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.
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