"
"A woman wearing furs, then," cried Wanda, "is nothing else than a
large cat, an augmented electric battery?"
"Certainly," I replied. "That is my explanation of the symbolic
meaning which fur has acquired as the attribute of power and beauty.
Monarchs and the dominant higher nobility in former times used it in
this sense for their costume, exclusively; great painters used it
only for queenly beauty. The most beautiful frame, which Raphael
could find for the divine forms of Fornarina and Titian for the
roseate body of his beloved, was dark furs."
"Thanks for the learned discourse on love," said Wanda, "but you
haven't told me everything. You associate something entirely
individual with furs."
"Certainly," I cried. "I have repeatedly told you that suffering has
a peculiar attraction for me. Nothing can intensify my passion more
than tyranny, cruelty, and especially the faithlessness of a
beautiful woman. And I cannot imagine this woman, this strange ideal
derived from an aesthetics of ugliness, this soul of Nero in the body
of a Phryne, except in furs."
"I understand," Wanda interrupted. "It gives a dominant and imposing
quality to a woman."
"Not only that," I continued. "You know I am _supersensual._ With me
everything has its roots in the imagination, and thence it receives
its nourishment. I was already pre-maturely developed and highly
sensitive, when at about the age of ten the legends of the martyrs
fell into my hands.
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