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 and Hulda Meister settled in Lindheim, a village in Germany near the Taunus, a spot to which the novelist seems to have been attached because in the grounds of his little estate was a haunted and ruined tower associated with a tragic medieval episode.  Here, after many legal delays, Sacher-Masoch was able to render his union with Hulda Meister legitimate; here two children were in due course born, and here the novelist spent the remaining years of his life in comparative peace.  At first, as is usual, treated with suspicion by the peasants, Sacher-Masoch gradually acquired great influence over them; he became a kind of Tolstoy in the rural life around him, the friend and confidant of all the villagers (something