"Now you understand the supersensual fool! Under the lash of a
beautiful woman my senses first realized the meaning of woman. In her
fur-jacket she seemed to me like a wrathful queen, and from then on
my aunt became the most desirable woman on God's earth.
"My Cato-like austerity, my shyness before woman, was nothing but an
excessive feeling for beauty. In my imagination sensuality became a
sort of cult. I took an oath to myself that I would not squander its
holy wealth upon any ordinary person, but I would reserve it for an
ideal woman, if possible for 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 looked at that time like Doctor
Faustus's. Everything in it was in a wild confusion. There were huge
closets stuffed full of books, which I bought for a song from a
Jewish dealer on the Servanica; [Footnote: The street of the Jews in
Lemberg.] there were globes, atlases, flasks, charts of the heavens,
skeletons of animals, skulls, the busts of eminent men. It looked as
though Mephistopheles might have stepped out from behind the huge
green store as a wandering scholiast at any moment.
"I studied everything in a jumble without system, without selection:
chemistry, alchemy, history, astronomy, philosophy, law, anatomy, and
literature; I read Homer, Virgil, Ossian, Schiller, Goethe,
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Moliere, the Koran, the Kosmos,
Casanova's Memoirs.
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