“Now watch me break him in,” said the Greek. He showed his teeth, and his face acquired the bloodthirsty expression, which startled me the first time I saw him.
And he began to apply the lash—so mercilessly, with such frightful force that I quivered under each blow, and began to tremble all over with pain. Tears rolled down over my cheeks. In the meantime Wanda lay on the ottoman in her fur jacket, supporting herself on her arm; she looked on with cruel curiosity, and was convulsed with laughter.
The sensation of being whipped by a successful rival before the eyes of an adored woman cannot be described. I almost went mad with shame and despair.
What was most humiliating was that at first I felt a certain wild, supersensual stimulation under Apollo’s whip and the cruel laughter of my Venus, no matter how horrible my position was. But Apollo whipped on and on, blow after blow, until I forgot all about poetry, and finally gritted my teeth in impotent rage, and cursed my wild dreams, woman, and love.
All of a sudden I saw with horrible clarity whither blind passion and lust have led man, ever since Holofernes and Agamemnon—into a blind alley, into the net of woman’s treachery, into misery, slavery, and death.
It was as though I were awakening from a dream.
Blood was already flowing under the whip. I wound like a worm that is trodden on, but he whipped on without mercy, and she continued to laugh without mercy. In the meantime she locked her packed trunk and slipped into her travelling furs, and was still laughing, when she went downstairs on his arm and entered the carriage.
Then everything was silent for a moment.
I listened breathlessly.
The carriage door slammed, the horse began to pull—the rolling of the carriage for a short time—then all was over.
For a moment I thought of taking vengeance, of killing him, but I was bound by the abominable agreement. So nothing was left for me to do except to keep my pledged word and grit my teeth.
My first impulse after this, the most cruel catastrophe of my life, was to seek laborious tasks, dangers, and privations. I wanted to become a soldier and go to Asia or Algiers, but my father was old and ill and wanted me.
So I quietly returned home and for two years helped him bear his burdens, and learned how to look after the estate which I had never done before. To labor and to do my duty was comforting like a drink of fresh water. Then my father died, and I inherited the estate, but it meant no change.
I had put on my own Spanish boots and went on living just as rationally as if the old man were standing behind me, looking over my shoulder with his large wise eyes.
One day a box arrived, accompanied by a letter. I recognized Wanda’s writing.
Curiously moved, I opened it, and read.
“Sir.—
Now that over three years have passed since that night in Florence, I suppose, I may confess to you that I loved you deeply. You yourself, however, stifled my love by your fantastic devotion and your insane passion. From the moment that you became my slave, I knew it would be impossible for you ever to become my husband. However, I found it interesting to have you realize your ideal in my own person, and, while I gloriously amused myself, perhaps, to cure you.
I found the strong man for whom I felt a need, and I was as happy with him as, I suppose, it is possible for anyone to be on this funny ball of clay.
But my happiness, like all things mortal, was of short duration. About a year ago he fell in a duel, and since then I have been living in Paris, like an Aspasia—
And you?—Your life surely is not without its sunshine, if you have gained control of your imagination, and those qualities in you have materialized, which at first so attracted me to you—your clarity of intellect, kindness of heart, and, above all else, your—moral seriousness.
I hope you have been cured under my whip; the cure was cruel, but radical. In memory of that time and of a woman who loved you passionately, I am sending you the portrait by the poor German.
Venus in Furs.”
I had to smile, and as I fell to musing the beautiful woman suddenly stood before me in her velvet jacket trimmed with ermine, with the whip in her hand. And I continued to smile at the woman I had once loved so insanely, at the fur jacket that had once so entranced me, at the whip, and ended by smiling at myself and saying: The cure was cruel, but radical; but the main point is, I have been cured.
“And the moral of the story?” I said to Severin when I put the manuscript down on the table.
“That I was a donkey,” he exclaimed without turning around, for he seemed to be embarrassed. “If only I had beaten her!”
“A curious remedy,” I exclaimed, “which might answer with your peasant women—”
“Oh, they are used to it,” he replied eagerly, “but imagine the effect upon one of our delicate, nervous, hysterical ladies—”
“But the moral?”
“That woman, as nature has created her and as man is at present educating her, is his enemy. She can only be his slave or his despot, but never his companion. This she can become only when she has the same rights as he, and is his equal in education and work.
“At present we have only the choice of being hammer or anvil, and I was the kind of donkey who let a woman make a slave of him, do you understand?
“The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.
“The blows, as you see, have agreed with me; the roseate supersensual mist has dissolved, and no one can ever make me believe again that these ‘sacred apes of Benares’[6] or Plato’s rooster[7] are the image of God.”
Afterword
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in Lemberg, Austrian Galicia, on January 27, 1836. He studied jurisprudence at Prague and Graz, and in 1857 became a teacher at the latter university. He published several historical works, but soon gave up his academic career to devote himself wholly to literature. For a number of years he edited the international review, Auf der Hohe, at Leipzig, but later removed to Paris, for he was always strongly Francophile. His last years he spent at Lindheim in Hesse, Germany, where he died on March 9, 1895. In 1873 he married Aurora von Rumelin, who wrote a number of novels under the pseudonym of Wanda von Dunajew, which it is interesting to note is the name of the heroine of Venus in Furs. Her sensational memoirs which have been the cause of considerable controversy were published in 1906.
During his career as writer an endless number of works poured from Sacher-Masoch’s pen. Many of these were works of ephemeral journalism, and some of them unfortunately pure sensationalism, for economic necessity forced him to turn his pen to unworthy ends.
There is, however, a residue among his works which has a distinct literary and even greater psychological value. His principal literary ambition was never completely fulfilled. It was a somewhat programmatic plan to give a picture of contemporary life in all its various aspects and interrelations under the general title of the Heritage of Cain. This idea was probably derived from Balzac’s Comedie Humaine. The whole was to be divided into six subdivisions with the general titles Love, Property, Money, The State, War, and Death. Each of these divisions in its turn consisted of six novels, of which the last was intended to summarize the author’s conclusions and to present his solution for the problems set in the others.
This extensive plan remained unachieved, and only the first two parts, Love and Property, were completed. Of the other sections only fragments remain. The present novel, Venus in Furs, forms the fifth in the series, Love.
The best of Sacher-Masoch’s work is characterized by a swift narration and a graphic representation of character and scene and a rich humor. The latter has made many of his shorter stories dealing with his native Galicia little masterpieces of local color.
There is, however, another element in his work which has caused his name to become as eponym for an entire se
ries of phenomena at one end of the psycho-sexual scale. This gives his productions a peculiar psychological value, though it cannot be denied also a morbid tinge that makes them often repellent. However, it is well to remember that nature is neither good nor bad, neither altruistic nor egoistic, and that it operates through the human psyche as well as through crystals and plants and animals with the same inexorable laws.
Sacher-Masoch was the poet of the anomaly now generally known as masochism. By this is meant the desire on the part of the individual affected of desiring himself completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex, and being treated by this person as by a master, to be humiliated, abused, and tormented, even to the verge of death. This motive is treated in all its innumerable variations. As a creative artist Sacher-Masoch was, of course, on the quest for the absolute, and sometimes, when impulses in the human being assume an abnormal or exaggerated form, there is just for a moment a flash that gives a glimpse of the thing in itself.
If any defense were needed for the publication of work like Sacher-Masoch’s it is well to remember that artists are the historians of the human soul and one might recall the wise and tolerant Montaigne’s essay On the Duty of Historians where he says, “One may cover over secret actions, but to be silent on what all the world knows, and things which have had effects which are public and of so much consequence is an inexcusable defect.”
And the curious interrelation between cruelty and sex, again and again, creeps into literature. Sacher-Masoch has not created anything new in this. He has simply taken an ancient motive and developed it frankly and consciously, until, it seems, there is nothing further to say on the subject. To the violent attacks which his books met he replied in a polemical work, Über den Wert der Kritik.
It would be interesting to trace the masochistic tendency as it occurs throughout literature, but no more can be done than just to allude to a few instances. The theme recurs continually in the Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau; it explains the character of the chevalier in Prévost’s Manon l’Escault. Scenes of this nature are found in Zola’s Nana, in Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved, in Albert Juhelle’s Les Pecheurs d’Hommes, in Dostojevski. In disguised and unrecognized form it constitutes the undercurrent of much of the sentimental literature of the present day, though in most cases the authors as well as the readers are unaware of the pathological elements out of which their characters are built.
In all these strange and troubled waters of the human spirit one might wish for something of the serene and simple attitude of the ancient world. Laurent Tailhade has an admirable passage in his Platres et Marbres, which is well worth reproducing in this connection:
“Toutefois, les Hellènes, dans, leurs cités de lumière, de douceur et d’harmonie, avaient une indulgence qu’on peut nommer scientifique pour les troubles amoureux de l’esprit. S’ils ne regardaient pas l’aliéné comme en proie a la visitation d’un dieu (idée orientale et fataliste), du moins ils savaient que l’amour est une sorte d’envoûtement, une folie où se manifeste l’animosité des puissances cosmiques. Plus tard, le christianisme enveloppa les âmes de ténèbres. Ce fut la grande nuit. L’Église condamna tout ce qui lui parût neuf ou menaçant pour les dogmes implaçable qui reduisaient le monde en esclavage.”
Among Sacher-Masoch’s works, Venus in Furs is one of the most typical and outstanding. In spite of melodramatic elements and other literary faults, it is unquestionably a sincere work, written without any idea of titillating morbid fancies. One feels that in the hero many subjective elements have been incorporated, which are a disadvantage to the work from the point of view of literature, but on the other hand raise the book beyond the sphere of art, pure and simple, and make it one of those appalling human documents which belong, part to science and part to psychology. It is the confession of a deeply unhappy man who could not master his personal tragedy of existence, and so sought to unburden his soul in writing down the things he felt and experienced. The reader who will approach the book from this angle and who will honestly put aside moral prejudices and prepossessions will come away from the perusal of this book with a deeper understanding of this poor miserable soul of ours and a light will be cast into dark places that lie latent in all of us.
Sacher-Masoch’s works have held an established position in European letters for something like half a century, and the author himself was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French Government in 1883, on the occasion of his literary jubilee. When several years ago cheap reprints were brought out on the Continent and attempts were made by various guardians of morality—they exist in all countries —to have them suppressed, the judicial decisions were invariably against the plaintiff and in favor of the publisher. Are Americans children that they must be protected from books which any European schoolboy can purchase whenever he wishes? However, such seems to be the case, and this translation, which has long been in preparation, consequently appears in a limited edition printed for subscribers only. In another connection Herbert Spencer once used these words: “The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.” They have a very pointed application in the case of a work like Venus in Furs.
F. S.
Atlantic City April, 1921
Notes
1 A long whip with a short handle.
2 A woman’s jacket.
3 The street of the Jews in Lemberg.
4 These were notorious prisons under the leaden roof of the Palace of the Doges.
5 A kind of Russian cap.
6 One of Schopenhauer’s designations for women.
7 Diogenes threw a plucked rooster into Plato’s school and exclaimed: “Here you have Plato’s human being.”
About the Author
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895/1905) was an Austrian writer and editor who is best known for his erotic story Venus in Furs. Educated in law, history and mathematics, Sacher-Masoch wrote primarily Galician folklore, and later served as editor of Auf der Höhe. Internationale Review (At the Pinnacle. International Review) where he focused on exposing anti-semitism and championing the emancipation of women. The prominence of fantasy and fetish in Sacher-Masoch’s work, particularly in Venus in Furs, led to the coining of the term masochism by psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing in 1886. Sacher-Masoch spent the last years of his life under psychiatric care and is believed to have died between 1895 and 1905.
Nana
Émile Zola
CONTENTS
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
About the Author
Chapter I
At nine o’clock in the evening the house at the Theatres des Variétés was still all but empty. A few individuals, it is true, were sitting quietly waiting in the balcony and stalls, but these were lost, as it were, among the ranges of seats whose coverings of cardinal velvet loomed in the subdued light of the dimly burning luster. A shadow enveloped the great red splash of the curtain, and not a sound came from the stage, the unlit footlights, the scattered desks of the orchestra. It was only high overhead in the third gallery, round the domed ceiling where nude females and children flew in heavens which had turned green in the gaslight, that calls and laughter were audible above a continuous hubbub of voices, and heads in women’s and workmen’s caps were ranged, row above row, under the wide-vaulted bays with their gilt-surrounding adornments. Every few seconds an attendant would make her appearance, bustling along with tickets in her hand and piloting in front of her a gentleman and a lady, who took their seats, he in his evening dress, she sitting slim
and undulant beside him while her eyes wandered slowly round the house.
Two young men appeared in the stalls; they kept standing and looked about them.
“Didn’t I say so, Hector?” cried the elder of the two, a tall fellow with little black mustaches. “We’re too early! You might quite well have allowed me to finish my cigar.”
An attendant was passing.
“Oh, Monsieur Fauchery,” she said familiarly, “it won’t begin for half an hour yet!”
“Then why do they advertise for nine o’clock?” muttered Hector, whose long thin face assumed an expression of vexation. “Only this morning Clarisse, who’s in the piece, swore that they’d begin at nine o’clock punctually.”
For a moment they remained silent and, looking upward, scanned the shadowy boxes. But the green paper with which these were hung rendered them more shadowy still. Down below, under the dress circle, the lower boxes were buried in utter night. In those on the second tier there was only one stout lady, who was stranded, as it were, on the velvet-covered balustrade in front of her. On the right hand and on the left, between lofty pilasters, the stage boxes, draped with long-fringed scalloped hangings, remained empty. The house with its white and gold, relieved by soft green tones, lay only half disclosed to view, as though full of a fine dust shed from the little jets of flame in the great glass luster.
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