och in her autobiography
(_Meine Lebensbeichte_, 1906; French translation, _Confession de
ma Vie_, 1907). Schlichtegroll's book is written with a somewhat
undue attempt to exalt his hero and to attribute his misfortunes
to his first wife. The autobiography of the latter, however,
enables us to form a more complete picture of Sacher-Masoch's
life, for, while his wife by no means spares herself, she clearly
shows that Sacher-Masoch was the victim of his own abnormal
temperament, and she presents both the sensitive, refined,
exalted, and generous aspects of his nature, and his morbid,
imaginative, vain aspects.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 at Lemberg in Galicia.
He was of Spanish, German, and more especially Slavonic race. The
founder of the family may be said to be a certain Don Matthias
Sacher, a young Spanish nobleman, in the sixteenth century, who
settled in Prague. The novelist's father was director of police
in Lemberg and married Charlotte von Masoch, a Little Russian
lady of noble birth. The novelist, the eldest child of this
union, was not born until after nine years of marriage, and in
infancy was so delicate that he was not expected to survive. He
began to improve, however, when his mother gave him to be suckled
to a robust Russian peasant woman, from whom, as he said later,
he gained not only health, but "his soul"; from her he learned
all the strange and melancholy legends of her people and a love
of the Little Russians which never left him. While still a child
young Sacher-Masoch was in the midst of the bloody scenes of the
revolution which culminated in 1848. When he was 12 the family
migrated to Prague, and the boy, though precocious in his
development, then first learned the German language, of which he
attained so fine a mastery. At a very early age he had found the
atmosphere, and even some of the most characteristic elements, of
the peculiar types which mark his work as a novelist.

It is interesting to trace the germinal elements of those
peculiarities which so strongly affected his imagination on the
sexual side. As a child, he was greatly attracted by
representations of cruelty; he loved to gaze at pictures of
executions, the legends of martyrs were his favorite reading, and
with the onset of puberty he regularly dreamed that he was