he was engaged to a sweet and charming young girl.  Then it was that he met a young woman at Graz, Laura Ruemelin, 27 years of age, engaged as a glove-maker, and living with her mother.  Though of poor parentage, with little or no knowledge of the world, she had great natural ability and intelligence.  Schlichtegroll represents her as spontaneously engaging in a mysterious intrigue with the novelist.  Her own detailed narrative renders the circumstances more intelligible.  She approached Sacher-Masoch by letter, adopting for disguise the name of his heroine Wanda von Dunajev, in order to recover possession of some compromising letters which had 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 acquaintance of an energetic man.  The wife,