doubt,” he remarks, “because, being frail and weak myself, it seemed to me that it would be easier to subdue her.”  “This taste for the beauty of the feet,” he continues, “was so powerful in me that it unfailingly aroused desire and would have made me overlook ugliness.  It is excessive in all those who have it.”  He admired the foot as well as the shoe:  “The factitious taste for the shoe is only a reflection of that for pretty feet.  When I entered a house and saw the boots arranged in a row, as is the custom, I would tremble with pleasure; I blushed and lowered my eyes as if in the presence of the girls themselves.  With this vivacity of feeling and a voluptuousness of ideas inconceivable at the age of 10 I still fled, with an involuntary impulse of modesty, from the girls I adored.”

We may clearly see how this combination of sensitive and precocious sexual ardor with extreme shyness, furnished the soil on which the germ of shoe-fetichism was able to gain a firm root and persist in some degree throughout a long life very largely given up to a pursuit of women, abnormal rather by its excessiveness than its perversity.  A few years later, he tells us, he happened to see a pretty pair of shoes in a bootmaker’s shop, and on hearing that they belonged to a girl whom at that time he reverently adored at a distance he blushed and nearly fainted.

In 1749 he was for a time attracted to a young woman very much older than himself; he secretly carried away one of her slippers and kept it for a day; a little later he again took away a shoe of the same woman which had fascinated him when on her foot, and, he seems to imply, he used it to masturbate with.

Perhaps the chief passion of Restif’s life was his love for Colette Parangon.  He was still a boy (1752), she was the young and virtuous wife of the printer whose apprentice Restif was and in whose house he lived.  Madame Parangon, a charming woman, as she is described, was not happily married, and she evidently felt a tender affection for the boy whose excessive love and reverence for her were not always successfully concealed.  “Madonna Parangon,” he tells us, “possessed a charm which I could never resist, a pretty little foot; it is a charm which arouses more than tenderness.  Her shoes, made in Paris, had that voluptuous elegance which seems to communicate soul and life.  Sometimes Colette wore shoes of simple white drugget or with silver flowers; sometimes rose-colored slippers with green heels, or green with rose heels; her supple feet, far from deforming her shoes, increased their grace and rendered the form more exciting.”  One day, on entering the house, he saw Madame Parangon elegantly dressed and wearing rose-colored shoes with tongues, and with green heels and a pretty rosette.  They were new and she took them off to put on green slippers with rose heels and borders which he thought equally exciting.  As soon as she had left the room, he continues, “carried