Women

At night Signor Mussolini lies between silken sheets in a huge, carved bed at the Villa Torlonia. A massive prie dieu stands at his bedside. A domed and gilded ceiling canopies above. From the sumptuous milieu he rose up refreshed one morning last week and spoke biting words to French feminist Vahdah Jeanne Bordeaux, who interviewed him after breakfast on the topic "Women."

Benito Dixit: "Women are trusting, confiding little animals. When a man tells a woman that he loves her, she makes it a point to believe him, no matter how many times she may already have been deceived. She believes him because she is an idealist, and being loved is an ideal condition. She believes him because she is romantic, and the state or condition of loving and being loved is a romantic one. Oh, when it is a question of imagination, women are far superior to men.

"Women cannot create. In all of the arts, from the beginning of time, women have done delicious small things, but when they have attempted grandeur they have failed ignominiously. . . . For example, what woman has ever created a great painting?

"Women are to man what men desire them to be--woman is to me an agreeable parenthesis in my busy life; they never have been more, nor can they ever be less. Today, I have no time to punctuate my life with other than work, but in the past, now the long ago past, when I was free to pick and choose my style of writing, I often found the parenthesis a pleasant way to punctuate.

"Flirtations should be indulged in as frequently as possible up to the age of 40, then a man should settle down to more staple amusements, such as work.

"What more agreeable than the enthusiasm a woman knows how to awaken in a man? What more charming, thrilling than the first kiss; what brings a more profound sigh of relief than the last?

"The power behind the throne? No, woman is not that. No great man has ever been inspired to greatness by a woman's unseen power. . . .

"Men are inspired by ambition or conviction; their desires to accomplish something in the world are purely selfish. If you could look into the soul of every man you meet in the course of a day, no vision of a woman would be enshrined there. No woman ever penetrates to the soul of a man, despite all things said to the contrary. . . . Left in their proper relation to man women are all that is delicious, adorable, sensuous. They are, in a large sense, necessary to our physical wellbeing. . . .

"What do I think of marriage? That it is a necessary institution, a contract to be entered into between a man and a woman for the good of the State, and for that reason it should never be dissolved, so long as they both live."

That almost ecstatic hymn of praise, the authorized biography of Benito Mussolini (TIME, Feb. 8), was written by Margherita G. Sarfatti, a woman described by famed portraitist Oscar Cesare as follows: "Her auburn hair, blue eyes, and rather classical features make her attractive. She is prominent at home and well-known abroad as a critic on art and literature. It is not a disguised fact that she enjoys the confidence of II Duce. She is the editor of his magazine II Gerachi." She concludes her life of Mussolini thus: "The scene, Signor Presidente, is dominated by your figure. The landscape is lit up by the steadily rising sun of your aims and hopes--by your love for Italy. . . . "So be it!"

Throughout her bulky volume of 347 pages she does not mention that her hero ever married, never refers to his children, alludes glowingly to several of his youthful conquests.