been written to him, as a joke, by a friend of hers.
Sacher-Masoch insisted on seeing his correspondent before
returning the letters, and with his eager thirst for romantic
adventure he imagined that she was a married woman of the
aristocratic world, probably a Russian countess, whose simple
costume was a disguise. Not anxious to reveal the prosaic facts,
she humored him in his imaginations and a web of mystification
was thus formed. A strong attraction grew up on both sides and,
though for some time Laura Ruemelin maintained the mystery and
held herself aloof from him, a relationship was formed and a
child born. Thereupon, in 1893, they married. Before long,
however, there was disillusion on both sides. She began to detect
the morbid, chimerical, and unpractical aspects of his character,
and he realized that not only was his wife not an aristocrat,
but, what was of more importance to him, she was by no means the
domineering heroine of his dreams. Soon after marriage, in the
course of an innocent romp in which the whole of the small
household took part, he asked his wife to inflict a whipping on
him. She refused, and he thereupon suggested that the servant
should do it; the wife failed to take this idea seriously; but he
had it carried out, with great satisfaction at the severity of
the castigation he received. When, however, his wife explained to
him that, after this incident, it was impossible for the servant
to stay, Sacher-Masoch quite agreed and she was at once
discharged. But he constantly found pleasure in placing his wife
in awkward or compromising circumstances, a pleasure she was too
normal to share. This necessarily led to much domestic
wretchedness. He had persuaded her, against her wish, to whip him
nearly every day, with whips which he devised, having nails
attached to them. He found this a stimulant to his literary work,
and it enabled him to dispense in his novels with his stereotyped
heroine who is always engaged in subjugating men, for, as he
explained to his wife, when he had the reality in his life he was
no longer obsessed by it in his imaginative dreams. Not content
with this, however, he was constantly desirous for his wife to be
unfaithful. He even put an advertisement in a newspaper to the
effect that a young and beautiful woman desired to make the
a