Venus in Furs. Leopold Sacher-Masoch von

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? 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 a 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 goat’s 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 grey 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.