among aristocratic circles.  Thus in the medieval Lai de Graelent of Marie de France this Breton knight is represented as very chaste, possessing a high ideal of love and able to withstand the wiles of women.  One day when he is hunting in a forest he comes upon a naked damsel bathing, together with her handmaidens.  Overcome by her beauty, he seizes her clothes in case she should be alarmed, but is persuaded to hand them to her; then he proceeds to make love to her.  She replies that his love is an insult to a woman of her high lineage.  Finding her so proud, Graelent sees that his prayers are in vain.  He drags her by force into the depth of the forest, has his will of her, and begs her very gently not to be angry, promising to love her loyally and never to leave her.  The damsel saw that he was a good knight, courteous, and wise.  She thought within herself that if she were to leave him she would never find a better friend.

Brantome mentions a lady who confessed that she liked to be “half-forced” by her husband, and he remarks that a woman who is “a little difficult and resists” gives more pleasure also to her lover than one who yields at once, just as a hard-fought battle is a more notable triumph than an easily won victory. (Brantome, Vie des Dames Galantes, discours i.) Restif de la Bretonne, again, whose experience was extensive, wrote in his Anti-Justine that “all women of strong temperament like a sort of brutality in sexual intercourse and its accessories.”

Ovid had said that a little force is pleasing to a woman, and that she is grateful to the ravisher against whom she struggles (Ars Amatoria, lib. i).  One of Janet’s patients (Raymond and Janet, Les Obsessions et la Psychasthenie, vol. ii, p. 406) complained that her husband was too good, too devoted.  “He does not know how to make me suffer a little.  One cannot love anyone who does not make one suffer a little.”  Another hysterical woman (a silk fetichist, frigid with men) had dreams of men and animals abusing her:  “I cried with pain and was happy at the same time.”  (Clerambault, Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, June, 1908, p. 442.)

It has been said that among Slavs of the lower class the wives feel hurt if they are not beaten by their husbands.  Paullinus, in the seventeenth century, remarked that Russian women are never more pleased and happy than when beaten by their husbands, and regard such treatment as proof of love. (See, e.g., C.F. von Schlichtegroll, Sacher-Masoch und der Masochismus, p. 69.) Krafft-Ebing believes that this is true at the present day, and adds that it is the same in Hungary, a Hungarian official having informed him that the peasant women of the Somogyer Comitate do not think they are loved by their husbands until they have received the first box on the ear. (Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, English translation