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 the full realization of life and the consciousness of his own power.  This was the sudden death of his favorite sister.  He became serious and quiet, and always regarded this grief as a turning-point in his life.

At the Universities of Prague and Graz he studied with such zeal that when only 19 he took his doctor’s degree in law and shortly afterward became a privatdocent for German history at Graz.  Gradually, however, the charms of literature asserted themselves definitely, and he soon abandoned teaching.  He took part, however, in the war of 1866 in Italy, and at the battle of Solferino he was decorated on the field for bravery in action by the Austrian field-marshal.  These incidents, however, had little disturbing influence on Sacher-Masoch’s literary career, and he was gradually acquiring a European reputation by his novels and stories.

A far more seriously disturbing influence had already begun to be exerted on his life by a series of love-episodes.  Some of these were of slight and ephemeral character; some were a source of unalloyed happiness, all the more so if there was an element of extravagance to appeal to his Quixotic nature.  He always longed to give a dramatic and romantic character to his life, his wife says, and he spent some blissful days on an occasion when he ran away to Florence with a Russian princess as her private secretary.  Most often these episodes culminated in deception and misery.  It was after a relationship of this kind from which he could not free himself for four years that he wrote Die Geschiedene Frau, Passionsgeschichte eines Idealisten, putting into it much of his own personal history.  At one time