In the lounge of one of the principal Parisian variety halls, I became acquainted with a fine-looking, haughty brunette who at first sight made a deep impression on me.
A born Parisienne, having first seen the light in the outlying district of La Chapelle, she had started life as an apprentice to a manufacturing jeweller, before trying to sell her charms to the highest bidder. Despite her humble beginning, she was one of those heroines Sacher-Masoch loved to depict. It is not indispensible that a woman should come into the world in a sumptuous castle of the so-called blue Danube to posses an ardent and imperious disposition.
This splendid dark woman bearing the prosaic name of Julie, might have been a twin sister to some cruel Wanda, or terrible Sarolta dear to my favorite novelist. Julie's obscure birth and early workshop career did not prevent her carrying herself like a true patrician dame and even in her most tender, yielding moments, her manner was brutally despotic. She was selfish while enjoying carnal conjonction, and full of pride. I was quite stirred by her overbearing moods.
I should never have dared to have approached her on the subject of flogging, if I had not accidentally discovered that she was a fervent expert in this salacious science. Entering her bedroom one day unannounced, I caught her with a long, flexible birch in her hand, and she deftly hid the whipping implement as she saw me. The revelation came upon me like a clap of thunder, and mastering my emotion as best I could, I asked her huskily how it was she had a rod in her possession.
“Does that surprise you, my dear boy?” she replied. “I love to whip men!”
Her words rang in my ears like celestial chimes, and my joy ws so immense that I felt as if I was going to faint.
Without speaking, I lead the young cocotte to the corner where she had hidden her magic wands.
“Oh, I know what you are going to say!” she explained. “It's very funny, but I guessed your feelings the first time you had me. I was awfully astonished when you came to see me often and never unburdened yourself about your sweet mania. You're in luck's way to-day, for you've no idea how excited I am! Only handling that bunch of twigs that I've got ready for one of my gentleman friends who ought to have been here an hour ago, has made me feel as wicked and barbarous as possible! Come, darling, let that rod of mine writhe like a living thing on your stout bottom! Make haste, I entreat you!”
Never waiting for my reply, she began tearing my clothes off my back. When I stood naked before her, she slipped out of her dressing-gown, the only garment veiling the secrets of her delicious body, and like a madwoman, the fascinating flogging harlot threw herself upon me, pinching my flesh with both hands, and making her teeth almost meet in the nipples of my breast and the muscles of my arms.
Clutching the rod with her right hand, she enlaced me with her legs and her left arm, squeezing me in a vice-like grip, in such a way as to present my plump young bum most advantageously to the approach of her blows which she rained down furiously.
Flooded by the fiery waves of her frenzied birching cuts; electrified by the close contact of her firm flesh, I writhed and twisted in an infinite lewd spasm of wild enjoyment. Her frame followed the movements of mine, as she still held me clasped to her, unceasingly applying with sure hand and great skill a series of stinging cuts causing atrocious pain. The elastic birch rebounded like a metal spring, and its hissing ends always touched upon the same sensitive spots just at the lower part of my bottom, at the top of my thighs. My twin hinder cheeks quivered and trembled at the incandescent kisses of the supple instrument of torturing passion.
Making a desperate effort to escape from the fatal embrace, and avoid the awful stinging stripes, I fell, turning right over, dragging my implacable dominating mistress with me.
With one bound, she sprang to her feet, and throwing her whole weight-that of a tall, fine woman-upon me, she bent one knee on the nape of my neck, seizing my arm in her nervous hand. She had thus found a posture that suited her; where she had full command over my backside, and so she kept on striking at it, never stopping.
“I must flog you! I must! I must!” she cried, and her words burnt into my brain, as she accompanied her exclamation with formidable blows.
A prisoner under her precious, but inexorable yoke, I felt the full force of her descending blows, as I shuddered all over. I yelled with the pain of her attack, but she occupied an inexpugnable position and profited by it to keep on birching me, covering my bruised buttocks with a never-ending shower of fearful strokes.
She only stopped when the rod failed her. Half its branches were broken, and littered every part of her room. Throwing away the remains of her birch, Julie fell upon me like a wild beast, shaking me and biting me, until at last she forced upon my eager, willing mouth the dewy rosebud of her sex which opened itself and palpitated beneath my moist kiss and titillating tongue.
The furious copulation that followed transported us in heavenly ecstasy, taking our senses away in a reciprocal swoon of delight. I left her dwelling, with a staggering walk resembling that of a drunkard, my backside afire from the bristling twigs, and my flesh tingling from the insensate joy of our delirious bout of love.
I had discovered the divinity I longed for. She showered upon me the sweet warm rain of voluptuous sensual enjoyment. Many a time and oft did I howl and rave under the adorable pain of Julie's bewitching birch.
Thus it was that my lecherous love for voluptuous flagellation took a thoroughly defined shape in my mind, and possessed me for ever. As time went on, I found out other clever torturing beauties, among courtesans as well as in the ranks of the most aristocratic ladies of high standing in Parisian society.
Among the latter, the most striking was a young girl of seventeen who did not look more than thirteen, so slight and gracile was she-fair, fresh, and delicate, with a child's voice and a baby's face.
One of our most famous procuresses, Madame Suzanne de Dreux, told me that she knew a real female phenomenon, a tit-bit for an amateur. The meeting and the bout took place in a sumptuously furnished flat, rue de la Victoire, where there was a room specially arranged, fitted up with every kind of apparatus pertaining to the practice of flagellation in all its branches.
I was surprised to see a little slip of a girl enter the whipping chamber. I felt inclined to propose a game of marbles, when, in curt tones, she put a stop to my attempts at joking.
With the utmost deftness, she tied me across a bench, and when I was powerless, birched me with extraordinary cleverness. She was as much a mistress of her rod as a violin-player is master of his bow, and led me up and down the gamut of voluptuous pain, the torturing path leading to heaven through hellish purgatory, transporting me finally into a luminous paradise of lubricity where I felt myself dying with ineffable bliss. The inspired goddess, who had brought about my spermatic delirium, wirithe on the ground in a vibrating paroxysm of indescribable meretricious voluptuousness, her secret sluices replying in solitude to the gush of my wellspring of manhood.
As we were both exhausted, I called for champagne, and the wonderful wee lassie consented to confide to me how her passionate love of whipping had been born in her.
In babyish accents, but with the malicious wit of a precocious girlie, she told me that her brother, two years her senior, had contracted a desire to be birched after having studied at a college where the master, a decrepit clergyman, allowed his young and robust betterhalf to whip the boarders.
When the youthful collegian returned to Paris, he visited prostitutes to satisfy his yearnings which had become a pressing need, but his mother and father kept him from gadding about and he was obliged to flog himself on the sly.
His sister caught him birching his own bottom one day, and the young lover of the rod revealed the hidden secret of his lust to her, leading her to follow him into the birching vortex. Compassionate and full of tender pity, she determined that her brother should not be deprived any longer and offered her services immediately. He accepted eagerly, and happiness reigned in both their hearts ever since. At first, it was in the parental dwelling that they indulged in their favourite sport, the fear of detection proving an additional charm.