The Dedalus Book of German Decadence Read Online Free PDF Page A

that cats make upon excitable, intellectual individuals, and that’s what makes these long-tailed darlings of the animal world, these graceful iridescent electric batteries, the favourites of people such as Mahomet, Cardinal Richelieu, Crebillon, Rousseau and Wieland.’
    ‘So,’ Wanda cried, ‘a woman in furs is nothing more than a large cat, a charged electric battery?’
    ‘Of course,’ I replied, ‘and this is how I explain the symbolic power that fur has gained as an attribute of power and beauty. Kings looked to fur for this in earlier times; a ruling aristocracy insisted on fur in their sartorial requirements, as did great painters when they portrayed the queens of beauty. For the divine form of his Fornarina Raphael could find no more precious frame than dark fur, as could Titian when he painted the rosy flesh of his mistress.’
    ‘I am most grateful for this learned erotic disquisition,’ Wanda said, ‘but you haven’t told me everything. You associate fur with something quite distinctive.’
    ‘Certainly,’ I cried. ‘I keep telling you that I find a strange excitement in pain, that nothing can whip up my passions more than tyranny and cruelty, especially the perfidy of a beautiful woman. And I can only conceive of this woman, this strange ideal from the aesthetics of baseness, this soul of a Nero in the body of a Phryne, as being draped in furs.’
    ‘I know,’ Wanda interceded ‘it gives a woman something imperious, impressive.’
    ‘It isn’t only that,’ I continued. ‘You know that I am a supersensory being, that for me everything is rooted in the imagination and draws it nourishment from this source. I was a precocious child and extremely excitable, and when I was about ten years old I came across a book on the legends of the martyrs. I can remember the mixture of horror and ecstasy with which I read how they rotted in prisons, were laid upon the grill, were transfixed with arrows, boiled in oil, thrown to wild animals, were crucified and suffered the most appalling agonies with a kind of joy. From that time onwards I regarded suffering and torment as a kind of pleasure, and it had to be a torment imposed by a beautiful woman, because for me everything poetic, everything demonic, is concentrated in woman. I made a cult of this.
    In sensuality I saw something holy, indeed, only holiness; I saw something divine in woman and her beauty because life’s most important goal – reproduction – is her prime task. I saw in woman the personification of nature, of Isis, and man was her priest, her slave; she confronted him as cruel as nature which thrusts away that which has served her as soon as she no longer needs it – whilst for him mistreatment, even death through her is the most voluptuous bliss.
    I envied King Gunter who was tied up by the powerful Brunhilde on their wedding night; I envied the poor minstrel who was sewn up into a wolf’s skin by his moody mistress who then hunted him like a wild animal; I envied the Knight Ctirad whom the bold amazon Scharka captured through cunning in a forest near Prague: she dragged him to her castle at Divin and, after she had toyed with him for a while she bound him on the wheel and –’
    ‘Monstrous!’ Wanda cried. ‘I could wish that you had fallen into the hands of such a wild woman, sewn into your wolf-skin, and, I tell you, you would soon forget your poetry beneath the teeth of her wild dogs, or on the wheel.’
    ‘Do you think so? I don’t.’
    ‘I don’t think you’re being particularly clever.’
    ‘Perhaps not. But listen: from that time onwards I used to read insatiably stories which portrayed the most dreadful cruelties, and I especially liked to look at pictures or prints where these were portrayed – all the bloodiest tyrants who ever sat on a throne, the inquisitors who tortured heretics by roasting or beheading, all those women who have gone down in history as voluptuous, beautiful and violent, like Libussa, Lucrezia