Venus in Furs | Page 7

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