+she exclaimed and laughed again. "Wait a moment, I will show you
+another picture of myself, one that I myself have painted, and you
+shall copy it."
+
+Her head appeared in the window, luminous like a flame under the
+sunlight.
+
+"Gregor!"
+
+I hurried up the stairs, through the gallery, into the studio.
+
+"Lead him to the bath," Wanda commanded, while she herself hurried
+away.
+
+A few moments passed and Wanda arrived; dressed in nothing but the
+sable fur, with the whip in her hand; she descended the stairs and
+stretched out on the velvet cushions as on the former occasion. I lay
+at her feet and she placed one of her feet upon me; her right hand
+played with the whip. "Look at me," she said, "with your deep,
+fanatical look, that's it."
+
+The painter had turned terribly pale. He devoured the scene with his
+beautiful dreamy blue eyes; his lips opened, but he remained dumb.
+
+"Well, how do you like the picture?"
+
+"Yes, that is how I want to paint you," said the German, but it was
+really not a spoken language; it was the eloquent moaning, the
+weeping of a sick soul, a soul sick unto death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The charcoal outline of the painting is done; the heads and flesh
+parts are painted in. Her diabolical face is already becoming visible
+under a few bold strokes, life flashes in her green eyes.
+
+Wanda stands in front of the canvas with her arms crossed over her
+breast.
+
+"This picture, like many of those of the Venetian school, is
+simultaneously to represent a portrait and to tell a story,"
+explained the painter, who again had become pale as death.
+
+"And what will you call it?" she asked, "but what is the matter with
+you, are you ill?"
+
+"I am afraid--" he answered with a consuming look fixed on the
+beautiful woman in furs, "but let us talk of the picture."
+
+"Yes, let us talk about the picture."
+
+"I imagine the goddess of love as having descended from Mount Olympus
+for the sake of some mortal man. And always cold in this modern world
+of ours, she seeks to keep her sublime body warm in a large heavy fur
+and her feet in the lap of her lover. I imagine the favorite of a
+beautiful despot, who whips her slave, when she is tired of kissing
+him, and the more she treads him underfoot, the more insanely he loves
+her. And so I shall call the picture: _Venus in Furs_."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The painter paints slowly, but his passion grows more and more
+rapidly. I am afraid he will end up by committing suicide. She plays
+with him and propounds riddles to him which he cannot solve, and he
+feels his blood congealing in the process, but it amuses her.
+
+During the sitting she nibbles at candies, and rolls the paper-wrappers
+into little pellets with which she bombards him.
+
+"I am glad you are in such good humor," said the painter, "but your face
+has lost the expression which I need for my picture."
+
+"The expression which you need for your picture," she replied,
+smiling. "Wait a moment."
+
+She rose, and dealt me a blow with the whip. The painter looked at
+her with stupefaction, and a child-like surprise showed on his face,
+mingled with disgust and admiration.
+
+While whipping me, Wanda's face acquired more and more of the cruel,
+contemptuous character, which so haunts and intoxicates me.
+
+"Is this the expression you need for your picture?" she exclaimed.
+The painter lowered his look in confusion before the cold ray of her
+eye.
+
+"It is the expression--" he stammered, "but I can't paint now--"
+
+"What?" said Wanda, scornfully, "perhaps I can help you?"
+
+"Yes--" cried the German, as if taken with madness, "whip me too."
+
+"Oh! With pleasure," she replied, shrugging her shoulders, "but if
+I am to whip you I want to do it in sober earnest."
+
+"Whip me to death," cried the painter.
+
+"Will you let me tie you?" she asked, smiling.
+
+"Yes--" he moaned--
+
+Wanda left the room for a moment, and returned with ropes.
+
+"Well--are you still brave enough to put yourself into the power of
+Venus in Furs, the beautiful despot, for better or worse?" she began
+ironically.
+
+"Yes, tie me," the painter replied dully. Wanda tied his hands on
+his back and drew a rope through his arms and a second one around his
+body, and fettered him to the cross-bars of the window. Then she
+rolled back the fur, seized the whip, and stepped in front of him.
+
+The scene had a grim attraction for me, which I cannot describe. I
+felt my heart beat, when, with a smile, she drew back her arm for the
+first blow, and the whip hissed through the air. He winced slightly
+under the blow. Then she let blow after blow rain upon him, with her
+mouth half-opened and her teeth flashing between her red lips, until
+he finally seemed to ask for mercy with his piteous, blue eyes. It
+was indescribable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She is sitting for him now, alone. He is working on her head.
+
+She has posted me in the adjoining room behind a heavy curtain,
+where I can't be seen, but can see everything.
+
+What does she intend now?
+
+Is she afraid of him? She has driven him insane enough to be sure,
+or is she hatching a new torment for me? My knees tremble.
+
+They are talking. He has lowered his voice so that I cannot
+understand a word, and she replies in the same way. What is the
+meaning of this? Is there an understanding between them?
+
+I suffer frightful torments; my heart seems about to burst.
+
+He kneels down before her, embraces her, and presses his head
+against her breast, and she--in her heartlessness--laughs--and now
+I hear her saying aloud:
+
+"Ah! You need another application of the whip."
+
+"Woman! Goddess! Are you without a heart--can't you love," exclaimed
+the German, "don't you even know, what it means to love, to be
+consumed with desire and passion, can't you even imagine what I
+suffer? Have you no pity for me?"
+
+"No!" she replied proudly and mockingly, "but I have the whip."
+
+She drew it quickly from the pocket of her fur-coat, and struck him
+in the face with the handle. He rose, and drew back a couple of paces.
+
+"Now, are you ready to paint again?" she asked indifferently. He did
+not reply, but again went to the easel and took up his brush and
+palette.
+
+The painting is marvellously successful. It is a portrait which as
+far as the likeness goes couldn't be better, and at the same time it
+seems to have an ideal quality. The colors glow, are supernatural;
+almost diabolical, I would call them.
+
+The painter has put all his sufferings, his adoration, and all his
+execration into the picture.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Now he is painting me; we are alone together for several hours every
+day. To-day he suddenly turned to me with his vibrant voice and said:
+
+"You love this woman?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I also love her." His eyes were bathed in tears. He remained silent
+for a while, and continued painting.
+
+"We have a mountain at home in Germany within which she dwells," he
+murmured to himself. "She is a demon."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The picture is finished. She insisted on paying him for it,
+munificently, in the manner of queens.
+
+"Oh, you have already paid me," he said, with a tormented smile,
+refusing her offer.
+
+Before he left, he secretly opened his portfolio, and let me look
+inside. I was startled. Her head looked at me as if out of a mirror
+and seemed actually to be alive.
+
+"I shall take it along," he said, "it is mine; she can't take it
+away from me. I have earned it with my heart's blood."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I am really rather sorry for the poor painter," she said to me to-day,
+"it is absurd to be as virtuous as I am. Don't you think so too?"
+
+I did not dare to reply to her.
+
+"Oh, I forgot that I am talking with a slave; I need some fresh air,
+I want to be diverted, I want to forget.
+
+"The carriage, quick!"
+
+Her new dress is extravagant: Russian half-boots of violet-blue
+velvet trimmed with ermine, and a skirt of the same material,
+decorated with narrow stripes and rosettes of furs. Above it is an
+appropriate, close-fitting jacket, also richly trimmed and lined with
+ermine. The headdress is a tall cap of ermine of the style of
+Catherine the Second, with a small aigrette, held in place by a
+diamond-agraffe; her red hair falls loose down her back. She ascends
+on the driver's seat, and holds the reins herself; I take my seat
+behind. How she lashes on the horses! The carriage flies along like
+mad.
+
+Apparently it is her intention to attract attention to-day, to make
+conquests, and she succeeds completely. She is the lioness of the
+Cascine. People nod to her from carriages; on the footpath people
+gather in groups to discuss her. She pays no attention to anyone,
+except now and then acknowledging the greetings of elderly gentlemen
+with a slight nod.
+
+Suddenly a young man on a lithe black horse dashes up at full speed.
+As soon as he sees Wanda, he stops his horse and makes it walk. When
+he is quite close, he stops entirely and lets her pass. And she too
+sees him--the lioness, the lion. Their eyes meet. She madly drives
+past him, but she cannot tear herself free from the magic power of
+his look, and she turns her head after him.
+
+My heart stops when I see the half-surprised, half-enraptured look
+with which she devours him, but he is worthy of it.
+
+For he is, indeed, a magnificent specimen of man, No, rather, he is
+a man whose like I have never yet seen among the living. He is in the
+Belvedere, graven in marble, with the same slender, yet steely
+musculature, with the same face and the same waving curls. What makes
+him particularly beautiful is that he is beardless. If his hips were
+less narrow, one might take him for a woman in disguise. The curious
+expression about the mouth, the lion's lip which slightly discloses
+the teeth beneath, lends a flashing tinge of cruelty to the beautiful
+face--
+
+Apollo flaying Marsyas.
+
+He wears high black boots, closely fitting breeches of white
+leather, short fur coat of black cloth, of the kind worn by Italian
+cavalry officers, trimmed with astrakhan and many rich loops; on his
+black locks is a red fez.
+
+I now understand the masculine Eros, and I marvel at Socrates for
+having remained virtuous in view of an Alcibiades like this.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have never seen my lioness so excited. Her cheeks flamed when she
+left from the carriage at her villa. She hurried upstairs, and with
+an imperious gesture ordered me to follow.
+
+Walking up and down her room with long strides, she began to talk so
+rapidly, that I was frightened.
+
+"You are to find out who the man in the Cascine was, immediately--
+
+"Oh, what a man! Did you see him? What do you think of him? Tell me."
+
+"The man is beautiful," I replied dully.
+
+"He is so beautiful," she paused, supporting herself on the arm of
+a chair, "that he has taken my breath away."
+
+"I can understand the impression he has made on you," I replied, my
+imagination carrying me away in a mad whirl. "I am quite lost in
+admiration myself, and I can imagine--"
+
+"You may imagine," she laughed aloud, "that this man is my lover,
+and that he will apply the lash to you, and that you will enjoy being
+punished by him.
+
+"But now go, go."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before evening fell, I had the desired information.
+
+Wanda was still fully dressed when I returned. She reclined on the
+ottoman, her face buried in her hands, her hair in a wild tangle,
+like the red mane of a lioness.
+
+"What is his name?" she asked, uncanny calm.
+
+"Alexis Papadopolis."
+
+"A Greek, then,"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"He is very young?"
+
+"Scarcely older than you. They say he was educated in Paris, and
+that he is an atheist. He fought against the Turks in Candia, and is
+said to have distinguished himself there no less by his race-hatred
+and cruelty, than by his bravery."
+
+"All in all, then, a man," she cried with sparkling eyes.
+
+"At present he is living in Florence," I continued, "he is said to
+be tremendously rich--"
+
+"I didn't ask you about that," she interrupted quickly and sharply.
+"The man is dangerous. Aren't you afraid of him? I am afraid of him.
+Has he a wife?"
+
+"No."
+
+"A mistress?"
+
+"No."
+
+"What theaters does he attend?"
+
+"To-night he will be at the Nicolini Theater, where Virginia Marini
+and Salvini are acting; they are the greatest living artists in
+Italy, perhaps in Europe.
+
+"See that you get a box--and be quick about it!" she commanded.
+
+"But, mistress--"
+
+"Do you want a taste of the whip?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You can wait down in the lobby," she said when I had placed the
+opera-glasses and the programme on the edge of her box and adjusted
+the footstool.
+
+I am standing there and had to lean against the wall for support so
+as not to fall down with envy and rage--no, rage isn't the right
+word; it was a mortal fear.
+
+I saw her in her box dressed in blue moire, with a huge ermine cloak
+about her bare shoulders; he sat opposite. I saw them devour each
+other with their eyes. For both of them the stage, Goldoni's _Pamela,_
+Salvini, Marini, the public, even the entire world, were non-existant
+to-night. And I--what was I at that moment?--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To-day she is attending the ball at the Greek ambassador's. Does she
+know, that she will meet him there?
+
+At any rate she dressed, as if she did. A heavy sea-green silk dress
+plastically encloses her divine form, leaving the bust and arms bare. In
+her hair, which is done into a single flaming knot, a white water-lily
+blossoms; from it the leaves of reeds interwoven with a few loose
+strands fall down toward her neck. There no longer is any trace of
+agitation or trembling feverishness in her being. She is calm, so calm,
+that I feel my blood congealing and my heart growing cold under her
+glance. Slowly, with a weary, indolent majesty, she ascends the marble
+staircase, lets her precious wrap slide off, and listlessly enters the
+hall, where the smoke of a hundred candles has formed a silvery mist.
+
+For a few moments my eyes follow her in a daze, then I pick up her
+furs, which without my being aware, had slipped from my hands. They
+are still warm from her shoulders.
+
+I kiss the spot, and my eyes fill with tears.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He has arrived.
+
+In his black velvet coat extravagantly trimmed with sable, he is a
+beautiful, haughty despot who plays with the lives and souls of men.
+He stands in the ante-room, looking around proudly, and his eyes rest
+on me for an uncomfortably long time.
+
+Under his icy glance I am again seized by a mortal fear. I have a
+presentiment that this man can enchain her, captivate her, subjugate
+her, and I feel inferior in contrast with his savage masculinity; I
+am filled with envy, with jealousy.
+
+I feel that I am a queer weakly creature of brains, merely! And what
+is most humiliating, I want to hate him, but I can't. Why is that
+among all the host of servants he has chosen me.
+
+With an inimitably aristocratic nod of the head he calls me over to
+him, and I--I obey his call--against my own will.
+
+"Take my furs," he quickly commands.
+
+My entire body trembles with resentment, but I obey, abjectly like
+a slave.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All night long I waited in the ante-room, raving as in a fever.
+Strange images hovered past my inner eye. I saw their meeting--their
+long exchange of looks. I saw her float through the hall in his arms,
+drunken, lying with half-closed lids against his breast. I saw him
+in the holy of holies of love, lying on the ottoman, not as slave,
+but as master, and she at his feet. On my knees I served them, the
+tea-tray faltering in my hands, and I saw him reach for the whip.
+But now the servants are talking about him.
+
+He is a man who is like a woman; he knows that he is beautiful, and
+he acts accordingly. He changes his clothes four or five times a day,
+like a vain courtesan.
+
+In Paris he appeared first in woman's dress, and the men assailed
+him with love-letters. An Italian singer, famous equally for his art
+and his passionate intensity, even invaded his home, and lying on his
+knees before him threatened to commit suicide if he wouldn't be his.
+
+"I am sorry," he replied, smiling, "I should like to do you the
+favor, but you will have to carry out your threat, for I am a man."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The drawing-room has already thinned out to a marked degree, but she
+apparently has no thought of leaving.
+
+Morning is already peering through the blinds.
+
+At last I hear the rustling of her heavy gown which flows along
+behind her like green waves. She advances step by step, engaged in
+conversation with him.
+
+I hardly exist for her any longer; she doesn't even trouble to give
+me an order.
+
+"The cloak for madame," he commands. He, of course, doesn't think of
+looking after her himself.
+
+While I put her furs about her, he stands to one side with his arms
+crossed. While I am on my knees putting on her fur over-shoes, she
+lightly supports herself with her hand on his shoulder. She asks:
+
+"And what about the lioness?"
+
+"When the lion whom she has chosen and with whom she lives is
+attacked by another," the Greek went on with his narrative, "the
+lioness quietly lies down and watches the battle. Even if her mate
+is worsted she does not go to his aid. She looks on indifferently as
+he bleeds to death under his opponent's claws, and follows the victor,
+the stronger--that is the female's nature."
+
+At this moment my lioness looked quickly and curiously at me.
+
+It made me shudder, though I didn't know why--and the red dawn
+immerses me and her and him in blood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She did not go to bed, but merely threw off her ball-dress and undid
+her hair; then she ordered me to build a fire, and she sat by the
+fire-place, and stared into the flames.
+
+"Do you need me any longer, mistress?" I asked, my voice failed me
+at the last word.
+
+Wanda shook her head.
+
+I left the room, passed through the gallery, and sat down on one of
+the steps, leading from there down into the garden. A gentle north
+wind brought a fresh, damp coolness from the Arno, the green hills
+extended into the distance in a rosy mist, a golden haze hovered over
+the city, over the round cupola of the Duomo.
+
+A few stars still tremble in the pale-blue sky.
+
+I tore open my coat, and pressed my burning forehead against the
+marble. Everything that had happened so far seemed to me a mere
+child's play; but now things were beginning to be serious, terribly
+serious.
+
+I anticipated a catastrophe, I visualized it, I could lay hold of it
+with my hands, but I lacked the courage to meet it. My strength was
+broken. And if I am honest with myself, neither the pains and
+sufferings that threatened me, not the humiliations that impended,
+were the thing that frightened me.
+
+I merely felt a fear, the fear of losing her whom I loved with a
+sort of fanatical devotion; but it was so overwhelming, so crushing
+that I suddenly began to sob like a child.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During the day she remained locked in her room, and had the negress
+attend her. When the evening star rose glowing in the blue sky, I saw
+her pass through the garden, and, carefully following her at a
+distance, watched her enter the shrine of Venus. I stealthily
+followed and peered through the chink in the door.
+
+She stood before the divine image of the goddess, her hands folded
+as in prayer, and the sacred light of the star of love casts its blue
+rays over her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On my couch at night the fear of losing her and despair took such
+powerful hold of me that they made a hero and a libertine of me. I
+lighted the little red oil-lamp which hung in the corridor beneath
+a saint's image, and entered her bedroom, covering the light with one
+hand.
+
+The lioness had been hunted and driven until she was exhausted. She
+had fallen asleep among her pillows, lying on her back, her hands
+clenched, breathing heavily. A dream seemed to oppress her. I slowly
+withdrew my hand, and let the red light fall full on her wonderful
+face.
+
+But she did not awaken.
+
+I gently set the lamp on the floor, sank down beside Wanda's bed,
+and rested my head on her soft, glowing arm.
+
+She moved slightly, but even now did not awaken. I do not know how
+long I lay thus in the middle of the night, turned as into a stone
+by horrible torments.
+
+Finally a severe trembling seized me, and I was able to cry. My
+tears flowed over her arm. She quivered several times and finally sat
+up; she brushed her hand across her eyes, and looked at me.
+
+"Severin," she exclaimed, more frightened than angry.
+
+I was unable to reply.
+
+"Severin," she continued softly, "what is the matter? Are you ill?"
+
+Her voice sounded so sympathetic, so kind, so full of love, that it
+clutched my breast like red-hot tongs and I began to sob aloud.
+
+"Severin," she began anew. "My poor unhappy friend." Her hand gently
+stroked my hair. "I am sorry, very sorry for you; but I can't help
+you; with the best intention in the world I know of nothing that
+would cure you."
+
+"Oh, Wanda, must it be?" I moaned in my agony.
+
+"What, Severin? What are you talking about?"
+
+"Don't you love me any more?" I continued. "Haven't you even a
+little bit of pity for me? Has the beautiful stranger taken complete
+possession of you?"
+
+"I cannot lie," she replied softly after a short pause. "He has made
+an impression on me which I haven't yet been able to analyse, further
+than that I suffer and tremble beneath it. It is an impression of the
+sort I have met with in the works of poets or on the stage, but I
+always thought it was a figment of the imagination. Oh, he is a man
+like a lion, strong and beautiful and yet gentle, not brutal like the
+men of our northern world. I am sorry for you, Severin, I am; but I
+must possess him. What am I saying? I must give myself to him, if he
+will have me."
+
+"Consider your reputation, Wanda, which so far has remained
+spotless," I exclaimed, "even if I no longer mean anything to you."
+
+"I am considering it," she replied, "I intend to be strong, as long
+as it is possible, I want--" she buried her head shyly in the pillows
+--"I want to become his wife--if he will have me."
+
+"Wanda," I cried, seized again by that mortal fear, which always
+robs me of my breath, makes me lose possession of myself, "you want
+to be his wife, belong to him for always. Oh! Do not drive me away!
+He does not love you--"
+
+"Who says that?" she exclaimed, flaring up.
+
+"He does not love you," I went on passionately, "but I love you, I
+adore you, I am your slave, I let you tread me underfoot, I want to
+carry you on my arms through life."
+
+"Who says that he doesn't love me?" she interrupted vehemently.
+
+"Oh! be mine," I replied, "be mine! I cannot exist, cannot live
+without you. Have mercy on me, Wanda, have mercy!"
+
+She looked at me again, and her face had her cold heartless
+expression, her evil smile.
+
+"You say he doesn't love me," she said, scornfully. "Very well then,
+get what consolation you can out of it."
+
+With this she turned over on the other side, and contemptuously
+showed me her back.
+
+"Good God, are you a woman without flesh or blood, haven't you a
+heart as well as I!" I cried, while my breast heaved convulsively.
+
+"You know what I am," she replied, coldly. "I am a woman of stone,
+_Venus in Furs_, your ideal, kneel down, and pray to me."
+
+"Wanda!" I implored, "mercy!"
+
+She began to laugh. I buried my face in her pillows. Pain had
+loosened the floodgates of my tears and I let them flow.
+
+For a long time silence reigned, then Wanda slowly raised herself.
+
+"You bore me," she began.
+
+"Wanda!"
+
+"I am tired, let me go to sleep."
+
+"Mercy," I implored. "Do not drive me away. No man, no one, will
+love you as I do."
+
+"Let me go to sleep,"--she turned her back to me again.
+
+I leaped up, and snatched the poinard, which hung beside her bed,
+from its sheath, and placed its point against my breast.
+
+"I shall kill myself here before your eyes," I murmured dully.
+
+"Do what you please," Wanda replied with complete indifference. "But
+let me go to sleep." She yawned aloud. "I am very sleepy."
+
+For a moment I stood as if petrified. Then I began to laugh and cry
+at the same time. Finally I placed the poinard in my belt, and again
+fell on my knees before her.
+
+"Wanda, listen to me, only for a few moments," I begged.
+
+"I want to go to sleep! Don't you hear!" she cried, leaping angrily
+out of bed and pushing me away with her foot. "You forget that I am
+your mistress?" When I didn't budge, she seized the whip and struck
+me. I rose; she struck me again--this time right in the face.
+
+"Wretch, slave!"
+
+With clenched fist held heavenward, I left her bedroom with a sudden
+resolve. She tossed the whip aside, and broke out into clear
+laughter. I can imagine that my theatrical attitude must have been
+very droll.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have determined to set myself free from this heartless woman, who
+has treated me so cruelly, and is now about to break faith and betray
+me, as a reward for all my slavish devotion, for everything I have
+suffered from her. I packed my few belongings into a bundle, and then
+wrote her as follows:
+
+"Dear Madam,--
+
+I have loved you even to madness, I have given myself to you as no man
+ever has given himself to a woman. You have abused my most sacred
+emotions, and played an impudent, frivolous game with me. However, as
+long as you were merely cruel and merciless, it was still possible for
+me to love you. Now you are about to become _cheap_. I am no longer
+the slave whom you can kick about and whip. You yourself have set me
+free, and I am leaving a woman I can only hate and despise.
+
+Severin Kusiemski."
+
+I handed these lines to the negress, and hastened away as fast as I
+could go. I arrived at the railway-station all out of breath.
+Suddenly I felt a sharp pain in my heart and stopped. I began to
+weep. It is humiliating that I want to flee and I can't. I turn back--
+whither?--to her, whom I abhor, and yet, at the same time, adore.
+
+Again I pause. I cannot go back. I dare not.
+
+But how am I to leave Florence. I remember that I haven't any money,
+not a penny. Very well then, on foot; it is better to be an honest
+beggar than to eat the bread of a courtesan.
+
+But still I can't leave.
+
+She has my pledge, my word of honor. I have to return. Perhaps she
+will release me.
+
+After a few rapid strides, I stop again.
+
+She has my word of honor and my bond, that I shall remain her slave
+as long as she desires, until she herself gives me my freedom. But
+I might kill myself.
+
+I go through the Cascine down to the Arno, where its yellow waters
+plash monotonously about a couple of stray willows. There I sit, and
+cast up my final accounts with existence. I let my entire life pass
+before me in review. On the whole, it is rather a wretched affair--a
+few joys, an endless number of indifferent and worthless things, and
+between these an abundant harvest of pains, miseries, fears,
+disappointments, shipwrecked hopes, afflictions, sorrow and grief.
+
+I thought of my mother, whom I loved so deeply and whom I had to
+watch waste away beneath a horrible disease; of my brother, who full
+of the promise of joy and happiness died in the flower of youth,
+without even having put his lips to the cup of life. I thought of my
+dead nurse, my childhood playmates, the friends that had striven and
+studied with me; of all those, covered by the cold, dead, indifferent
+earth. I thought of my turtle-dove, who not infrequently made his
+cooing bows to me, instead of to his mate.--All have returned, dust
+unto dust.
+
+I laughed aloud, and slid down into the water, but at the same
+moment I caught hold of one of the willow-branches, hanging above the
+yellow waves. As in a vision, I see the woman who has caused all my
+misery. She hovers above the level of the water, luminous in the
+sunlight as though she were transparent, with red flames about her
+head and neck. She turns her face toward me and smiles.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I am back again, dripping, wet through, glowing with shame and
+fever. The negress has delivered my letter; I am judged, lost, in the
+power of a heartless, affronted woman.
+
+Well, let her kill me. I am unable to do it myself, and yet I have
+no wish to go on living.
+
+As I walk around the house, she is standing in the gallery, leaning
+over the railing. Her face is full in the light of the sun, and her
+green eyes sparkle.
+
+"Still alive?" she asked, without moving. I stood silent, with bowed
+head.
+
+"Give me back my poinard," she continued. "It is of no use to you.
+You haven't even the courage to take your own life."
+
+"I have lost it," I replied, trembling, shaken by chills.
+
+She looked me over with a proud, scornful glance.
+
+"I suppose you lost it in the Arno?" She shrugged her shoulders. "No
+matter. Well, and why didn't you leave?"
+
+I mumbled something which neither she nor I myself could understand.
+
+"Oh! you haven't any money," she cried. "Here!" With an
+indescribably disdainful gesture she tossed me her purse.
+
+I did not pick it up.
+
+Both of us were silent for some time.
+
+"You don't want to leave then?"
+
+"I can't."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wanda drives in the Cascine without me, and goes to the theater
+without me; she receives company, and the negress serves her. No one
+asks after me. I stray about the garden, irresolutely, like an animal
+that has lost its master.
+
+Lying among the bushes, I watch a couple of sparrows, fighting over
+a seed.
+
+Suddenly I hear the swish of a woman's dress.
+
+Wanda approaches in a gown of dark silk, modestly closed up to the
+neck; the Greek is with her. They are in an eager discussion, but I
+cannot as yet understand a word of what they are saying. He stamps
+his foot so that the gravel scatters about in all directions, and he
+lashes the air with his riding whip. Wanda startles.
+
+Is she afraid that he will strike her?
+
+Have they gone that far?
+
+He has left her, she calls him; he does not hear her, does not want
+to hear her.
+
+Wanda sadly lowers her head, and then sits down on the nearest
+stone-bench. She sits for a long time, lost in thought. I watch her with
+a sort of malevolent pleasure, finally I pull myself together by sheer
+force of will, and ironically step before her. She startles, and
+trembles all over.
+
+"I come to wish you happiness," I said, bowing, "I see, my dear
+lady, too, has found a master."
+
+"Yes, thank God!" she exclaimed, "not a new slave, I have had enough
+of them. A master! Woman needs a master, and she adores him."
+
+"You adore him, Wanda?" I cried, "this brutal person--"
+
+"Yes, I love him, as I have never loved any one else."
+
+"Wanda!" I clenched my fists, but tears already filled my eyes, and
+I was seized by the delirium of passion, as by a sweet madness. "Very
+well, take him as your husband, let him be your master, but I want
+to remain your slave, as long as I live."
+
+"You want to remain my slave, even then?" she said, "that would be
+interesting, but I am afraid he wouldn't permit it."
+
+"He?"
+
+"Yes, he is already jealous of you," she exclaimed, "he, of you! He
+demanded that I dismiss you immediately, and when I told him who you
+were--"
+
+"You told him--" I repeated, thunderstruck.
+
+"I told him everything," she replied, "our whole story, all your
+queerness, everything--and he, instead of being amused, grew angry,
+and stamped his foot."
+
+"And threatened to strike you?"
+
+Wanda looked to the ground, and remained silent.
+
+"Yes, indeed," I said with mocking bitterness, "you are afraid of
+him, Wanda!" I threw myself down at her feet, and in my agitation
+embraced her knees. "I don't want anything of you, except to be your
+slave, to be always near you! I will be your dog-"
+
+"Do you know, you bore me?" said Wanda, indifferently.
+
+I leaped up. Everything within me was seething.
+
+"You are now no longer cruel, but cheap," I said, clearly and
+distinctly, accentuating every word.
+
+"You have already written that in your letter," Wanda replied, with
+a proud shrug of the shoulders. "A man of brains should never repeat
+himself."
+
+"The way you are treating me," I broke out, "what would you call it?"
+
+"I might punish you," she replied ironically, "but I prefer this
+time to reply with reasons instead of lashes. You have no right to
+accuse me. Haven't I always been honest with you? Haven't I warned
+you more than once? Didn't I love you with all my heart, even
+passionately, and did I conceal the fact from you, that it was
+dangerous to give yourself into my power, to abase yourself before
+me, and that I want to be dominated? But you wished to be my
+plaything, my slave! You found the highest pleasure in feeling the
+foot, the whip of an arrogant, cruel woman. What do you want now?
+
+"Dangerous potentialities were slumbering in me, but you were the
+first to awaken them. If I now take pleasure in torturing you,
+abusing you, it is your fault; you have made of me what I now am, and
+now you are even unmanly, weak, and miserable enough to accuse me."
+
+"Yes, I am guilty," I said, "but haven't I suffered because of it?
+Let us put an end now to the cruel game."
+
+"That is my wish, too," she replied with a curious deceitful look.
+
+"Wanda!" I exclaimed violently, "don't drive me to extremes; you see
+that I am a man again."
+
+"A fire of straw," she replied, "which makes a lot of stir for a
+moment, and goes out as quickly as it flared up. You imagine you can
+intimidate me, and you only make yourself ridiculous. Had you been
+the man I first thought you were, serious, reserved, stern, I would
+have loved you faithfully, and become your wife. Woman demands that
+she can look up to a man, but one like you who voluntarily places his
+neck under her foot, she uses as a welcome plaything, only to toss
+it aside when she is tired of it."
+
+"Try to toss me aside," I said, jeeringly. "Some toys are dangerous."
+
+"Don't challenge me," exclaimed Wanda. Her eyes began to flash, and
+a flush entered her cheeks.
+
+"If you won't be mine now," I continued, with a voice stifled with
+rage, "no one else shall possess you either."
+
+"What play is this from?" she mocked, seizing me by the breast. She
+was pale with anger at this moment. "Don't challenge me," she
+continued, "I am not cruel, but I don't know whether I may not become
+so and whether then there will be any bounds."
+
+"What worse can you do, than to make your lover, your husband?" I
+exclaimed, more and more enraged.
+
+"I might make you _his_ slave," she replied quickly, "are you not in
+my power? Haven't I the agreement? But, of course, you will merely
+take pleasure in it, if I have you bound, and say to him.
+
+"Do with him what you please."
+
+"Woman, are you mad!" I cried.
+
+"I am entirely rational," she said, calmly. "I warn you for the last
+time. Don't offer any resistance, one who has gone as far as I have
+gone might easily go still further. I feel a sort of hatred for you,
+and would find a real joy in seeing him beat you to death; I am still
+restraining myself, but--"
+
+Scarcely master of myself any longer, I seized her by the wrist and
+forced her to the ground, so that she lay on her knees before me.
+
+"Severin!" she cried. Rage and terror were painted on her face.
+
+"I shall kill you if you marry him," I threatened; the words came
+hoarsely and dully from my breast. "You are mine, I won't let you go,
+I love you too much." Then I clutched her and pressed her close to
+me; my right hand involuntarily seized the dagger which I still had
+in my belt.
+
+Wanda fixed a large, calm, incomprehensible look on me.
+
+"I like you that way," she said, carelessly. "Now you are a man, and
+at this moment I know I still love you."
+
+"Wanda," I wept with rapture, and bent down over her, covering her
+dear face with kisses, and she, suddenly breaking into a loud gay
+laugh, said, "Have you finished with your ideal now, are you
+satisfied with me?"
+
+"You mean?" I stammered, "that you weren't serious?"
+
+"I am very serious," she gaily continued. "I love you, only you, and
+you--you foolish, little man, didn't know that everything was only
+make-believe and play-acting. How hard it often was for me to strike
+you with the whip, when I would have rather taken your head and
+covered it with kisses. But now we are through with that, aren't we?
+I have played my cruel role better than you expected, and now you
+will be satisfied with my being a good, little wife who isn't
+altogether unattractive. Isn't that so? We will live like rational
+people--"
+
+"You will marry me!" I cried, overflowing with happiness.
+
+"Yes--marry you--you dear, darling man," whispered Wanda, kissing my
+hands.
+
+I drew her up to my breast.
+
+"Now, you are no longer Gregor, my slave," said she, "but Severin,
+the dear man I love--"
+
+"And he--you don't love him?" I asked in agitation.
+
+"How could you imagine my loving a man of his brutal type? You were
+blind to everything, I was really afraid for you."
+
+"I almost killed myself for your sake."
+
+"Really?" she cried, "ah, I still tremble at the thought, that you
+were already in the Arno."
+
+"But you saved me," I replied, tenderly. "You hovered over the
+waters and smiled, and your smile called me back to life."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have a curious feeling when I now hold her in my arms and she lies
+silently against my breast and lets me kiss her and smiles. I feel
+like one who has suddenly awakened out of a feverish delirium, or
+like a shipwrecked man who has for many days battled with waves that
+momentarily threatened to devour him and finally has found a safe
+shore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I hate this Florence, where you have been so unhappy," she
+declared, as I was saying good-night to her. "I want to leave
+immediately, tomorrow, you will be good enough to write a couple of
+letters for me, and, while you are doing that, I will drive to the
+city to pay my farewell visits. Is that satisfactory to you?"
+
+"Of course, you dear, sweet, beautiful woman."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Early in the morning she knocked at my door to ask how I had slept.
+Her tenderness is positively wonderful. I should never have believed
+that she could be so tender.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She has now been gone for over four hours. I have long since
+finished the letters, and am now sitting in the gallery, looking down
+the street to see whether I cannot discover her carriage in the
+distance. I am a little worried about her, and yet I know there is
+no reason under heaven why I should doubt or fear. However, a feeling
+of oppression weighs me down, and I cannot rid myself of it. It is
+probably the sufferings of the past days, which still cast their
+shadows into my soul.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She is back, radiant with happiness and contentment.
+
+"Well, has everything gone as you wished?" I asked tenderly, kissing
+her hand.
+
+"Yes, dear heart," she replied, "and we shall leave to-night. Help
+me pack my trunks."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Toward evening she asked me to go to the post-office and mail her
+letters myself. I took her carriage, and was back within an hour.
+
+"Mistress has asked for you," said the negress, with a grin, as I
+ascended the wide marble stairs.
+
+"Has anyone been here?"
+
+"No one," she replied, crouching down on the steps like a black cat.
+
+I slowly passed through the drawing-room, and then stood before her
+bedroom door.
+
+Why does my heart beat so? Am I not perfectly happy?
+
+Opening the door softly, I draw back the portiere. Wanda is lying on
+the ottoman, and does not seem to notice me. How beautiful she looks,
+in her silver-gray dress, which fits closely, and while displaying
+in tell-tale fashion her splendid figure, leaves her wonderful bust
+and arms bare.
+
+Her hair is interwoven with, and held up by a black velvet ribbon.
+A mighty fire is burning in the fire-place, the hanging lamp casts
+a reddish glow, and the whole room is as if drowned in blood.
+
+"Wanda," I said at last.
+
+"Oh Severin," she cried out joyously. "I have been impatiently
+waiting for you." She leaped up, and folded me in her arms. She sat
+down again on the rich cushions and tried to draw me down to her
+side, but I softly slid down to her feet and placed my head in her
+lap.
+
+"Do you know I am very much in love with you to-day?" she whispered,
+brushing a few stray hairs from my forehead and kissing my eyes.
+
+"How beautiful your eyes are, I have always loved them as the best
+of you, but to-day they fairly intoxicate me. I am all--" She
+extended her magnificent limbs and tenderly looked at me from beneath
+her red lashes.
+
+"And you--you are cold--you hold me like a block of wood; wait, I'll
+stir you with the fire of love," she said, and again clung fawningly
+and caressingly to my lips.
+
+"I no longer please you; I suppose I'll have to be cruel to you
+again, evidently I have been too kind to you to-day. Do you know, you
+little fool, what I shall do, I shall whip you for a while--"
+
+"But child--"
+
+"I want to."
+
+"Wanda!"
+
+"Come, let me bind you," she continued, and ran gaily through the
+room. "I want to see you very much in love, do you understand? Here
+are the ropes. I wonder if I can still do it?"
+
+She began with fettering my feet and then she tied my hands behind
+my back, pinioning my arms like those of a prisoner.
+
+"So," she said, with gay eagerness. "Can you still move?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Fine--"
+
+She then tied a noose in a stout rope, threw it over my head, and
+let it slip down as far as the hips. She drew it tight, and bound me
+to a pillar.
+
+A curious tremor seized me at that moment.
+
+"I have a feeling as if I were about to be executed," I said with a
+low voice.
+
+"Well, you shall have a thorough punishment to-day," exclaimed Wanda.
+
+"But put on your fur-jacket, please," I said.
+
+"I shall gladly give you that pleasure," she replied. She got her
+_kazabaika_, and put it on. Then she stood in front of me with
+her arms folded across her chest, and looked at me out of half-closed
+eyes.
+
+"Do you remember the story of the ox of Dionysius?" she asked.
+
+"I remember it only vaguely, what about it?"
+
+"A courtier invented a new implement of torture for the Tyrant of
+Syracuse. It was an iron ox in which those condemned to death were
+to be shut, and then pushed into a mighty furnace.
+
+"As soon as the iron ox began to get hot, and the condemned person
+began to cry out in his torment, his wails sounded like the bellowing
+of an ox.
+
+"Dionysius nodded graciously to the inventor, and to put his
+invention to an immediate test had him shut up in the iron ox.
+
+"It is a very instructive story.
+
+"It was you who innoculated me with selfishness, pride, and cruelty,
+and _you shall be their first victim._ I now literally enjoy having a
+human being that thinks and feels and desires like myself in my power;
+I love to abuse a man who is stronger in intelligence and body than I,
+especially a man who loves me.
+
+"Do you still love me?"
+
+"Even to madness," I exclaimed.
+
+"So much the better," she replied, "and so much the more will you
+enjoy what I am about to do with you now."
+
+"What is the matter with you?" I asked. "I don't understand you,
+there is a gleam of real cruelty in your eyes to-day, and you are
+strangely beautiful--completely _Venus in Furs."_
+
+Without replying Wanda placed her arms around my neck and kissed me.
+I was again seized by my fanatical passion.
+
+"Where is the whip?" I asked.
+
+Wanda laughed, and withdrew a couple of steps.
+
+"You really insist upon being punished?" she exclaimed, proudly
+tossing back her head.
+
+"Yes."
+
+Suddenly Wanda's face was completely transformed. It was as if
+disfigured by rage; for a moment she seemed even ugly to me.
+
+"Very well, then _you_ whip him!" she called loudly.
+
+At the same instant the beautiful Greek stuck his head of black
+curls through the curtains of her four-poster bed. At first I was
+speechless, petrified. There was a horribly comic element in the
+situation. I would have laughed aloud, had not my position been at
+the same time so terribly cruel and humiliating.
+
+It went beyond anything I had imagined. A cold shudder ran down my
+back, when my rival stepped from the bed in his riding boots, his
+tight-fitting white breeches, and his short velvet jacket, and I saw
+his athletic limbs.
+
+"You are indeed cruel," he said, turning to Wanda.
+
+"Only inordinately fond of pleasure," she replied with a wild sort
+of humor. "Pleasure alone lends value to existence; whoever enjoys
+does not easily part from life, whoever suffers or is needy meets
+death like a friend.
+
+"But whoever wants to enjoy must take life gaily in the sense of the
+ancient world; he dare not hesitate to enjoy at the expense of others;
+he must never feel pity; he must be ready to harness others to his
+carriage or his plough as though they were animals. He must know how to
+make slaves of men who feel and would enjoy as he does, and use them for
+his service and pleasure without remorse. It is not his affair whether
+they like it, or whether they go to rack and ruin. He must always
+remember this, that if they had him in their power, as he has them they
+would act in exactly the same way, and he would have to pay for their
+pleasure with his sweat and blood and soul. That was the world of the
+ancients: pleasure and cruelty, liberty and slavery went hand in hand.
+People who want to live like the gods of Olympus must of necessity have
+slaves whom they can toss into their fish-ponds, and gladiators who will
+do battle, the while they banquet, and they must not mind if by chance a
+bit of blood bespatters them."
+
+Her words brought back my complete self-possession.
+
+"Unloosen me!" I exclaimed angrily.
+
+"Aren't you my slave, my property?" replied Wanda. "Do you want me
+to show you the agreement?"
+
+"Untie me!" I threatened, "otherwise--" I tugged at the ropes.
+
+"Can he tear himself free?" she asked. "He has threatened to kill me."
+
+"Be entirely at ease," said the Greek, testing my fetters.
+
+"I shall call for help," I began again.
+
+"No one will hear you," replied Wanda, "and no one will hinder me
+from abusing your most sacred emotions or playing a frivolous game
+with you." she continued, repeating with satanic mockery phrases from
+my letter to her.
+
+"Do you think I am at this moment merely cruel and merciless, or am
+I also about to become cheap? What? Do you still love me, or do you
+already hate and despise me? Here is the whip--" She handed it to the
+Greek who quickly stepped closer.
+
+"Don't you dare!" I exclaimed, trembling with indignation, "I won't
+permit it--"
+
+"Oh, because I don't wear furs," the Greek replied with an ironical
+smile, and he took his short sable from the bed.
+
+"You are adorable," exclaimed Wanda, kissing him, and helping him
+into his furs.
+
+"May I really whip him?" he asked.
+
+"Do with him what you please," replied Wanda.
+
+"Beast!" I exclaimed, utterly revolted.
+
+The Greek fixed his cold tigerish look upon me and tried out the
+whip. His muscles swelled when he drew back his arms, and made the
+whip hiss through the air. I was bound like Marsyas while Apollo was
+getting ready to flay me.
+
+My look wandered about the room and remained fixed on the ceiling,
+where Samson, lying at Delilah's feet, was about to have his eyes put
+out by the Philistines. The picture at that moment seemed to me like
+a symbol, an eternal parable of passion and lust, of the love of man
+for woman. "Each one of us in the end is a Samson," I thought, "and
+ultimately for better or worse is betrayed by the woman he loves,
+whether he wears an ordinary coat or sables."
+
+"Now watch me break him in," said the Greek. He showed his teeth,
+and his face acquired the blood-thirsty expression, which startled
+me the first time I saw him.
+
+And he began to apply the lash--so mercilessly, with such frightful
+force that I quivered under each blow, and began to tremble all over
+with pain. Tears rolled down over my cheeks. In the meantime Wanda
+lay on the ottoman in her fur-jacket, supporting herself on her arm;
+she looked on with cruel curiosity, and was convulsed with laughter.
+
+The sensation of being whipped by a successful rival before the eyes
+of an adored woman cannot be described. I almost went mad with shame
+and despair.
+
+What was most humiliating was that at first I felt a certain wild,
+supersensual stimulation under Apollo's whip and the cruel laughter
+of my Venus, no matter how horrible my position was. But Apollo
+whipped on and on, blow after blow, until I forgot all about poetry,
+and finally gritted my teeth in impotent rage, and cursed my wild
+dreams, woman, and love.
+
+All of a sudden I saw with horrible clarity whither blind passion
+and lust have led man, ever since Holofernes and Agamemnon--into a
+blind alley, into the net of woman's treachery, into misery, slavery,
+and death.
+
+It was as though I were awakening from a dream.
+
+Blood was already flowing under the whip. I wound like a worm that
+is trodden on, but he whipped on without mercy, and she continued to
+laugh without mercy. In the meantime she locked her packed trunk and
+slipped into her travelling furs, and was still laughing, when she
+went downstairs on his arm and entered the carriage.
+
+Then everything was silent for a moment.
+
+I listened breathlessly.
+
+The carriage door slammed, the horse began to pull--the rolling of
+the carriage for a short time--then all was over.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For a moment I thought of taking vengeance, of killing him, but I
+was bound by the abominable agreement. So nothing was left for me to
+do except to keep my pledged word and grit my teeth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My first impulse after this, the most cruel catastrophe of my life,
+was to seek laborious tasks, dangers, and privations. I wanted to
+become a soldier and go to Asia or Algiers, but my father was old and
+ill and wanted me.
+
+So I quietly returned home and for two years helped him bear his
+burdens, and learned how to look after the estate which I had never
+done before. To _labor_ and to _do my duty_ was comforting like a
+drink of fresh water. Then my father died, and I inherited the estate,
+but it meant no change.
+
+I had put on my own Spanish boots and went on living just as
+rationally as if the old man were standing behind me, looking over
+my shoulder with his large wise eyes.
+
+One day a box arrived, accompanied by a letter. I recognized Wanda's
+writing.
+
+Curiously moved, I opened it, and read.
+
+"Sir.--
+
+Now that over three years have passed since that night in Florence,
+I suppose, I may confess to you that I loved you deeply. You
+yourself, however, stifled my love by your fantastic devotion and
+your insane passion. From the moment that you became my slave, I knew
+it would be impossible for you ever to become my husband. However,
+I found it interesting to have you realize your ideal in my own person,
+and, while I gloriously amused myself, perhaps, to cure you.
+
+I found the strong man for whom I felt a need, and I was as happy
+with him as, I suppose, it is possible for any one to be on this
+funny ball of clay.
+
+But my happiness, like all things mortal, was of short duration.
+About a year ago he fell in a duel, and since then I have been living
+in Paris, like an Aspasia--
+
+And you?--Your life surely is not without its sunshine, if you have
+gained control of your imagination, and those qualities in you have
+materialized, which at first so attracted me to you--your clarity of
+intellect, kindness of heart, and, above all else, your--_moral
+seriousness_.
+
+I hope you have been cured under my whip; the cure was cruel, but
+radical. In memory of that time and of a woman who loved you
+passionately, I am sending you the portrait by the poor German.
+
+_Venus in Furs_."
+
+I had to smile, and as I fell to musing the beautiful woman suddenly
+stood before me in her velvet jacket trimmed with ermine, with the
+whip in her hand. And I continued to smile at the woman I had once
+loved so insanely, at the fur-jacket that had once so entranced me,
+at the whip, and ended by smiling at myself and saying: The cure was
+cruel, but radical; but the main point is, I have been cured.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"And the moral of the story?" I said to Severin when I put the
+manuscript down on the table.
+
+"That I was a donkey," he exclaimed without turning around, for he
+seemed to be embarrassed. "If only I had beaten her!"
+
+"A curious remedy," I exclaimed, "which might answer with your
+peasant-women--"
+
+"Oh, they are used to it," he replied eagerly, "but imagine the
+effect upon one of our delicate, nervous, hysterical ladies--"
+
+"But the moral?"
+
+"That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present
+educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot,
+but _never his companion._ This she can become only when she has
+the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work.
+
+"At present we have only the choice of being hammer or anvil, and I
+was the kind of donkey who let a woman make a slave of him, do you
+understand?
+
+"The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be
+whipped, deserves to be whipped.
+
+"The blows, as you see, have agreed with me; the roseate supersensual
+mist has dissolved, and no one can ever make me believe again that
+these 'sacred apes of Benares' [Footnote: One of Schopenhauer's
+designations for women.] or Plato's rooster [Footnote: Diogenes
+threw a plucked rooster into Plato's school and exclaimed: "Here
+you have Plato's human being."] are the image of God."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Venus in Furs, by Ritter von Leopold Sacher-Masoch
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