Venus in Furs Read online

  And after a while I added a few Goethe verses, which I had recently found in his paralipomena to Faust:

  To Cupid

  His arrows, they are only claws,

  His wings a pair of lies,

  His horns are hidden by the wreath,

  He is, we must surmise,

  Like all the Gods of ancient Greece,

  A devil in disguise.

  Then I placed the picture before me on the table, leaning it against a book and viewing it.

  I was both delighted and horrified by the hardness, the severity of the marble countenance, by the icy coquetry with which the splendid woman drapes her charms in the dark sable furs.

  I picked up the quill again. Here is what I wrote:

  “To love, to be loved—what happiness! And yet how the brightness fades against the tortured bliss of worshiping a woman who turns us into a plaything, the bliss of being the slave of a beautiful female tyrant who ruthlessly tramples us underfoot. Even Samson, the hero, the giant gave himself over once again to Delilah, who had already betrayed him, and she betrayed him once again, and the Philistines bound him up before her and put out his eyes, which, drunk with rage and love, rested on the beautiful traitress until the very last moment.”

  I had breakfast in my honeysuckle gazebo and read the Book of Judith and envied the grim hero Holofernes for the queenly woman who chopped his head off and for the gory beauty of his death.

  “God did punish him and deliver him into a woman’s hands.”

  That verse struck me.

  How ungallant these Jews are, I thought. And their God—He could pick more decent expressions when speaking about the fair sex.

  “God did punish him and deliver him into a woman’s hands,” I repeated to myself. Well, what could I possibly do to make Him punish me?

  For God’s sake! Here was our landlady. She had again grown a bit smaller overnight. And up there, among the green vines and festoons, again the white gown. Was it Venus or the widow?

  This time it was the widow, for Madame Tartakowska curtsied and, on the widow’s behalf, asked to borrow something to read. I hurried into my room and pulled a few volumes together.

  I recalled—too late—that my picture of Venus was in one of those volumes. Now the white woman up there had it along with my effusions.

  What would she say about them?

  I heard her laugh.

  Was she laughing at me?

  Full moon! There it was, peeping over the tops of the lower firs that edged the park, and a silvery haze filled the terrace, the clumps of trees, the entire landscape as far as the eye could see, and the haze blurred softly into the distance like quivering waters.

  I couldn’t resist. Something was calling me, urging me so strangely. I got dressed again and stepped into the garden.

  I was drawn to the meadow, to her, my Goddess, my beloved.

  The night was cool. I shivered. The air was heavy with the smells of flowers and woods. It was intoxicating.

  What a celebration! What music all around. A nightingale sobbed. The stars glittered very faintly in the pale blue shimmer. The meadow shone smooth as a mirror, as the ice covering a pond.

  Sublime and radiant was the statue of Venus.

  Yet—what was that?

  A huge, dark fur streamed from the marble shoulders of the Goddess down to the soles of her feet—I stood rigid, gaping at her, and again I was seized by that indescribable anxiety and I fled.

  I quickened my steps. Then I saw that I had missed my path, and just as I was about to turn sideways into one of the green trails, there, in front of me, on a stone bench, sat Venus, the beautiful stone woman—no, the real Goddess of Love, with warm blood and a throbbing pulse. Yes, she had come alive for me, like that statue that had started breathing for her creator.5 True, the miracle was only half realized as yet: Her white hair still glowed like stone and her white gown shimmered like moonlight (or was it satin?) and the dark fur streamed from her shoulders. But her lips were red by now and her cheeks were taking on color, while her eyes shot two diabolical green shafts into me—and then she laughed.

  Her laugh was so bizarre, so—oh, it was indescribable, it took my breath away! I kept fleeing and had to stop every few yards and catch my breath, and that mocking laughter pursued me along the gloomy bower paths, across the bright lawns, into the thicket pierced only by a few moonbeams. I couldn’t find my way, I wandered about, cold drops pearling on my forehead.

  At last I halted and recited a brief monologue.

  It went—well, one is always either very charming or very gross to oneself.

  I said to myself: “Ass!”

  That word had a powerful effect, like a magic formula releasing me and restoring my senses.

  I was instantly calm.

  Ecstatic, I repeated: “Ass!”

  I now saw everything clear and sharp again: there was the fountain, there the path lined with boxwoods, there the house, toward which I slowly trudged.

  Suddenly, once again, behind the silver embroidery of the green, moonlit wall: the white figure, the beautiful stone woman whom I worshiped, whom I feared, whom I was fleeing.

  A few short leaps and I was in the house, catching my breath and pondering.

  Just what was I really now: a small dilettante or a big fool?

  A sultry morning: the air was dead, very spicy, agitating. I was sitting again in my honeysuckle gazebo and reading the Odyssey, the part about the attractive sorceress who turned her worshipers into beasts.6 A delicious picture of ancient love.

  The grass and the trees were rustling softly, and the leaves of my book were rustling, and the terrace was rustling too.

  A woman’s gown—

  Here she was—Venus. But without furs. No, this time it was the widow, and yet—Venus. Oh! What a woman!

  How she stood there in her white, airy morning robe, staring at me, and how poetic and graceful her fine shape! She wasn’t tall, nor was she petite, and her face was more attractive, more piquant (in the sense of the days of the French marquises: “naughty, racy”) rather than strictly beautiful; and yet, how enchanting, what softness, what gracious mischief played about those full and not too small lips. Her skin was so infinitely delicate that the blue veins shimmered through everywhere, even through the muslin covering her arms and her bosom. How luxuriantly her red hair curled—yes, it was red, not blond or golden; and how demonically and yet charmingly it played around the back of her neck. And now her eyes struck me like bolts of green lightning. Yes, they were green, those eyes, with their indescribable gentle power; green, but green like precious stones, like deep, unfathomable mountain lakes.

  She noticed my confusion, which even caused me to misbehave, for I remained seated and kept my cap on my head.

  She smiled roguishly.

  I finally stood up and greeted her. She came nearer and burst into a loud, almost childlike laughter. I stuttered as only a small dilettante or a big ass can stutter in such moments.

  That was how we met.

  The Goddess asked me for my name and told me hers: she was Wanda von Dunajew.

  And she was really my Venus.

  “But Madam, how did you ever hit on that?”

  “Through the small picture that was inserted in one of your books—”

  “I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “The strange remarks on the back—”

  “Why strange?”

  She looked at me. “I’ve always wanted to meet a real dreamer—for variety’s sake. Well, all things considered, you strike me as one of the wildest.”

  “Dear Madam … in fact—” Again that obnoxious, asinine stuttering, plus my blushing, which may be appropriate in a boy of sixteen, but for me, who was almost ten years older….

  “You were afraid of me last night.”

  “Actually … however—but won’t you have a seat?”

  She sat down and relished my fear—for I dreaded her even more now, in broad daylight—a charming scorn twitche
d around her upper lip.

  “You view love and especially women,” she began, “as something hostile, something against which you defend yourself, although in vain, something whose power over you, however, you feel as a sweet torment, a prickling cruelty: this is truly a modern attitude.”

  “You do not share it.”

  “I do not share it.” She spoke quickly and decisively, shaking her head so vigorously that her curls flew up like red flames.

  “I regard the cheerful sensuality of the Hellenes—a joy without pain—as an ideal that I strive for in my own life. For I don’t believe in the love that is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, just take a look at me: I’m far worse than a heretic, I’m a pagan!

  “‘You think the Goddess of Love really gave it much thought

  “When Anchises pleased her in the Idaean Grove?’

  “Those verses from Goethe’s Roman Elegies have always delighted me.

  “In Nature there is only the love of the Heroic Age, ‘when gods and goddesses loved.’ In those days.

  “‘Desire followed the glance, pleasure followed desire.’

  “Everything else is bogus, affected, dishonest. Christianity (whose gruesome emblem, the cross, I find horrifying) introduced something alien, inimical into Nature and her innocent drives.

  “The struggle of the mind with the sensory world is the Gospel of the moderns. I want no part of it.”

  “Yes, your place would be on Mount Olympus, Madam,” I replied. “But we moderns simply can’t endure classical cheerfulness, least of all in love. We are shocked by the very thought of sharing a woman—even an Aspasia7—with others; we are as jealous as our God. Thus, the name of the beautiful Phryne has become a term of abuse among us.

  “We would rather have a pale, sorry Holbein Virgin who belongs entirely to us than a classical Venus, no matter how divinely beautiful, if she loves Anchises today, Paris tomorrow, and Adonis the day after. And when Nature does triumph in us, when we abandon ourselves in burning passion to such a woman, her cheerful joie de vivre strikes us as demonic, as cruel, and we see our bliss as a sin that we must atone for.”

  “So you too are a fan of the modern woman, that poor, hysterical little female, who, in somnambular pursuit of her dream, her masculine ideal, fails to appreciate the best man and who, amid tearful fits, neglects her Christian duties every day, cheating and being cheated on, constantly seeking and choosing and rejecting, never happy, never making anyone else happy, and cursing fate instead of calmly admitting: ‘I want to love and live as Helen and Aspasia lived.’ Nature knows of no permanence in the male-female relationship.”

  “Dear Madam—”

  “Let me finish. It is merely the egoism of the man, who wants to bury a woman like a treasure. All attempts at using vows, contracts, and holy ceremonies have failed to bring permanence into the most changeable aspect of changeable human existence, namely love. Can you deny that our Christian world is rotting?”

  “But—”

  “But you mean to say that the individual who rebels against the institutions of society is ostracized, stigmatized, stoned. Fine. I dare to try. My principles are quite pagan, I want to make the most of my existence. I can do without your hypocritical respect, I prefer happiness. The inventors of Christian marriage were correct in simultaneously inventing immortality. But I do not plan to live forever, and if everything for me as Wanda von Dunajew is finished here with my last breath, what do I care whether my pure spirit sings in the angelic choirs or my dust billows into new shapes? Once I no longer exist as I am, out of what consideration should I then forgo anything? Should I belong to a man I don’t love simply because I used to love him? No, I forgo nothing, I love any man who appeals to me and I make any man who loves me happy. Is that ugly? No, it is at least far more beautiful than my cruelly delighting in the tortures incited by my charms and my virtuously turning my back on the poor man who pines away for me. I am young, rich, and beautiful, and just as I am, I live cheerfully for pleasure and enjoyment.”

  While she spoke, with her eyes sparkling roguishly, I took hold of her hands without quite knowing what to do with them; but now, being the genuine dilettante that I was, I hastily let go.

  “Your frankness,” I said, “enthralls me, and not that alone—”

  Again that wretched dilettantism, choking me, leaving me tongue-tied.

  “What were you going to say?”

  “I was going to say that—yes, I would want … Forgive me, dear Madam—I interrupted you.”

  “How so?”

  A long pause. She was surely reciting a long monologue, which, translated into my language, could be summed up in a single word: “Ass.”

  “If you will permit me, dear Madam,” I finally began. “How did you develop these—these notions?”

  “Very simple. My father was a rationalist. Starting in the cradle, I was surrounded by plaster casts of ancient statues. At ten, I read Gil Blas, at twelve La Pucelle. Just as other children were friends with Tom Thumb, Bluebeard, and Cinderella, I counted Venus and Apollo, Heracles and Laocoön as my friends. My husband had a cheerful, sunny disposition; not even the incurable ailment that overcame him shortly after our wedding could ever darken his brow for long. The very night before his death he took me into his bed, and during the many months he sat dying in his wheelchair, he would often joke with me: ‘Well, do you already have an admirer?’ I turned crimson. ‘Don’t cheat on me,’ he once added. ‘I would find that ugly. Just get yourself a handsome man or rather several. You’re a good wife, but you’re still half a child, you need toys.’

  “I probably don’t have to tell you that I had no admirer during his lifetime. Enough though. He groomed me to become what I am: a Greek.”

  “A Goddess,” I broke in.

  She smiled. “Which Goddess?”

  “Venus.”

  She wagged her finger at me and knitted her brows. “Ultimately a Venus in Furs. Just wait—I have a big, big fur which can cover you totally. I want to catch you in it as if it were a net.”

  “Do you actually believe,” I said quickly, for I had had a thought that, ordinary and fatuous as it was, I considered a very good thought. “Do you believe that your ideas can be acted upon in our time, that Venus in her unclad beauty and serenity can stroll impunitively among railroads and telegraphs?”

  “Unclad certainly not, but in furs,” she cried, laughing. “Would you like to see mine?”

  “And then—”

  “What do you mean: ‘then’?”

  “Free, lovely, cheerful, and happy people as the Greeks were can exist only if they have slaves, who perform the prosaic business of everyday life for them and, above all, labor for them.”

  “Of course,” she replied mischievously. “An Olympian Goddess like me requires a whole army of slaves. So be wary of me.”

  “Why?”

  I myself was startled by the boldness with which I had blurted out that “why.” She, however, was anything but startled. Her lips curled up slightly, exposing her small white teeth, and she then spoke casually as if about something hardly worth the mention. “Do you want to be my slave?”

  “In love there is no equality,” I replied, earnest and solemn. “If I must choose between domination and submission, it seems to me that it would be far more appealing to be the slave of a beautiful woman. But where can I find a woman who, instead of trying to gain control by means of petty cantankerousness, knows how to rule with calm and self-assurance, even severity?”

  “Well, ultimately that wouldn’t be so difficult.”

  “You believe—”

  “I—for instance!” She laughed, leaning way back. “I have a talent for despotism—I also own the necessary furs. But last night you were seriously frightened of me!”

  “Seriously.”

  “And now?”

  “Now—I’m more frightened of you than ever!”

  We were together every day, I and—Venus; together a
good deal of the time. We took breakfast in my honeysuckle gazebo and tea in her small salon, and I had a chance to display all my minor, very minor talents. Why had I schooled myself in all sciences, tried my hand at all arts if I was unable to serve a petite and pretty woman? …

  However, this woman was anything but petite and she impressed me quite enormously. One day I drew her portrait, and while drawing I now so clearly sensed how little our modern attire suited her cameo head. She had little of Rome but much of Greece in her features.

  I wanted to paint her now as Psyche, now as Astarte,8 depending on whether her eyes had that enthusiastic and spiritual look or that half-languishing and half-singeing, that weary and voluptuous look. But she wished only a portrait.

  Well, I would give her a fur.

  Ah! How could I possibly have any doubts as to who merited a princely fur if not she?

  When we were together one evening, I read Goethe’s Roman Elegies to her. Then I put the book down and improvised a few things. She appeared satisfied, indeed she hung on my every word, and her bosom trembled.

  Or was I mistaken?

  The rain throbbed mournfully against the panes, the fire in the hearth crackled with a wintry snugness, I felt so much at home with her. For an instant I had lost all respect for the beautiful woman and I kissed her hand, and she put up with it.

  Then I sat at her feet and read her a little poem that I had penned for her.

  Venus in Furs

  Gracious, devilish, mythical lady.

  Put your foot upon your slave,

  Stretching out your marble body

  Under myrtles and agaves.

  Yes—and now more! This time I had really gotten beyond the first stanza; but that evening she ordered me to give her the manuscript. I had no copy, and today, when I am writing on the basis of my journal, I can remember only that first stanza.

  It was a curious sensation that I was experiencing. I did not believe that I was in love with Wanda—at least, I had felt nothing of that flash of lightning, that kindling of passion at our first meeting. But I did sense that her extraordinary, truly divine beauty was gradually laying magical snares around me. Nor was I developing an emotional attachment to her; it was a physical submission—slow but all the more thorough.