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Venus In Furs 1
All stories on this web site are purely FICTIONAL. The people depicted within these stories only exist in someone's IMAGINATION. Any resemblence between anyone depicted in these stories and any real person, living or dead, is an incredible COINCIDENCE too bizarre to be believed. If you think that you or someone you know is depicted in one of these stories it's only because you're a twisted perverted little fucker who sees conspiracies and plots where none exist. You probably suspect that your own MOTHER had sex with ALIENS and COWS and stuff. Well, she didn't. It's all in your head. Now take your tranquilizers and RELAX.
Venus In Furs, an etext in eight sections.
This is section 1 of 8.
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as the lover's pinch
Which hurts, and is desired.
-- Antony and Cleopatra, V, 2
1
I was in charming company.
Facing me, before the massive Renaissance fireplace, sat Venus: not the
casual demi-mondaine who measures swords with the enemy sex under a
pseudonym -- no "Madame Phryne" or "Mademoiselle Cl^Bop^Ctre" -- but the real
Goddess of Love.
She was sitting in an armchair, and had kindled a roaring fire whose
reflections ran in red flames over her pale face with its white eyes and from
time to time over her naked feet when she tried to warm them.
Her head was magnificent in spite of the dead stony eyes, but this was
all I could see of her: the divinity had wrapped her marble body in a great
fur and was curled up, quivering, like a cat.
"I don't understand it, dear lady," I said. "It's not really cold now.
These past two weeks we have had perfect spring weather. It must be your
nerves."
"My compliments on your spring," she replied in a deep stony voice, and
at once sneezed divinely, twice in succession. "I really cannot bear it here
much longer, and I am beginning to understand --" She paused.
"What, dear lady?"
"I am beginning to believe the incredible and to understand the
incomprehensible. Suddenly I understand the virtue of German women, and
German philosophy -- and I no longer wonder why you of the North do not know
how to love, why you have no idea of love."
"But madam," I replied with spirit, "I at least have surely given you no
cause --"
"Oh, not you..." The goddess smiled, then suddenly sneezed again, and
shrugged her shoulders with inimitable grace. "Not you. Which is why I've
always been kind to you, and even visit you now and then -- though I catch
cold every time, even with all these furs. Do you remember the first time we
met?"
"How could I forget? You wore your flowing hair in brown curls and you
had brown eyes and a red mouth, but I knew you at once by the curve of your
cheek and its marble pallor. And you were wearing a violet velvet jacket edged
with squirrel."
"Yes, you were quite in love with the costume. And how teachable you
were!"
"You taught me what love really is -- a serene form of worship which
made me forget two thousand years."
"And my fidelity was unequalled!"
"Why, as for strict fidelity --" I smiled.
"Ungrateful man!"
"I make no reproaches. You are a divinity, but nonetheless a woman and,
like every woman, cruel in matters of love."
"What you call cruelty," the Goddess of Love replied with animation, "is
simply the element of passion and sensuality which is part of woman's nature,
and which makes her give herself whenever she loves, and love everything that
pleases her."
"But can there be any greater cruelty than to make a love endure the
faithlessness of the woman he loves?"
She shrugged, making her beautiful breasts quiver within the fur. "We
are faithful as long as we love, but you demand that a woman be faithful when
she has ceased to love, and that she give herself without any but the most
degrading, mechanical enjoyment. Who is cruel there, the woman or the man?
You of the North take love too seriously. You talk of duties, when there
should be only a question of pleasure."
"Yes, madam, that is why our feelings are respectable and virtuous, and
our relations permanent."
"And yet you retain a restless, unsatisfied yearning for the nudity of
paganism," she said. "But that love which is the height of joy, that central
union of breath and limbs and feeling by which our bodies figure forth the
original divine unity of man and woman, that is not for you moderns, you
children of reflection. In you it turns to something evil. Whenever you wish
to be natural, you become gross. For you, nature is something hostile; you
have made devils of the smiling gods of Greece, and of me a demon. You can
only exorcise and curse me, or immolate yourselves in a bacchantic ecstasy
before my altar. And should one of you ever have the courage to kiss my red
mouth, he must make a barefoot pilgrimage to Rome in penitential garb and
expect flowers to grow from a withered staff, while under my very feet roses,
violets and myrtles spring up every hour -- only their fragrance does not
agree with you. Remain here among the clouds of your northern fogs and
Christian incense; leave us pagans lying under the debris, under the lava; do
not dig us up. Pompeii was not built for you, nor our villas, our baths, our
temples. You do not need gods like us. Our world was not made for you, and
we are chilled in yours." The beautiful marble woman gave a little cough and
drew the dark sables still closer around her naked shoulders.
"A thousand thanks 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 the act of love they merge and are reconciled for a
short time only, when they have but one thought, one sensation, one will, and
then they disunite and become greater enemies than ever. And whichever of the
two fails to dominate will -- as you know better than I -- soon feel the
other's foot on his neck --"
"And as a rule it is the man who feels the woman's," said lady Venus
with mocking satisfaction. "As you know still better than I."
"Of course. That is why I have no illusions."
"You mean you are now my slave without illusions?" Her brows
contracted. "Ah, for that I shall tread on you without mercy..."
"Madam!"
"You do not know me yet? Yes, I am cruel -- since you take such delight
in the word -- and have I not the right to be? Man is the one who desires,
woman the one who is desired: this is her complete and decisive advantage.
Through his passions, Nature has put man in thraldom to woman, and the woman
who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and now to
betray him at last with a smile, is a fool."
"Your own principles," I said drily.
"They are based on several thousands of years' experience," she replied
with an ironical smile as her white fingers played over the dark fur. "The
more devotion a woman shows, the sooner the man recovers his sanity and begins
to domineer. The more cruelly she treats him, the more faithless she is, the
more wantonly she plays with him, the less pity she shows -- by so much does
she heighten his desire and compel his love and worship. So it has always
been, from the times of Helen and Delilah down to those of Catherine the Great
and Lola Montez."
"I will not deny," I said, "That nothing attracts a man more than the
image of a beautiful, passionate, cruel and despotic woman, who changes her
lovers freely and without scruple according to her whim --"
"And who in addition wears furs," the goddess struck in with a mocking
look. "What do you mean by that, madam?"
"I know your weakness. Who better?"
"Do you know," I said, "that since our last meeting you have become very
much the coquette?"
"In what way, may I ask?"
"In having found there is no better way of displaying your white body
than in those dark furs, and that --"
The goddess laughed. "You are dreaming," she cried. "Wake up!" and she
seized my arm with her marble hand. "Do wake up," she repeated hoarsely, her
voice dropping into the lower register. I opened my eyes with difficulty.
I saw the hand which was shaking me, but this hand was as brown as
tobacco, while the voice was the thick, vodka-roughened voice of my Cossack
servant who was towering over me at his full height of over six feet.
"Do get up," the good fellow was saying. "It is really disgraceful."
"What is disgraceful?"
"To fall asleep like this in your clothes, and with a book as well."
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 cover "--
by Hegel. Besides, it's time we were starting for Herr Severin's where you're
expected for tea."
"A curious dream," said Severin when I had finished. He rested his arms
on his knees, holding his face in his delicate finely veined hands, and
plunged into thought.
I knew he would remain so for a long time, hardly even breathing. This
often happened, and by now I looked on his behaviour as in no way remarkable.
I had been on terms of close friendship with him for nearly three years, and
was used to his peculiarities. For it could not be denied he was peculiar,
although not quite the dangerous madman which the neighbourhood, and indeed
the entire district of Kolomea, considered him. I found his personality not
only interesting but -- and this was why many people looked on me as a little
mad also -- highly sympathetic.
For a Galician nobleman and landowner, and considering his age -- he was
barely over thirty -- he showed a surprising maturity of outlook, a gravity
verging on the pedantic. He lived by a minutely elaborated,
half-philosophical, half-practical system, like a piece of clock-work; and not
by this alone, but also by the thermometer, barometer, aerometer, hydrometer,
Hippocrates, Hufeland, Plato, Kant, Knigge and Lord Chesterfield. But at
times he had sudden attacks of violent passion, and gave the impression of
being about to run his head right through the wall. At such times everyone
found it better to keep out of his way.
While he remained silent the fire sang in the chimney, and the big old
samovar sang too; the ancient chair in which I sat rocking to and fro, smoking
my cigar, was also singing rather creakily, as was a cricket somewhere in the
old walls. I let my eyes roam over the curious apparatus which crowded his
room, the skeletons of animals, stuffed birds, globes and plaster-casts, until
by chance my gaze fell on a painting which I had often seen in this room but
which today, touched by the red reflections of the fire, made a new and
indescribable impression on me. It was a large oil painting done in the
robust, full-blooded manner of the Flemish school. The subject was curious
enough. A beautiful woman with a radiant smile on her lips, her luxuriant
hair tied in a classical knot, was half lying on an ottoman, supporting
herself on her left arm, quite naked in her dark furs. Her right hand was
playing with a long-lashed whip, while her bare foot rested carelessly on a
man lying before her like a slave or a dog. This man, in whose stark but
well-formed features there lay a brooding sadness and passionate devotion,
looked up at her with the ecstatic burning gaze of a martyr. And this man,
this footstool for the woman's feet, was Severin, but beardless and, as it
seemed, some ten years younger.
"Venus in Furs!" I cried, pointing to the picture. "That is how I saw
her in my dream."
"So did I," said Severin, his voice remote. "Only I dreamed my dream
with open eyes."
"Indeed?"
"Ah, it's a tedious story..."
"Your picture must have suggested my dream," I went on. "Now tell me
what it means. I can guess it played a role in your life, perhaps a decisive
one, but you alone can give me the details."
"Look then at its model and counterpart," my strange friend replied
without heeding my request, as he gestured towards a picture hanging
opposite -- a fine copy of Titian's famous Venus with the Mirror in the
Dresden Gallery.
"And what is its significance?"
Severin rose and pointed at the fur in which Titian had clothed his
goddess of love. "It too is a 'Venus in Furs'," he said with a faint smile,
"though I don't believe the old Venetian had any such ulterior motive. He
simply painted the portrait of some fashionable Messalina, and was tactful
enough to have Cupid hold the mirror in which she appraises her majestic
allure with such cold aplomb -- though the boy looks as if his task were
rather irksome. The title is merely a piece of flattery. Following the
pictorial conventions of the time, the lady was given the name of Venus. But
the imperial furs in which Titian's lovely model draped herself, probably less
from modesty than from fear of catching a chill, have become for us a symbol
of the tyranny and cruelty that are the essence and beauty of woman. But
enough of that... The picture, as it stands, is a pungent satire on our own
conception of love. In this rarefied northland, this icy Christian world,
Venus must creep into a great black fur so as not to catch cold..." He
laughed and lit a fresh cigarette.
At that moment the door opened and a plump comely blonde girl entered;
she had wise, kindly eyes, was dressed in black silk, and had brought us eggs
and cold meat for our tea. Severin took one of the eggs and broke it with his
knife. "Didn't I tell you I wanted them soft-boiled?" he exclaimed with a
violence which made the young woman tremble.
"But my dear Sevtchu --" she said timidly.
"Sevtchu nothing!" he cried. "You are to obey, to obey, do you
understand!" And he seized a kantschuk from the hook where it was hanging
among his other weapons.
The pretty girl fled from the room as swiftly and shyly as a doe.
"Wait -- I'll deal with you later!" he called after her.
"Severin," I said, laying a hand on his arm, "how can you treat a pretty
young woman like this?"
"Consider this woman," he replied, his eyes twinkling mirthfully. "If I
had made a habit of flattering her she would have put a rope around my neck
long ago. But now, when I bring her up under the kantschuk, she adores me."
"Nonsense!"
"Not at all. This is how one breaks women in."
"Well, you can live like a pasha in your harem if you wish, but do not
lay down theories about it --"
"Why not?" he took me up short. "Goethe's 'you must be hammer or anvil'
applies very well to the relation between men and women, or didn't the Lady
Venus in your dream convince you? Woman's power lies in man's passion, and
she knows how to use this power if he fails to understand it. He has only one
choice: to be the tyrant or the slave of woman. No sooner does he give way
than his neck is under the yoke, and then the whip will begin to fall."
"Odd maxims!"
"Not maxims, but truths verified by experience," he replied, nodding his
head. "I have actually felt the lash. I am cured. Would you like to know
how?"
He rose, took a small manuscript from his massive desk and laid it
before me.
"You have already asked me about the picture," he said, "and I have long
owed you an explanation. Here, read..."
He sat down by the fire with his back to me, and seemed to dream with
open eyes. Silence had fallen once again, and once again the fire was singing
in the chimney, and the samovar and the cricket in the wall were singing too.
I opened the manuscript and read:
CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERSENSUAL MAN
In the margin was the epigraph, a variation of the well-known lines of
Mephistopheles in Faust:
Thou sensual, supersensual wooer,
A woman leads thee by the nose.
I turned the title-page and read:
What follows has been compiled from the pages of my diary of the period.
For it is never possible to write frankly of one's own past: only in personal
records does everything keep the freshness of its colours, the colours of the
moment.
Gogol, the Russian Moli
Comic Muse is the one beneath whose mask of laughter the tears are falling."
A wonderful saying...
I have a curious feeling as I am writing all this down. The air seems
full of a disturbing fragrance of flowers, an odour which overcomes me and
makes my head swim, the smoke from the fireplace curls up and shapes itself
into the figures of little gray-bearded goblins who point their fingers
mockingly at me, while little plump-cheeked amoretti ride on the arms of my
chair and on my knees -- and then I smile involuntarily, I even laugh aloud as
I record my adventures, even though I am writing not with common ink but with
the red blood that drips from my heart, for all its long-closed wounds have
reopened, throbbing and smarting, and every now and then a tear falls on the
paper.
o
The days creep by sluggishly in this little Carpathian resort. You see
no one, and no one sees you. It is so boring one could write idylls. I have
enough leisure here to fill an entire picture-gallery, to supply a theatre
with new plays for a whole season and a dozen virtuosos with concertos, trios
and duos, but -- what am I saying? -- the upshot of it all is that I do no
more than stretch the canvas, smooth the bow, line the scores. For I am -- no
false modesty now, friend Severin: you can lie to others but can't succeed in
lying to yourself any longer -- I am nothing but a dilettante, a dilettante in
painting, in poetry, in music and in several of the other so-called
unprofitable arts which, however, secure for their masters these days the
income of a cabinet minister or even of a petty princeling. Above all, I am a
dilettante in life.
Until now I have lived as I have painted and poetized: that is, I have
never got beyond the preliminary work, the plan, the first act, the first
stanza. There are people like that, who begin everything and finish nothing.
I am one of them.
But what am I running on about?
To the business in hand.
I lounge in my window-seat, and the miserable little town which fills me
with ennui really seems ineffably full of poetry. How marvellous the prospect
of that blue wall of mountains interwoven with golden sunlight and laced with
torrents like ribbons of silver! How clear and blue the sky into which rise
the snow-capped peaks, how fresh and green the wooded slopes and the meadows
grazed by the little knots of cattle-green all the way down to the yellow
waves of grain in which the reapers stand, bend down and rise again.
The house where I live is in a kind of park or forest or wilderness,
whatever you care to call it, and is very secluded.
Its only inhabitants are myself, a widow from Lemberg, and Madame
Tartakovska the landlady, a little old woman who grows older and smaller every
day. There is also an old dog that limps on one leg, and a young cat that is
always playing with a ball of wool. The ball of wool belongs, I believe, to
the widow.
She is said to be really beautiful, this widow, still very young,
twenty-four at the most, and very rich. She keeps her green jalousies always
closed, and has a balcony quite embowered with green creepers and climbing
plants. I, down below, have a comfortable cosy arbour of honeysuckle, where I
read and write and paint and sing like a bird among the branches. I can look
up at the balcony; sometimes I actually do, and then from time to time a white
gown gleams amid the dense green network of the leaves.
But the beautiful woman up there doesn't really interest me, because I
am in love with someone else, and most unhappily: far more unhappily than the
Knight of Toggenburg or the Chevalier in Manon Lescaut, because my beloved is
made of stone.
In the park, in the little wilderness, there is a pretty meadow where a
couple of deer graze peacefully. In 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 seen in all my life.
But that does not mean a great deal, for I have not seen many beautiful
women, nor indeed many women at all. In matters of love, too, I am a
dilettante who has never gone beyond the preliminaries, the first act. But
why make comparisons, as if anything beautiful can ever be surpassed?
It is enough to say this Venus is beautiful; and I love her passionately
and with a morbid intensity -- madly, as one can only love a woman who never
responds to one's love save by an unchanging, an eternally calm and stony
smile. Yes. I literally adore her.
Often I lie reading under the leafy shelter of a young birch-tree
nearby, while the sun broods over the forest; often I visit that cold, cruel
mistress of mine by night and kneel before her, my forehead or my lips pressed
to the cold pediment on which her feet are standing -- and my prayers ascend
to her.
The rising moon, now past its third quarter, produces an indescribable
effect: it seems to hover among the trees, drenching the meadow in its stream
of silver, and the Goddess stands transfigured and shining, as if she were
bathing in the soft radiance.
Once, as I was returning from my orisons by one of the paths leading to
the house, I suddenly saw a woman's moving figure, white as stone under the
moon's light and screened from me only by a row of trees. For a moment it
seemed the beautiful marble woman had taken pity on me, had come to life and
was following me! I was seized by a nameless fear, my heart threatened to
burst, but instead of --
Well, I am a dilettante. As usual, I broke down at the second stanza,
or rather I didn't break down, but on the contrary ran away as fast as I
could.
What luck! Through a Jew who deals in prints and engravings I have
secured a picture of my ideal. A small reproduction of Titian's Venus with
the Mirror. What a woman! I would like to write a poem, but instead I take
the reproduction and write on it:
"VENUS IN FURS
"You are cold, even while you fan our flames. Wrap yourself then in your
despot's furs, for there is none on whom they sit better, cruel goddess of
love and beauty!"
After a while I add a few verses from Goethe, which I found the other
day in his Paralipomena to Faust:
To Amor
"The pair of wings a fiction are,
The arrows, they are only claws,
The wreath conceals the little horns;
For there's no doubt at all that he
-- Like all the gods of ancient Greece --
Is only a devil in disguise.
Then I place the picture before me on my table, propping it with a book,
and gaze at it. The cold coquetry with which this superb woman drapes her
charms in her furs of dark sable, the severity and hardness which dwell in
this marmoreal face, fill me with rapture and a strange fear. Once more I
take up my pen and write these words:
"To love, to be loved, what happiness! And yet how this bliss pales before
the tormenting ecstasy of worshipping a woman who makes a plaything of one, of
being the slave of a beautiful tyrant who treads one pitilessly underfoot! So
Samson, the hero, the mighty warrior, once more gave himself into the hands of
Delilah even after she had betrayed him, and then once again she betrayed him,
and the Philistines bound him and put out his eyes which until the last he
kept fixed, drunken with rage and love, on the lovely traitress."
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