Xenobia X., a relative of his own on the paternal side, played the chief part, and this scene left an undying impress on his imagination.  The Countess was a beautiful but wanton creature, and the child adored her, impressed alike by her beauty and the costly furs she wore.  She accepted his devotion and little services and would sometimes allow him to assist her in dressing; on one occasion, as he was kneeling before her to put on her ermine slippers, he kissed her feet; she smiled and gave him a kick which filled him with pleasure.  Not long afterward occurred the episode which so profoundly affected his imagination.  He was playing with his sisters at hide-and-seek and had carefully hidden himself behind the dresses on a clothes-rail in the Countess’s bedroom.  At this moment the Countess suddenly entered the house and ascended the stairs, followed by a lover, and the child, who dared not betray his presence, saw the countess sink down on a sofa and begin to caress her lover.  But a few moments later the husband, accompanied by two friends, dashed into the room.  Before, however, he could decide which of the lovers to turn against the Countess had risen and struck him so powerful a blow in the face with her fist that he fell back streaming with blood.  She then seized a whip, drove all three men out of the room, and in the confusion the lover slipped away.  At this moment the clothes-rail fell and the child, the involuntary witness of the scene, was revealed to the Countess, who now fell on him in anger, threw him to the ground, pressed her knee on his shoulder, and struck him unmercifully.  The pain was great, and yet he was conscious of a strange pleasure.  While this castigation was proceeding the Count returned, no longer in a rage, but meek and humble as a slave, and kneeled down before her to beg forgiveness.  As the boy escaped he saw her kick her husband.  The child could not resist the temptation 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