n to return to
the spot; the door was closed and he could see nothing, but he
heard the sound of the whip and the groans of the Count beneath
his wife's blows.

It is unnecessary to insist that in this scene, acting on a
highly sensitive and somewhat peculiar child, we have the key to
the emotional attitude which affected so much of Sacher-Masoch's
work. As his biographer remarks, woman became to him, during a
considerable part of his life, a creature at once to be loved and
hated, a being whose beauty and brutality enabled her to set her
foot at will on the necks of men, and in the heroine of his first
important novel, the _Emissaer_, dealing with the Polish
Revolution, he embodied the contradictory personality of Countess
Xenobia. Even the whip and the fur garments, Sacher-Masoch's
favorite emotional symbols, find their explanation in this early
episode. He was accustomed to say of an attractive woman: "I
should like to see her in furs," and, of an unattractive woman:
"I could not imagine her in furs." His writing-paper at one time
was adorned with the figure of a woman in Russian Boyar costume,
her cloak lined with ermine, and brandishing a scourge. On his
walls he liked to have pictures of women in furs, of the kind of
which there is so magnificent an example by Rubens in the gallery
at Munich. He would even keep a woman's fur cloak on an ottoman
in his study and stroke it from time to time, finding that his
brain thus received the same kind of stimulation as Schiller
found in the odor of rotten apples.[97]

At the age of 13, in the revolution of 1848, young Sacher-Masoch
received his baptism of fire; carried away in the popular
movement, he helped to defend the barricades together with a
young lady, a relative of his family, an amazon with a pistol in
her girdle, such as later he loved to depict. This episode was,
however, but a brief interruption of his education; he pursued
his studies with brilliance, and on the higher side his education
was aided by his father's esthetic tastes. Amateur theatricals
were in special favor at his home, and here even the serious
plays of Goethe and Gogol were performed, thus helping to train
and direct the boy's taste. It is, perhaps, however, significant
that it was a tragic event which, at the age of 16, first brought
to him th