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Venus In Furs 3
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 3 of 8.
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We are sitting on Wanda's little balcony in the soft fragrance of a
summer night, a twofold roof is above us, the green ceiling of creepers and
the vault of heavens sown with innumerable stars. From the park rises the low
wailing love-call of a cat, and I am sitting on a stool at the feet of my
divinity, telling her of my childhood.
"And so, even then, all these strange traits were apparent?" said
Wanda.
"I cannot recall a time when they were not. Even in my cradle, so my
mother told me, I was supersensual, I scorned the healthy breast of my nurse
and had to be brought up on goat's milk. As a boy I was unaccountably shy
with women, but this was only a sign of my inordinate interest in them. I was
also oppressed by the grey vaulting and semi-darkness of the church, and
actually afraid of the glittering altars and images of the saints. By stealth
I would creep, as to a secret vice, to a plaster cast of Venus which stood in
my father's little library, and kneel and repeat to her the prayers I had been
taught -- the Paternoster, the Ave and the Credo.
"Once, at night, I left my bed to visit her. The sickle of a new moon
was my only illumination, and showed me the goddess in an icy pale-blue light.
I threw myself before her and kissed her cold feet as I had seen our peasants
kiss those of the dead Saviour.
"All at once an irresistible craving seized me.
"I rose and embraced the beautiful cold body with my arms and kissed the
chilly lips, and the next moment I was convulsed by a long exquisite tremor...
I fled, and later, in a dream, it seemed as if the goddess herself stood by my
bed, threatening me with upraised arm.
"I was sent to school early and soon reached the gymnasium. I seized
passionately on everything that promised to bring the world of antiquity
nearer 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 fatal apple to Venus, I
saw Troy burn, and I followed Ulysses on his wanderings. The prototypes of
all that is beautiful sank deeply into my soul, and so at an age when other
boys are coarse and obscene I showed an insurmountable aversion to everything
base, vulgar and uncouth.
"To me, then on the verge of adolescence, the love of woman seemed
something particularly base and ugly, for I saw it first in all its grossness.
I avoided all contact with the other sex; in a word, I was supersensual almost
to madness.
"When I was about fourteen my mother had a charming chambermaid, young,
pretty, 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 the room. All at once she paused and bent over
me, still holding her broom, and the next moment a pair of fresh, full,
adorable lips was pressed to mine. The kiss of this amorous little she-cat
sent a delicious shudder through me, but I lifted up my Moribus Germaniae like
a shield against the temptress and fled from the room in indignation."
Wanda broke into a merry laugh. "It would really be hard to find
another man like you! but go on."
"There is another memorable incident of that period," I said. "The
Countess Sobol, a distant aunt of mine by marriage, was visiting my parents.
She was a beautiful and imposing woman with a charming smile, but I hated her,
for she was looked on by my family as a kind of Messalina. My conduct towards
her was as rude, surly and malicious as it could be.
"One day my parents had driven to the capital of the district. My aunt
determined to profit by their absence and execute judgment on me. She entered
suddenly in her fur-lined Russian jacket, followed by the cook, the
kitchenmaid and the cat of a chambermaid whom I had scorned. Without any
questions or parley they seized and stripped me, bound me hand and foot in
spite of my violent resistance, and then my aunt, with an evil smile, rolled
up her sleeve and began whipping my naked loins with a stout switch. She
whipped so hard that she drew blood, and at last, in spite of all my heroic
resolve to remain silent, I howled and wept and begged for mercy. She then
had me unbound, but I had to go on my knees, thank her for the punishment, and
kiss her hand.
"Now you understand the supersensual fool! Under the lash of a
beautiful haughty woman, looking in her fur jacket like a wrathful sovereign,
I felt my senses first awake to the meaning of woman, and from that moment my
aunt became the most desirable woman on earth.
"My Catonian austerity, my shyness with women were simply an excessive
feeling for beauty. In the furnace of my imagination sensuality assumed the
rank of an aesthetic, and I swore to myself that I would not squander its
stores on any ordinary woman but would preserve them for an ideal one, and if
possible for an avatar of 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 there looked like Doctor Faustus'. Everything
was in utter confusion, there were great closets stuffed with books~ I had
bought for a song from a Jewish dealer in the Servanica, globes, atlases,
retorts, celestial charts, skeletons of animals, skulls, busts of eminent men.
At any moment Mephistopheles, dressed as a peripatetic schoolman, might have
stepped out from behind the big green stove.
"I studied everything pell-mell, without system or selection --
chemistry, alchemy, history, astronomy, philosophy, law, anatomy and
literature; I read Homer, Virgil, Ossian, Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare,
Cervantes, Moli
confused every day, more fantastic, more supersensual. And all the time a
beautiful female ideal was hovering in my imagination, every now and then
appearing before me like a vision among my leather-bound books and dead bones,
lying on a bed of roses, her body encircled by cupids; sometime she appeared
gowned like the Olympians and with the stern white face of the statue of
Venus, sometimes blue-eyed, with her hair in rich brown braids and wearing my
aunt's red velvet jacket trimmed with ermine. You can imagine the culmination
of my solitary meditations at this time..."
Wanda frowned swiftly, but her lovely mouth did not lose its indulgent
smile as she listened.
"One morning, however, when this ideal creature had been floating before
me all night long in her smiling beauty, I went to see the Countess Sobol, who
received me in a friendly and even cordial manner; she gave me a kiss of
welcome, which put all my senses in a turmoil. She was perhaps forty years
old at this time, but like most society women she was now at the height of her
beauty. She was still wearing a fur-edged jacket, this time one of green
velvet trimmed with marten, but none of the sternness which had once so
delighted me was now discernible in her face; on the contrary, there was so
little cruelty in her that without any ado she let me adore her.
"Only too soon did she discover my supersensual folly and innocence, and
she was pleased to grant me her favours. And I -- I was as happy as a young
god. What ecstasy it was to be allowed to lie at her feet and to kiss her
hands, those hands which had scourged me! What marvellous hands they were --
beautifully shaped, delicate, rounded and white, with rose-tinted nails. I
was really in love only with her hands; I played with them, let them submerge
and reappear in the dark fur, held them against the light, and was unable to
glut my eyes with them."
Wanda involuntarily glanced at her own hands; I noticed it and had to
smile.
"From the extent to which I was governed by supersensuality in those
days, you can see I was in love only with the cruel lashes I had received from
my aunt; it was the same later on, when I made love to a young actress only
in the role and costume in which she had attracted me. Still later, I lost my
head over a highly respectable woman who played the part of virtue to
admiration and deceived me with a wealthy Jew -- since when, having been
betrayed by a woman who feigned the strictest principles and the highest
ideals, I have hated all that kind of sentimental poetic virtue. Give me a
woman who is honest enough to say, 'I am a Pompadour, a Lucrezia Borgia,' and
I am ready to adore her."
Wanda rose and went to the window. "You have a strange way of rousing
one's imagination," she said, "of playing on one's nerves and making one's
pulse beat faster. You place a halo on vice, provided only it is honest.
Your ideal is simply a bold and gifted courtesan. Oh, you are a man who would
corrupt a woman to her depths!"
In the middle of the night there was a knock at my window; I got up,
opened it and was startled. Outside stood Venus in Furs, as she had appeared
to me the first time.
"You have unsettled me with your talk," she said. "I have been tossing
in bed, unable to sleep. You must come up and keep me company."
"At once."
When I entered Wanda was kneeling before the fireplace where she had
kindled a small fire.
"Autumn is coming on," she said, "already the nights are quite cold. I
am afraid you may not like it, but I must keep my furs on until the room warms
up."
"Not like it! You are joking --" I put my arm around her and kissed
her.
"Of course I know your weakness," she said smiling. "But why this
excessive fondness for furs?"
"I was born with it," I replied. "I had it as a child. Moreover, furs
have a stimulating effect on all highly-strung natures, due to certain general
and natural laws. They possess a physical stimulus which sets one a-tingle,
and no one can wholly escape it. Science has recently shown a connection
between electricity and warmth; at any rate, their effects on the human
organism are closely related. The torrid zone produces more passionate people
through the influence of the warmer atmosphere. It is the same with
electricity. This is why the presence of cats has such a magical and salutary
influence on all highly-strung men of intellect, and why these long-tailed
Graces of the animal world, these adorable spark-engendering electric
batteries, have been the favorite animals of men like Mohammed, Cardinal
Richelieu, Cr^Bbillon, Rousseau, Wieland."
"A woman wearing furs, then," cried Wanda, "is nothing more than a large
cat, an amplified electric battery?"
"Exactly," I said. "That is my explanation of the symbolic meaning
which fur has acquired as an attribute of power and beauty. In former times
monarchs and the higher nobility made it, as such, their privileged costume;
great painters used it only for sovereign beauty. The most fitting frame
which Raphael could find for the divine form of La Fornarina, and Titian for
the rosy body of his beloved, was one of dark furs."
"I thank you for the learned discourse on eroticism," said Wanda, "but
you have not told me everything. You associate with furs something entirely
personal to yourself."
"Certainly," I said. "I have already told you that suffering has a
peculiar attraction for me, and that nothing can heighten my passion more than
the idea of tyranny, of cruelty, and above all of a woman's faithlessness.
And for some reason I cannot picture this woman -- this ideal beauty strangely
derived from an aesthetic of ugliness, this soul of a Nero in the body of a
Phryne -- except in furs."
"l understand," said Wanda. "They give a woman a dominant and imposing
air."
"It is more than that. You know I am supersensual, that for me
everything has its roots in fantasy and receives its whole nourishment from
the fantastic. Well, I was already precocious and highly sensitive when at
about the age of ten the legends of the Christian martyrs fell into my hands;
I remember reading with a kind of horror, which was actually rapture, of how
they languished in dungeons, were laid on gridirons, were pierced with arrows,
boiled in pitch, thrown to wild beasts, nailed to the cross, and how they
suffered the most atrocious torments with a kind of joy. From then on, to
undergo cruel torture seemed to me an exquisite delight, especially when it
was inflicted by a beautiful woman -- for ever since I can remember all poetry
and everything demonic were for me combined and concentrated in the idea of
woman.
"Thus I felt there was something sacred in sensuality, that indeed
sensuality was the only sacred thing; in woman and her beauty I saw something
divine, because the most important function of woman -- the continuation of
the species -- was her vocation and her mission. To me woman represented the
very personification of nature, the goddess Isis, and man was no more than her
priest, her instrument, her slave; in contrast to him she was cruel, like
Nature herself who throws aside whatever has served her purpose as soon as she
needs it no longer -- while to him her cruelties, even death itself, were
still sensual raptures.
"I envied King Gunther whom the mighty Br^Annhilde fettered on his bridal
night, and the poor troubadour whom his capricious mistress ordered to be sewn
in the skins of wolves and hunted like a wild beast; I envied the knight
Ctirad whom the bold Amazon Scharka cunningly ensnared in the forests of
Prague and carried off to her Castle Divine where, after amusing herself with
him for a while, she had slowly broken on the wheel --"
"Revolting!" cried Wanda. "Ah, I almost wish you could fall into the
hands of such a savage woman. In the wolf's skin, under the teeth of the dogs
or on the wheel, you would lose the taste for your kind of poetry."
"Do you think so? I do not."
"You are really out of your senses."
"Possibly. But let me go on. I developed a perfect passion for stories
where the worst cruelties were described, and I especially liked to look at
pictures and prints which portrayed all the bloody tyrants who have ever
occupied a throne, the Inquisitors who had the heretics tortured, roasted,
racked and whipped, and above all the women whom the pages of history have
recorded as lustful, beautiful, violent -- Libussa, Lucrezia Borgia, Agnes of
Hungary, Queen Margot, Isabeau, the Sultana Roxolana, the Russian Czarinas of
the last century -- all these women I saw in furs bordered with ermine."
"And so furs now rouse strange fancies in you," said Wanda, and she
began draping her magnificent fur cloak temptingly about her, making the
shining sable play around her breast and arms. "So -- how do you feel now,
half broken on the wheel?" Her piercing green eyes rested on me with a
peculiar mocking pleasure.
Overcome by desire I fell at her feet and threw my arms about her.
"Yes, you have brought my dearest dream to life!" I cried. "It has
slept long enough."
"And that dream is -- ?" She laid her hand on my neck.
The pressure of her warm hand, and the tender searching gaze she bent on
me through half-closed eyes, filled me with a delicious vertigo.
"To be the slave of a woman, a beautiful woman whom I live, whom I
worship!"
"And who maltreats you in return," added Wanda laughing.
"Yes, who binds me and whips me, treads me underfoot, 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, maddened by jealousy, you meet him face to face --
a female demon who will hand you over entirely to his mercy. Why not?" She
gazed at me intently. "This last tableau doesn't please you quite so well?"
I looked at Wanda with awe. "You surpass my dreams."
"Yes, we women are inventive," she said. "Be careful, when you find
your ideal: she might well treat you more cruelly than you expect."
"I fear I have already found my ideal," I cried, burying my burning face
in her lap.
"Surely it is not l?" she cried, throwing off her furs and moving about
the room laughing. She was still laughing when I went downstairs, and as I
stood musing in the courtyard I could still hear her laughter ringing from
above.
"Do you really expect me, then, to embody your ideal?" Wanda asked
quizzically when we met in the park today.
At first I could find no answer; the most contradictory feelings were
warring within me. Meanwhile she had sat down on one of the stone benches and
was playing with a flower.
"Well," she said, "do you?"
I knelt and took her hands. "Once more, Wanda, I beg you to be my wife,
my true and loyal wife... But if you cannot, then become my ideal, entirely,
without restraint or compunction."
She surveyed me with a level gaze. "You know I am still ready to give
you my hand at the end of a year, if by that time you prove to be the man I am
looking for," she said gravely. "But I think you would you would be really
more grateful to me if I realized your fantasies. 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 would enjoy having a man wholly in
your power, torturing him --"
"No, no," she exclaimed quickly. "Or -- or perhaps --" she paused. "I
understand myself no longer, but I have a confession to make. 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, of all those other selfish, frivolous, cruel women has carried me
away and taken possession of my soul. It tempts, it incites me to become like
those women who for all their vileness were slavishly worshipped during their
own lifetimes and who still exert a miraculous power from the grave. Ah, you
will end by making me a despot in miniature, a domestic Pompadour!"
"Then if this is latent in you," I said with animation, "yield to this
tendency of your nature! I want no half-commitment. If you cannot be a true,
loyal wife to me, be a demon."
I was nervous and exhausted from lack of sleep, and the nearness of the
beautiful woman had put me in a kind of delirium; I no longer remember what I
said, but only that I kissed her feet and finally raised her foot and placed
it on my neck, when she withdrew it hurriedly and rose almost in anger.
"If you love me, Severin," she said quickly, and her voice was sharp
with command, "never speak to me of these things again. Do you understand,
never! Otherwise -- I might really --" She smiled and sat down again.
"I am completely serious," I exclaimed, scarcely knowing what I was
saying. "I adore you so infinitely that I will endure anything from you for
the sake of spending my whole life at your side."
"Severin, once more I warn you."
"Your warning is in vain. Do with me as you will, only do not drive me
away."
"Severin," she replied, "I am a frivolous woman, it is dangerous to put
yourself completely in my power; you will end by really becoming my
plaything. What makes you sure I will not abuse this mad love of yours?"
"Your own nobility of character."
"But absolute power makes one unfeeling, arrogant."
"Be so, then," I cried, "tread me underfoot!"
Wanda threw her arms around my neck, gazed into my eyes and shook her
head. "I am afraid I cannot. But I will try, for your sake -- for I love
you, Severin, as I have never loved another man."
Today she suddenly appeared in street-costume, and made me go shopping
with her. She looked at whips, long-lashed whips of the kind used on dogs.
"Are these what you require, madam?" asked the shopman.
"No, they are too small," said Wanda judicially, with a side glance at
me. "I need something heavier --"
"For a bulldog, perhaps?" he suggested.
"Why yes," she exclaimed. "The kind used in Russia for intractable
serfs."
She looked further and at last picked out a heavy whip made of braided
leather, the sight of which gave me a strange, shrinking sensation.
"Now goodbye, Severin," she said. "I have other purchases to make for
which I shan't need you."
I took my leave of her and went for a walk. Coming back I saw Wanda
leaving a furrier's; she beckoned to me.
"Consider, my dear," she began pleasantly, "I have never made a secret
of the fascination your fantastic character holds for me. The idea of having
such a serious man altogether in my power, actually lying at my feet in
ecstasy, stirs me -- but will this attraction last? A woman loves a man, but
she abuses a slave and ends by kicking him aside."
"Very well then," I replied. "Kick me aside when you are tired of me.
I wish only to be your slave."
"Ah, Severin, dangerous forces lie within me," said Wanda after we had
gone a few steps further. "You are awakening them, and to no good to
yourself. You know how to paint pleasure, cruelty, arrogance, in glowing
colours, -- but what you would say if I really tried my hand at them and made
you the first subject of the trial? I should be like the tyrant Dionysius who
had the inventor of the brazen ox roasted in it, to see whether his groans and
death-rattle really resembled an ox's bellowing. Perhaps I am a she-
Dionysius..."
"Be so," I cried, "and my dreams will be realized! I am yours for good
or ill, as you see fit. The destiny I feel within my breast is driving me
on -- demoniacally, relentlessly."
"Beloved,
I do not even care to see you today or tomorrow: not until 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, once more; then I had a donkey saddled -- an animal symbolic
of learning -- and rode into the mountains; I was trying to dull the pain of
my desire and longing with the magnificent scenery of the Carpathians.
I return tired, hungry, thirsty and more in love than ever. I change my
clothes quickly, and a few moments later knock at her door.
"Come in!"
I enter. She is standing in the middle of the room, wearing a gown of
white satin which flows over her body like liquid light; over it she wears a
scarlet Russian jacket richly edged with ermine, and on her powdered snowy
hair is a small diamond tiara. She stands with her arms folded, her brows
contracted.
"Wanda!"
I run forward and am about to throw my arms around her when she draws
back, measuring me with her gaze from head to foot.
"Slave!"
"Mistress!" I kneel, and kiss the hem of her gown.
"That is better."
"Oh, how beautiful you are."
"Do I please you?" She stepped before the mirror and looked at herself
with proud satisfaction.
"I shall go mad..." I murmured. Her lips twitched in derision, and she
looked at me mockingly from between half-closed lids. "Give me the whip."
I looked around the room.
"No," she cried, "stay as you are, on your knees!" She went to the
fireplace, took the whip from the mantelpiece and then, looking at me with a
meaningful smile, made it whistle in the air; then, slowly, she rolled up the
sleeve of her jacket.
"Marvellous woman!" I cried.
"Silence, slave!" Her mouth suddenly twisted with beautiful savagery,
and she lashed me with the whip; the next moment she threw one arm around me
and bent down with a tender look. "Did I hurt you?" She asked with a mixture
of shyness and timidity.
"No," I said, "and even if you had, the pain that comes from you is a
joy. Strike again, if it gives you any pleasure."
"Ah, it does not..."
But once again I was seized by that strange intoxication. "Whip me," I
begged, "whip me without mercy!"
Wanda raised the whip and struck me twice.
"Now, are you satisfied?"
"No."
"No? Seriously?"
"Whip me, I beg you -- it is a joy to me."
"Yes, because you know it is not in earnest, and that I could not find
it in my heart to hurt you. And you are right: for me this brutal game goes
against the grain. If I were really the kind of woman who whips her slaves
you would be horrified."
"No, Wanda," I replied, "I love you more than myself, I am devoted to
you, for life or death. You can literally do with mc whatever you wish,
whatever your whim suggests."
"Severin!"
"Tread me underfoot!" I cried, throwing myself down before her.
"I hate all this play-acting," she said impatiently.
"Then abuse me in earnest..."
An uncanny pause.
"Severin, I am warning you -- for the last time," said Wanda.
"If you love me," I begged with upraised eyes, "be cruel."
"If I love you," she repeated slowly. "Very well!" She stepped back
and looked down at me with an evil smile: standing there with the long-lashed
whip doubled in her hand, she was marvellously beautiful. "Be my slave then,
and know what it means to be given into the hands of a woman." At the same
moment she thrust me away from her with her foot.
"How do you like the sound of this, slave?" she said, and cut the air
with the whip. "Get up!"
I made to rise.
"Not like that," she ordered. "on your knees."
I obeyed, and she began to apply the lash.
The blows fell rapidly and with stinging force, each one cutting into my
flesh and burning, but the pain was rapturous -- for it came from her whom I
adored and for whom I was ready to lay down my life...
At last she ceased. "I am really beginning to enjoy this," she said,
"but enough for tonight. I have a diabolical curiosity to see how much you
can stand, I find a cruel pleasure in seeing you quiver and writhe under this
whip, in hearing your moans and cries, I want to keep on whipping until you
beg for mercy, until you are senseless. You have roused a dangerous creature
in me... But now, get up."
I seized her hand to press it to my lips.
"What insolence!" She thrust me away with her foot. "Out of my sight,
slave!"
I awoke after a feverish night filled with confused dreams. Dawn was
just breaking.
How much of what was still floating in my memory was true? What was
experience, and what was dream? That I have been whipped is certain, I can
still feel each stroke, can count the burning red stripes on my body. And she
whipped me. Yes, now I know.
My dream has been realized. What is it like? Am I disappointed with
the truth of my dream?
No, I am only a little tired -- but her cruelty has enraptured me. Oh,
how I love her, how I adore her! Anything I write here could not express a
tithe of my feeling for her, my utter devotion. What happiness, to be her
slave.
She calls to me from her balcony. I hasten up. She is standing on the
threshold, holding out her hand in a comradely manner.
"I am ashamed of myself," she says as I embrace her; and she hides her
head on my breast.
"Why?"
"Try to forget that ugly scene last night," she said in a quavering
voice. "I have satisfied your insane wish, now let us be sensible and happy
and loving, and in a year I will be your wife."
"Mistress," I cried, "and I your slave!"
"Not another word of slavery, cruelty or the whip," she interrupted. "I
will grant you no such favours -- nothing except wearing my fur jacket. Come,
help me into it."
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