But the Almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the hands of a woman

      The Vulgate, Judith XVI: 7

      My company was charming.

      Opposite me by the massive Renaissance fireplace sat Venus: she was not a casual woman of the half-world, who under this pseudonym wages war against the enemy sex, like Mademoiselle Cleopatra, but the real, true goddess of love.

      She sat in an armchair and had kindled a crackling fire, whose reflection ran in red flames over her pale face with its white eyes, and from time to time over her feet when she sought to warm them.

      Her head was wonderful in spite of the dead stony eyes; it was all I could see of her. She had wrapped her marble-like body in a huge fur, and rolled herself up trembling like a cat.

      ‘I don’t understand it,’ I exclaimed. ‘It isn’t really cold any longer. For two weeks past we have had perfect spring weather. You must be nervous.’

      ‘Much obliged for your spring,’ she replied with a low stony voice, and immediately afterwards sneezed divinely, twice in succession. ‘I really can’t stand it here much longer, and I am beginning to understand –’

      ‘What, dear lady?’

      ‘I am beginning to believe the unbelievable and to understand the ununderstandable. All of a sudden I understand the Germanic virtue of woman, and German philosophy, and I am no longer surprised that you of the north do not know how to love, haven’t even an idea of what love is.’

      ‘But, madame,’ I replied flaring up, ‘I surely haven’t given you any reason.’

      ‘Oh, you –’ The divinity sneezed for the third time, and shrugged her shoulders with inimitable grace. ‘That’s why I have always been nice to you, and even come to see you now and then, although I catch a cold every time, in spite of all my furs. Do you remember the first time we met?’

      ‘How could I forget it,’ I said. ‘You wore your abundant hair in brown curls, and you had brown eyes and a red mouth, but I recognised you immediately by the outline of your face and its marble-like pallor – you always wore a violet-blue velvet jacket edged with squirrel-skin.’

      ‘You were really in love with the costume, and awfully docile.’

      ‘You have taught me what love is. Your serene form of worship let me forget two thousand years.’

      ‘And my faithfulness to you was without equal!’

      ‘Well, as far as faithfulness goes –’

      ‘Ungrateful!’

      ‘I will not reproach you with anything. You are a divine woman, but nevertheless a woman, and like every woman cruel in love.’

      ‘What you call cruel,’ the goddess of love replied eagerly, ‘is simply the element of passion and of natural love, which is woman’s nature and makes her give herself where she loves, and makes her love everything that pleases her.’

      ‘Can there be any greater cruelty for a lover than the unfaithfulness of the woman he loves?’

      ‘Indeed!’ she replied. ‘We are faithful as long as we love, but you demand faithfulness of a woman without love, and the giving of herself without enjoyment. Who is cruel there – woman or man? You of the north in general take love too soberly and seriously. You talk of duties where there should be only a question of pleasure.’

      ‘That is why our emotions are honourable and virtuous, and our relations permanent.’

      ‘And yet you have a restless, always unsatisfied craving for the nudity of paganism,’ she interrupted, ‘but that love, which is the highest joy, which is divine simplicity itself, is not for you moderns, you children of reflection. It works only evil in you. As soon as you wish to be natural, you become common. To you nature seems something hostile; you have made devils out of the smiling gods of Greece, and out of me a demon. You can only exorcise and curse me, or slay yourselves in bacchantic madness before my altar. And if ever one of you has had the courage to kiss my red mouth, he makes a barefoot pilgrimage to Rome in penitential robes and expects flowers to grow from his withered staff, while under my feet roses, violets, and myrtles spring up every hour, but their fragrance does not agree with you. Stay among your northern fogs and Christian incense; let us pagans remain under the debris, beneath the lava; do not disinter us. Pompeii was not built for you, nor our villas, our