Erzsebet Bathory Quotes

This was the only door she ever opened, the door into herself. And her taciturnity was such that in a mirror, where every woman smiles at her reflection, she struck at herself over and over again, hammering her own effigy at her dumb forge. No flame, no air. Clad in red velvet, adorned in white, in black or pearl, her face heavily made up beneath the large pale forehead. In the heart of her room, encircled by candelabras, nothing but herself; a self always unseizable, and whose many faces she was forever unable to assemble in a single look.

In an ordinary portrait the woman comes forward to meet whoever looks at her, and tells her own story. But here, the real woman lurks a hundred leagues behind the equivocal gaze, entirely closed to herself, a plant rooted yet in the mysterious soil out of which it has come.

There existed between Erzsébet and the external world something like a vacuum, like the padding in a madman’s cell. The eyes of the portrait proclaim it; she wished to seize and couldn’t touch. Then, the wish to be awake but not to be alive, that is what kindles the taste for blood, the blood of others; perhaps this was the hidden secret which, ever since her birth, had been obscured from her.