The White Maiden

by Hanns Heinz Ewers
translated by Erich Posselt and Sinclair Dombrow

A mi me gusta el blanco!
Viva el blanco, muera el negro!
Porque el negro es muy triste
Yo soy alegre!
Yo no lo quiero!

Andalusian copla.[01]

DONALD MCLEAN was waiting for him in the cafe. When Lothar entered, he cried:

“At last! I thought you would never come.”

Lothar sat down, aimlessly stirring the lemonade the girl brought him. “What is it?” he asked.

McLean leaned slightly forward.

“It should interest you,” he said. “You are studying the transformations of Aphrodite, are you not? Well, there may be a chance of your seeing the foam-born goddess in a new guise.”[02]

Lothar yawned.

“Ah! Really?”

“Really!” said McLean.

“Just a moment, please,” Lothar proceeded. “Venus is Proteus' true daughter, but I flatter myself I know all her disguises. For more than a year I was in Bombay with Klaus Petersen…”[03]

“Well?” asked the Scotchman.

“Well? Obviously you don't know Klaus Petersen? Herr Klaus from Hamburg is a talented man; perhaps a genius! The Marechal Gilles de Rais was a charlatan compared to him!”[04]

Donald McLean shrugged his shoulders.

“That isn't the only art!”

“Certainly not! But, just wait. Oscar Wilde was a good friend of mine, as you know, and I knew Inez Seckel for many years. Each one of these names ought to give you a wealth of sensations!”[05]

“Not all of them,” the painter remarked.

“Not all of them?” Lothar drummed on the table. “But the best, no doubt! In short: I know the Venus who changes into Eros; I know her when she clothes herself in furs and swings the scourge. I know Venus as a Sphinx, thrusting her blood-thirsty claws into the flesh of children. I know Venus when she wallows lustfully in decay. And I know the black love-goddess who, at Satan's masses, squirts the priest's revolting sacrifice over the body of a virgin. Laurette Dumont took me into her private zoo.[06]

I know what few others know; the rare delights that Sodom offers! More than that. In Geneva I fathomed Lady Kathlin McMurdoch's secret, of which no other living person was aware! I know the vilest Venus—or shall I say the purest?—the one which weds man to the flower. Do you still believe that Venus could choose a mask unknown to me?”

McLean slowly sipped his strega.

“I promise you nothing,” he said. “I only know that the Duke Ettore Aldobrandini has been in Naples again these last three days. I met him yesterday on the Toledo.”[07]

“I should be glad to meet him,” Lothar replied. “I have heard of him often enough. He is said to be one of the few men who knows how to make of his life a work of art,—and has the means to do it.”

“I don't believe they have exaggerated,” the Scotch painter continued. “You can convince yourself; the day after tomorrow the Duke is giving a reception at which I shall be glad to introduce you.”

“Thank you,” Lothar replied.

The Scotchman laughed.

“Aldobrandini was in excellent spirits when I met him. Besides, the extraordinary hour for which he invited me—five o'clock in the afternoon— indicates that something unusual is in the air! For this reason I believe that the Duke has a special surprise for his friends; if this be the case, you may rest assured that we shall see something unheard of. The Duke never follows the trodden path.”

“Let's hope that you are right!” Lothar sighed. “In that case, I shall have the pleasure of calling for you at your home the day after tomorrow?”

* * *

LARGO SAN DOMENICO!” McLean instructed the driver. “Palazzo Corigliano!”[08]

The two men mounted the broad baroque stairway; an English butler led them into the salon. They found seven or eight gentlemen, all in full dress; the only exception was a priest in a violet soutane.

McLean introduced his friend to the Duke, who shook hands with him. “Thank you for coming,” he said with a charming smile. “I hope you won't be entirely disappointed.” He bowed and, in a somewhat louder voice, addressed all those present.

“Gentlemen!” he said. “I beg your indulgence for having disturbed you at such an unusual hour. But it is a case of necessity; unfortunately, the little doe that I shall have the honor of presenting to you today comes from a very good, respectable family. She can come to me only under great difficulties, and must positively be home by half past six, so that her father and mother and the English governess will not notice her absence.

These, gentlemen, are things which a cavalier has to reckon with! And now I shall ask you to excuse me for a few minutes, as I still have a few preparations to make. In the meantime I hope you will partake of a little refreshment.”

The Duke motioned to his servant, bowed again and left the room.

A gentleman with huge Victor-Emanuele mustachios approached Lothar. It was di Nardis, the political editor of the Pungolo, who wrote under the pseudonym “Fuoco.”[09]

“I wager we shall witness an Arabian joke,” he laughed. “The Duke has just returned from Bagdad.”

The priest shook his head.

“No, Don Goffredo,” he said, “we shall see a piece of Italian Renaissance. For the last half year the Duke has been studying Valdomini's secret history of the Borgias, loaned to him after long entreaties by the director of the royal archives in Severino e Sosio.”[10]

“Well, we shall see,” answered McLean. “Will you give me, meanwhile, the racing tips, which you promised me?”

The editor drew out a notebook and entered into a long conversation on the turf with the Scottish painter and the priest. Lothar slowly sipped orange ice from a crystal plate. He studied the pretty golden spoon which bore the arms of the Aldobrandinis; a ragged cross-beam surrounded by six stars. After half an hour a servant drew back the curtains. “The Duke prays you to follow me,” he announced.

He led the guests through two small rooms, then he opened a double door, had them all pass through it, and quickly shut it behind them. They found themselves in a spacious, extremely long hall, sparingly lighted. The floor was covered with a wine-red rug, and the doors and windows were hung with heavy curtains of the same hue, in which the ceiling, too, was painted.

The walls, absolutely bare, were also overlaid with wine-red cloth; and the same material covered the few armchairs, sofas and lounges which stood around the room. The far end of the room was in complete darkness; it was barely possible to distinguish a grand piano decorated with red damask.

“Please be seated, gentlemen,” cried the Duke. He himself took a chair and the others followed suit. Quickly the servants moved from one wall-bracket to the other, extinguishing the few burning candles.

When the room was in utter darkness, a soft chord from the piano became audible. Softly, a sequence of moving cadences floated through the hall. “Palestrina,” the priest murmured under his breath. “You see that you were wrong with your Arabian idea, Don Goffredo.”[11]

“Well,” the editor answered in the same tone, “was yours a happier guess when you thought of Cesare Borgia?”

They recognized, incidentally, that the piano was an old spinet. The simple chords awoke a strange sensation in Lothar, but he was unable to determine exactly what it was. At any rate, it was something he had not felt for a long, long time.

Di Nardis leaned toward him so closely that his mustachio tickled Lothar's cheek.

“I have it!” he whispered. “I did not know that I could still be so ingenious.”

Lothar felt that he was right.

After a while the quiet servant lit two candles. A pale, almost uncanny sheen fell upon the hall.

The music played on.

“And yet,” Lothar whispered to his neighbor, “there is a curious cruelty in these tones. I might say, an innocent cruelty.”

Again the quiet servant lit a few candles. Lothar stared into the red glow which filled the entire room like a mist.

The blood-color almost stifled him. His soul clung to the tones which awoke in him the sensation of a faint shimmering white. But the red obtruded itself, gained the upper hand: always new candles were lit by the quiet servant.

“This is unbearable,” Lothar heard the editor hiss through his teeth.

Now the hall was half lit. The red seemed to cover everything with a stifling pall, and the white of the innocent music became ever fainter—fainter— Then, from behind the spinet, emerged a figure; a young girl wrapped in a great white shroud. Slowly she walked to the middle of the hall, a shining white cloud in the red glow.

There the maiden stopped. She spread her arms so that the shroud fell to the floor. Like silent swans the cloth kissed her feet, but the white of her body shone more brightly still.

Lothar leaned back and involuntarily raised his hands to his eyes.

“It almost blinds you,” he breathed.

She was a young, adolescent girl, with the charming unripeness of a bud—a sovereign innocence that needed no protection; and, at the same time, sure promise that called forth a boundless wish for fulfillment. Her blue-black hair, parted in the middle, waved over temples and ears, and was caught in a heavy knot at the back. The big black eyes looked straight at the men, indifferently, without seeing anyone. They seemed to smile like her lips: a strange, unconscious smile of crudest innocence.

And the gleaming white flesh shone so brightly that all the red about her appeared to recede. The music seemed to throb with exultation.

Only now did Lothar notice that the girl carried a snow-white Jove on her hand. She bent her head slightly and raised her arm, and the white dove stretched its little head.

And the pigeon kissed the white maiden. She caressed it, stroked its head, and pressed the bird gently to her bosom. The white dove lifted its wings a little and cuddled close, closer to the gleaming flesh.

“Blessed dove!” whispered the priest.[12]

And then, with a sudden, quick motion, the white maiden lifted the pigeon with both hands high up over her head. She leaned far back and, with a strong jerk, tore the dove in two. The red blood trickled down without spattering her face, flowing down in long streams over shoulders and breast, over the gleaming body of the white maiden.

All around the red mist closed in again; it was as if the white maiden were drowning in a bath of blood. Trembling, anguished, she cowered down. And from all sides the lustful glow crept near; the floor opened like a maw of fire; the frightful red engulfed the white maiden.

The next instant the trap door had closed again. The silent servant tore back the curtains and quickly led the guests back to the reception room.

No one seemed to want to say a word. Silently they took their coats and went downstairs. The Duke had disappeared.

* * *

“GENTLEMEN!” said the editor of the Pungolo to Lothar and the Scottish painter, when they reached the street. “Will you dine with me on Bertolini's terrace?”

They drove together to the terrace. Silently they drank their champagne; silently they stared down on cruelly beautiful Naples bathed by the last rays of the evening sun in a luminous glow. The editor took out his notebook and jotted down a few figures. “Eighteen—blood, four—dove, twenty-one—maiden,” he said. “A fine terno, I shall try it in the lottery.”[13]

Footnotes

Researched and edited with the assistance of AI. I have fact-checked the additional material, but AI is prone to mistakes and hallucinations. Nothing in the footnotes section should be used as a source for a research project.

1. The epigraph is Spanish: “I like white! / Long live white, let black die! / Because black is very sad; / I am cheerful! / I do not want it!” A copla is a short traditional song or verse form, particularly associated with Spanish popular song. Ewers uses the opposition between white and black as a symbolic key to the story; the apparently cheerful verse becomes ominous when the story turns that color symbolism into an encounter with blood and violence. The attribution to an “Andalusian copla” should be treated as a literary attribution unless a specific traditional source is identified.

   Real Academia EspaÑola, Diccionario de la lengua espaÑola, “copla”; Ewers, The White Maiden.

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2. “Foam-born” refers to the Greek Aphrodíte, identified in Hesiod's Theogony as arising from the sea foam produced after Cronus cast the severed genitals of Uranus into the sea. The phrase is therefore more than a conventional poetic epithet: Ewers is announcing a transformation of the goddess whose traditional birth already combines erotic beauty, violence, blood, and dismemberment. The story's later imagery deliberately reverses the traditional association of Aphrodite with beauty and desire by making innocence itself the vehicle of cruelty.

   Hesiod, Theogony, 176–206; William Smith, ed., Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, “Aphrodite.”

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3. Lothar's claim that “Venus is Proteus' true daughter” is mythologically incorrect. Proteus is the shape-changing “Old Man of the Sea,” whereas Aphrodite/Venus has several competing genealogies, including Hesiod's foam-born origin and Homer's identification of Aphrodite as the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Ewers is evidently exploiting the association between Venus and transformation rather than giving a conventional genealogy; Proteus's ability to change shape makes him a fitting, if invented, father for Lothar's catalogue of metamorphic Venuses.

   Hesiod, Theogony, 176–206; Homer, Iliad, 5.370–417; Homer, Odyssey, 4.384–570.

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4. Gilles de Rais (c. 1405–1440), French nobleman and military commander associated with Joan of Arc, was executed after a trial involving accusations of the murder and abuse of children as well as alleged sorcery. His historical case became the basis for later legends portraying him as a monstrous sadist and occultist, often with considerably less historical caution than modern scholarship recommends. Lothar's comparison therefore invokes one of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' most notorious figures of aristocratic sexual violence. Ewers also references Gilles de Rais in Vampire" Chapter VIII: Hyacinths.

   Georges Bataille, The Trial of Gilles de Rais; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Gilles de Rais.”

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5. Oscar Wilde is an especially revealing name in Lothar's catalogue of erotic and aesthetic experience. Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray combines aestheticism, decadence, Gothic horror, concealed corruption, and the transformation of beauty into a record of moral destruction; those themes closely parallel Ewers's fascination with beauty that becomes terrifying when its surface is penetrated. The reference also links this story to the larger European decadent tradition in which art, eroticism, artificiality, and cruelty become deliberately intertwined.

   Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890); Morgan Library & Museum, “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”

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6. The sequence of “Venuses” deliberately evokes the literature of decadent eroticism. Most conspicuously, “she clothes herself in furs and swings the scourge” recalls Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs (1870), whose heroine Wanda dominates and humiliates the narrator's alter ego, Severin. Ewers's catalogue also moves through the Gothic, the grotesque, sadomasochistic eroticism, Satanic ritual, and sexualized death, anticipating the French tradition of the conte cruel—the “cruel tale” associated particularly with Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Contes cruels (1883) and with Poe's earlier tales of aestheticized horror.

   Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs (1870); Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Contes cruels (1883); Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).

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7. The Aldobrandini were a real and prominent Italian noble family, originally from Florence and particularly important in Rome after Ippolito Aldobrandini became Pope Clement VIII in 1592. The story's Duke Ettore Aldobrandini, however, is a fictional character; the use of a genuine aristocratic surname gives Ewers's invented decadent milieu an additional appearance of historical authenticity. The phrase “make of his life a work of art” also directly expresses the decadent ideal of turning existence itself into an aesthetic creation.

   Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Clement VIII”; Aldobrandini family historical records; Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation.

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8. Largo San Domenico and the Palazzo Corigliano place the reception in the historic center of Naples, beside the church and piazza of San Domenico Maggiore. Palazzo Corigliano is a genuine historic palace that later became associated with the University of Naples “L'Orientale.” Ewers's use of the actual Neapolitan setting, combined with a fictional aristocratic host and secret chamber, is characteristic of the story's blending of documentary place names with Gothic invention.

   Università degli Studi di Napoli “L'Orientale,” historical documentation on Palazzo Corigliano; Palazzo Corigliano tra archeologia e storia (Naples, 1985).

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9. Il Pungolo was not an invented newspaper: the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli preserves issues of this Neapolitan political evening newspaper, whose publication began in 1860 and continued into the nineteenth century. The story's di Nardis and his pseudonym “Fuoco,” however, are presented as fictional characters unless independent evidence establishes otherwise. This is another instance in which Ewers anchors fantasy in recognizable contemporary institutions.

   Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Il Pungolo: giornale politico popolare della sera.

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10. The Borgias were the powerful Italian-Spanish family whose members included Pope Alexander VI and Cesare Borgia, and whose reputation became heavily embellished by later historians, novelists, and popular culture. The supposed “secret history” by Valdomini and the reference to a director of the royal archives at “Severino e Sosio” appear to be part of Ewers's fictional apparatus rather than identifiable historical sources. The passage deliberately exploits the late nineteenth-century fascination with secret archives, forbidden histories, and the supposedly hidden crimes of Renaissance rulers.

    Christopher Hibbert, The Borgias and Their Enemies; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Borgia Family.”

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11. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594) was the leading representative of the Roman school of Renaissance polyphony and one of the most important composers of sacred music in sixteenth-century Italy. His music was subsequently associated with ideals of clarity, spiritual purity, and Catholic sacred polyphony, making his name particularly appropriate for Ewers's contrast between “innocent” white music and the increasingly oppressive red illumination. The priest's comment also sets “Italian Renaissance” against the earlier joke about Baghdad, emphasizing the story's deliberately theatrical alternation between exoticism and European historical memory.

    Lewis Lockwood, Music in Renaissance Ferrara; Grove Music Online, “Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da.”

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12. The dove has genuine associations with Aphrodite/Venus in ancient Mediterranean art and literature, although it was not exclusively her symbol. In the story the white dove therefore reinforces the connection already announced at the beginning: the maiden is staged as a transformed, distorted Venus figure. The subsequent killing of the dove violently reverses the conventional symbolism of beauty, love, peace, and purity, turning the goddess's traditional companion into an object of sacrifice.

    Walter Burkert, Greek Religion; John Scheid, An Introduction to Roman Religion; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Aphrodite.”

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13. Terno means a three-number combination in the Italian lottery. The editor's conversion of the horrifying spectacle into three lottery numbers—18 for blood, 4 for the dove, and 21 for the maiden—is the story's final grotesque joke: the sublime, erotic, and violent tableau is reduced to gambling. This ending is characteristic of the conte cruel, in which a carefully constructed atmosphere of terror or aesthetic intensity is punctured by a final act of cruelty, irony, or absurdity.

    Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Contes cruels (1883); Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Nouveaux contes cruels; Italian lottery terminology and historical documentation.

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Bibliography and Further Reading

Researched and edited with the assistance of AI. I have not personally referenced a majority of the books or articles listed below.

The following sources provide historical, mythological, religious, literary, and cultural context for the annotations above. Modern scholarship is preferred where the story's nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century assumptions differ from current scholarship.

• Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Harvard University Press, 1985.
• Craveri, Benedetta. The Age of Conversation. New York Review Books, 2005.
• Hesiod. Theogony. Translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press.
• Hibbert, Christopher. The Borgias and Their Enemies: 1431–1519. Harcourt, 2008.
• Homer. The Iliad. Especially Book 5, concerning Aphrodite.
• Homer. The Odyssey. Especially Book 4, concerning Proteus.
• Lockwood, Lewis. Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400–1505. Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Pierluigi da Palestrina, Giovanni. Selected sacred works and historical documentation in Grove Music Online.
• Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von. Venus in Furs. 1870.
• Scheid, John. An Introduction to Roman Religion. Indiana University Press, 2003.
• Smith, William, ed. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. 1844–1849. Entry: “Aphrodite.”
• Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Auguste. Contes cruels. 1883.
• Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Auguste. Nouveaux contes cruels. 1888.
• Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. First published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, 1890; revised book edition, 1891.
• Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. Il Pungolo: giornale politico popolare della sera, historical newspaper collection.
• Palazzo Corigliano tra archeologia e storia. Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1985.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica. Entries consulted include “Aphrodite,” “Borgia Family,” “Gilles de Rais,” “Palestrina,” and related historical subjects.