“Why not,” he said animatedly. “Goethe’s ‘you must be hammer or anvil’ is absolutely appropriate to the relation between man and woman. Didn’t Lady Venus in your dream prove that to you? Woman’s power lies in man’s passion, and she knows how to use it, if man doesn’t understand himself. He has only one choice: to be the _tyrant_ over or the _slave_ of woman. As soon as he gives in, his neck is under the yoke, and the lash will soon fall upon him.” “Strange maxims!” “Not maxims, but experiences,” he replied, nodding his head, “_I have actually felt the lash_. I am cured. Do you care to know how?” He rose, and got a small manuscript from his massive desk, and put it in front of me. “You have already asked about the picture. I have long owed you an explanation. Here—read!” Severin sat down by the chimney with his back toward me, and seemed to dream with open eyes. Silence had fallen again, and again the fire sang in the chimney, and the samovar and the cricket in the old walls. I opened the manuscript and read: CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERSENSUAL MAN. The margin of the manuscript bore as motto a variation of the well-known lines from _Faust_: “Thou supersensual sensual wooer A woman leads you by the nose.” —MEPHISTOPHELES. I turned the title-page and read: “What follows has been compiled from my diary of that period, because it is impossible ever frankly to write of one’s past, but in this way everything retains its fresh colors, the colors of the present.” Gogol, the Russian Molière, says—where? well, somewhere—“the real comic muse is the one under whose laughing mask tears roll down.” A wonderful saying. So I have a very curious feeling as I am writing all this down. The atmosphere seems filled with a stimulating fragrance of flowers, which overcomes me and gives me a headache. The smoke of the fireplace curls and condenses into figures, small gray-bearded kokolds that mockingly point their finger at me. Chubby-cheeked cupids ride on the arms of my chair and on my knees. I have to smile involuntarily, even laugh aloud, as I am writing down my adventures. Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that drips from my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and it throbs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.