cquaintance of an energetic man. The wife, however, though she
wished to please her husband, was not anxious to do so to this
extent. She went to an hotel by appointment to meet a stranger
who had answered this advertisement, but when she had explained
to him the state of affairs he chivalrously conducted her home.
It was some time before Sacher-Masoch eventually succeeded in
rendering his wife unfaithful. He attended to the minutest
details of her toilette on this occasion, and as he bade her
farewell at the door he exclaimed: "How I envy him!" This episode
thoroughly humiliated the wife, and from that moment her love for
her husband turned to hate. A final separation was only a
question of time. Sacher-Masoch formed a relationship with Hulda
Meister, who had come to act as secretary and translator to him,
while his wife became attached to Rosenthal, a clever journalist
later known to readers of the _Figaro_ as "Jacques St.-Cere," who
realized her painful position and felt sympathy and affection for
her. She went to live with him in Paris and, having refused to
divorce her husband, he eventually obtained a divorce from her;
she states, however, that she never at any time had physical
relationships with Rosenthal, who was a man of fragile
organization and health. Sacher-Masoch united himself to Hulda
Meister, who is described by the first wife as a prim and faded
but coquettish old maid, and by the biographer as a highly
accomplished and gentle woman, who cared for him with almost
maternal devotion. No doubt there is truth in both descriptions.
It must be noted that, as Wanda clearly shows, apart from his
abnormal sexual temperament, Sacher-Masoch was kind and
sympathetic, and he was strongly attached to his eldest child.
Eulenburg also quotes the statement of a distinguished Austrian
woman writer acquainted with him that, "apart from his sexual
eccentricities, he was an amiable, simple, and sympathetic man
with a touchingly tender love for his children." He had very few
needs, did not drink or smoke, and though he liked to put the
woman he was attached to in rich furs and fantastically gorgeous
raiment he dressed himself with extreme simplicity. His wife
quotes the saying of another woman that he was as simple as a
child and as naughty as a monkey.

In 1883 Sacher-Masoch a