Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

"But the Almighty Lord hath struck him
and hath delivered him into
the hands of a woman."
-The Vulgate, Judith, xvi.7
     "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."

     "This is why our emotions are honorable and virtuous, and our relations permanent."

     "And yet a restless, always-unsatisfied craving for the nudity of paganism," she interrupted. "But that love, which is the highest job, 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 baths, our temples. You do not require gods. We are chilled in your world."

     "Much obliged for the classical lesson," I replied, "But you cannot deny that man and woman are mortal enemies, in your serene sunlit world as well as in our foggy one. In love there is union into a single being for a short time only, capable of only one thought, one sensation, one will, in order to be then further disunited. And you know this better than I; whichever of the two fails to subjugate will soon feel the feet of the other on his neck --"

     "And as a rule the man that of the woman, " cried Madame Venus with proud mockery, "Which you know better than I."

     "Of course, and that is why I don't have any illusions."

     "You mean you are now my slave without illusions, and for that reason you shall feel the weight of my foot without mercy."

     "Madame!"

     "Don't you know me yet? Yes, I am cruel -- since you take so much delight in that word -- and am I not entitled to be so? Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. Through man's passion, nature has given man into woman's hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise."

     "Exactly your principles," I interrupted angrily.

     "They are based on the experience of thousands of years," she replied ironically, while her white fingers played over the dark fur. "The more devoted a woman shows herself to be, the sooner the man sobers down and becomes domineering. The more cruelly she treats him and the more faithless she is, the worse she uses him, the more wantonly she plays with him, the less pity she shows him, by so much the more will she increase his desire, be loved, be worshiped by him. So it has always been, since the time of Helen and Delilah, down to Catherine the Second and Lola Montez."

     "I cannot deny," I said, "That nothing will attract a man more than the picture of a beautiful, passionate, cruel, and despotic woman who wantonly changes her favorites without scruple in accordance with her whim --"

"Woman's power lies in man's passion, and she knows how to use it,
if man doesn't understand himself."
~~~~
A great book on the power struggles of relationships in their most raw, base form and truths beyond measure that are sometimes hard and painful to grasp because it strips away all the idealism -- yet still maintains the very real air of mystery and intrigue unhindered by banal romantic notions that don't hold up when taken out of theory and put into practice.

The full book.
- Venus in Furs