Story of O
by Pauline Reage


"Keep me rather in this cage and feed me sparingly, if you dare. Anything 
that brings me closer to illness and the edge of death makes me more 
faithful. It is only when you make me suffer that I feel safe and secure. 
You should never have agreed to be a god for me if you were afraid to assume 
the duties of a god and we all know that they are not as tender as all that. 
You have already seen me cry. Now you must learn to relish my tears." 

"That Pauline Reage is a more dangerous writer than the Marquis de Sade 
follows from the fact that art is more persuasive than propaganda ... Aiming 
only to reveal, to clarify, to make real to the reader those dark and 
repulsive practices and emotions that his better self rejects as improbable 
or evil, Pauline Reage succeeds in drawing us irresistibly into her perverse 
world through the magnetism of her own selfless absorption in it Like some 
exquisitely balanced, gently undulating instrument, she carefully inscribes 
the cruel shocks inflicted on her heroine's refined sensibility-and we 
believe." 

-New York Times Book Review 

"An ironic fable of unfreedom, a mystic document that transcends the 
pornographic and even the erotic ... (it) is so horrifying, outraging 
cherished beliefs in the sanctity of the body and in personal freedom ... To 
give the body, to allow it to be ravaged, exploited and totally possessed, 
can be an act of consequence ... " 

-Newsweek 

 Translated from the French by Sabine d'Estree
 Preface by Jean Paulhan of the Academie Francaise
 A Note on Story of O by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues


 Originally published in Paris, France.
 Chez Jean-Jacques Pauvert in 1954, as Histoire d'O,
 by Jean-Jacques Pauvert 

 "A Note on Story of O" was published in Le Belvedere, Paris, France, 
Bernard Grasset Editeur 1958 


Contents 

Translator's Note
A Note on Story of O
Preface: Happiness in Slavery
I The Lovers of Roissy
II Sir Stephen
III Anne-Marie and tie Rings
IV The Owl
The Second Ending
Translator's Note 


In July of 1954, one of the most curious-and mysterious-novels of recent 
times appeared under the imprint of a young French publisher, Jean-Jacques 
Pauvert: Histoire d'O (Story of O). Its author was Pauline Reage, a name 
completely unknown in French literary circles, where everyone knows 
everyone. The work was greeted with considerable respect by the critics, who 
none the less clearly did not know what to make of this latter-day, female 
Sade. Part of their circumspection no doubt derived from the fact that Jean 
Paulhan, himself a leading writer, critic, editor and now member of the 
august Academie Francaise,(1) wrote a Preface to the book in the form of an 
essay entitled "Happiness in Slavery," which, however sympathetic, hardly 
helped to clarify any of the mystery surrounding the work. 

During the winter following its publication, Story of O became the talk of 
the French salons and cafes. Even in Paris, where scandal is slow to ignite, 
there was an element of shock in these exchanges-that such a book, such a 
total anachronism, could appear, full-blown, in the mid-twentieth century. 
But the real interest centered around the mystery: who was Pauline Reage? 
Until her identity was bared, people found it difficult to assume a 
reasonable stance vis-a-vis the work: if Pauline Reage was the pseudonym of 
some eminent writer, they would feel compelled to react one way; if she were 
a complete unknown, another; and if indeed she were a literary hack merely 
seeking notoriety, then still another. 

The mystery entered a new phase when, in February, 1955, the book was 
awarded the Prix des Deux Magots-a prize established for and generally 
awarded to new works of an unconventional nature, which counted highly 
respected novelists Raymond Queneau and Antoine Blondin among its laureates. 
At this point, the newspapers seized on the book-and the mystery-and 
headlines blared the news to the general public. Inevitably, the sanctity of 
the general public being menaced, the police moved in. Although there was 
never any official notification that an investigation was under way, 
numerous personalities, including Messrs. Paulhan and Pauvert, were 
interrogated. But suddenly, as unofficially as it had begun, the 
investigation ceased. It is said that the desist order was sent down by a 
high government official, but this remains unsubstantiated. In any event, 
there have never been any further censorship problems. 

To this day, no one knows who Pauline Reage is. In his Preface, Paulhan 
speculates that the author is a woman, citing as evidence not only the 
uncommon attention to details of dress and make-up, but that telling scene 
in which O, abandoned by her lover, Rene, to the torments and tortures of 
his Roissy colleagues, still has the (feminine) presence of mind to notice 
that Rent's slippers are worn and frayed and to note in her mind that she 
must buy him another pair. 

I have never met Pauline Reage, although, through questions of the 
translation, I have been in indirect communication (via the French 
publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert) and received the author's comments. I trust 
I am not betraying a confidence, or appearing immodest, when I say that the 
author has gone out of her way to say how pleased she is with those portions 
of the translation she has read. I long puzzled over this unusual display of 
literary generosity on the part of an author concerning a translator and 
only recently did I discover, or suspect I had discovered, the reason for 
it. There exists an earlier translation of O, made in Paris several years 
ago. I trust I shall not be accused of a corresponding lack of generosity if 
I say (and I am not the first and far from the only one, to say it) that 
this earlier version is less a translation than an adaptation. It reads 
somehow as though the adapter-translator were in fact embarrassed by the 
work: certain parts are glossed over; whole descriptions, nonexistent in the 
original, are written in; and indeed, much of the book is paraphrased rather 
than translated directly. As one who had read the work in French when it 
first appeared and admired not only its contents but the extreme felicity of 
the style, what troubled me most about the earlier English version was its 
seeming disdain for this obvious style. Subsequently, I learned this 
translator was a man and it seemed to me that this fact alone sufficed to 
explain both the embarrassment-male embarrassment-manifest in his version 
and also why Pauline Reage had gone out of her way to comment favorably on 
mine: Story of O, written by a woman, demands a woman translator, one who 
will humble herself before the work and be satisfied simply to render it, as 
faithfully as possible, without interpretation or unwanted elaboration. 
Faced with a work such as O, male pride, male superiority-however liberal 
the male, however much he may try to suppress them-will, I am certain, 
somehow intrude. Like O, therefore, I have tried to humble myself, to remain 
as faithful as possible (although, if the reader will forgive, I have 
attempted to stop short of slavishness) to the intent and style of the 
author. 

Story of O is the work of an original writer, who has dared to present us 
with certain truths, or intimations of truth, rarely found in literature. 
However much one may disagree with, or even profoundly dislike, these truths 
(or, if you will, these ideas), Pauline Reage has done what all good artists 
aim for and when they are successful, accomplish: to arouse us from the 
lethargy of our set ways and routine lives, prick us into consciousness, 
provoke a reaction (whether positive or negative, it matters little) within 
us; in short, to make us think. That in itself is a rare enough occurrence 
so that we should be grateful indeed whenever we have the good fortune to 
encounter it. 

M. Paulhan, in speculating about the book's conclusion, suggests that the 
author may have permitted herself this one small indulgence-the end-with the 
thought in mind of one day continuing O's adventures. To date, however, no 
sequel has been forthcoming and the present work, with its many mysteries 
still unsolved, is all we have.(2) For beyond the more or less general 
consensus that the author is a woman, nothing is certain about the work. And 
yet, perhaps there is a kind of virtue in this, for we are thus obliged to 
judge the book itself, uncluttered by any outside considerations. Like O 
before her judges, the work stands naked and alone. 

S.d'E. 

 ------------------- 

(1) There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that when M. Paulhan was nominated 
for l'Acadimie Francaise, opponents to his candidacy placed a copy of the 
yellow-covered volume of O on the chair of each of the Academy members. 
Another version has it that the copies were so placed by members promoting 
his candidacy, who claimed that his discovery of and Preface to O 
constituted another proof of his literary acumen. Whatever the truth, M. 
Paulhan was promptly elected as one of France's forty immortals. 

(2) Or, to be exacts almost all. A year or two after O appeared, Miss Reage 
wrote the preface to another somewhat mysterious work entitled Vintage, by 
Jean de Berg, which was published in 1956 by Les Editions de Minuit, the 
publishers of most of the avant-garde fiction in France since World War II. 
Since then, however, she has not been heard from again. 

 A Note on Story of O
by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues 

Apropos of Story of O (the object of a notoriety which its author, Madame 
Pauline Reage or whoever is hiding behind that mask of a perfect little 
girl-and she is most assuredly a woman-doubtless neither expected nor 
desired), people are going about-both those who have read the book and those 
who have as yet been unable to find a copy of the yellow-jacketed 
work-trying to outdo one another by asserting that it is an "erotic" book. 
The formula is familiar, too quickly and too easily employed. It would not 
be a bad idea, in this case as in others, to consider it from the vantage 
point of time, which is a convenient position when one finds oneself in the 
uncomfortable situation of having to judge an object so close at hand and so 
unusual that it tends to blind you. 

Now, it seems fairly obvious that the time of a work of fiction, both in 
plot and continuity, is always a kind of past, whether or not the author 
likes it, whereas the time of (physical) love is specifically the present If 
we accept the fact that the art of lovers, as the saying goes, is to make 
pleasure last as long as possible, then it is a question of a multitude of 
splendid and excruciating moments with neither past nor future, quite 
independent of one another, although they all are rather alike. The rough 
comparison between an alternating and a direct current is not to be 
discarded. Making allowances for the florid language, one might also say of 
lovers that they cull pleasure like a string of pearls. And when a novelist, 
or a writer of fiction, attempts through his narrative to re-create the 
fleeting intensity of these precious moments, to set them squarely before 
the eyes of the reader in order to arouse his senses, if his work is truly 
erotic it will unfold as a series of repetitious sequences punctuated here 
and there on rare occasions by sudden shifts of fortune which have nothing 
to do with the central sensual fact, but without which the work would be 
unreadable. Most of the novels of Sade and the Grandiose Trois files et leur 
mere by Pierre Louys, are examples of this sort. 

Faced with these or with other more recent works whose purpose, whether 
avowed or not, is fairly obvious, since everything, from plot to language, 
contributes to the goal of voluptuousness-Story of O is not, strictly 
speaking, an erotic book. In fact, of the two planes on which it is 
constructed, that of the mind (or rather: the soul) ruthlessly dominates 
that of the flesh. The picture that the four long chapters give of the 
modern world, the action, the characters, are all extraordinarily vivid; 
above all, they are not dependent upon the sensual fire as they would be in 
an erotic book. Here we are dealing with a genuine novel, one we should not 
hesitate to categorize as a mystic work. For, beneath the guise and methods 
of eroticism, the subject is the tragic flowering of a woman in the 
abdication of her freedom, in willful slavery, in humiliation, in the 
prostitution imposed upon her by her masters, in torture and even in the 
death which, after she has suffered every other ignominy, she requests and 
they agree to. 

It was rightly said of Sade that his is the work of a moralist. Erotic books 
are almost all alike in this respect: either they are working toward the 
elaboration of a revolutionary morality, or they echo the morality of their 
age, against which they are protesting. But women are little given to these 
Aristotelian speculations. And Pauline Reage is as completely devoid of 
morality as is the Portuguese Nun or Saint Therese of Avila. 

The reader may be surprised by our use of the term "flowering." Is the term 
apt? I think it is. In any event, what we are shown in Story of O is a 
complete spiritual transformation, what others would call an ascesis. Madame 
Reage, who has a good knowledge of English and does not mind showing it, 
could have entitled her book: A Woman's Progress. 

That this book, which is anything but vulgar, owes a debt to the sort of 
productions commonly found in catalogues of vile pornography, is indeed 
surprising; but it is also true. In the same way that Julien Gracq, in his 
preface to Au Chateau d'Argol, declaring that all battles are won or lost 
according to the same plans, voluntarily limited his instruments of terror 
to the arsenal of the Gothic novels of the end of the eighteenth and 
beginning of the nineteenth century, so Madame Reage uses the tried-and-true 
formulas of more than a hundred volumes sold under the counter. The black 
leather, the little wasp-waisted corsets, the whips and riding crops, the 
rooms sound-proofed to muffle the cries, the brandings with a red-hot iron, 
the intimate rings and chains: there is nothing here so original that we 
have not already encountered it in Unwilling Slaves, Infernal 
Voluptuousness; in Sonia the Domineering or Sonia Defeated; in Slavery, in 
The Ardent Tutelage, in Hot Days, or in the Slaves of John Krissler ... And 
if Pauline Reage, whose ability to construct a story is, as I have said, 
that of a very great novelist, thus refuses to exercise her imagination when 
dwelling on details, there is good reason to believe that it is a matter of 
pride, that she wishes to glory in triumphing through methods which are in 
the public domain. It has been noted that the owl costume O wears in the 
last chapter is actually like a mask by Leonor Fini, whose sensual and 
disturbing qualities I had occasion to comment upon not long ago. Madame 
Reage has seized upon this cast-off piece of clothing for a masked ball and 
has infused it with a prodigious and sinister life; through an act of 
admirable intuition, she has understood the role for which it was suited and 
then follows the major scene at the end, when O is exposed to public scorn: 
the display of a body which is no longer anything but an object, flouted 
beneath the plumage, offered to the first comer. Then: death. Inevitably; 
woman, through the decline of her flesh, having become pure spirit. 

Yes, Story of O, as I have said, is indeed a mystic book! 

Proud Reage ... In the midst of her glowing tale, she has a way of involving 
herself, of slipping, at the worst possible moments, into the skin of her 
heroine, which is enough to make one shudder and at the same time make one 
feel a certain tenderness for her. The way one would feel toward a brave 
bull who has fought well. The chateau at Roissy, like the bull ring, is the 
sacrificial site. When women become exasperated, they sometimes assume 
postures wherein they seem to be offering themselves to the arrows of 
misfortune and it would not be difficult to draw from them, for the sake of 
youth, some sublime examples. For it is difficult to go as far down as Reage 
does, under cover of the mask and of night but beneath the crudest light and 
she reaches depths of humiliation which have scarcely been plumbed by Genet, 
or by Adamov in the terrible pages of his L'Epreuve. With her, not the 
faintest trace of dilettantism. Still proudly, the black pact is candidly 
accepted and carried through to its ultimate consequences. It is in this, 
perhaps, that she differs especially from the authors of erotic books, 
almost all of whom have known how to keep themselves aloof by keeping to the 
privileged terrain of dandyism, by torturing victims with whom they are 
unfamiliar, by using humor and imagination, by discreetly keeping exits open 
by which, at dawn, they can leave, without having overly sullied or 
compromised themselves. 

Such a descent into hell, of which the rightful issue is the destruction of 
the body (and it is O's fanatic wish that her body be insulted, then 
destroyed), has raised the question of "masochism." The word, first of all, 
is detestable, deriving from one of the worst, most stupid and ridiculous 
writers of the second half of the nineteenth century. Venus in Furs was all 
the rage. Who, unless he were a trifle addle-brained, would still have any 
interest in this empty prattle? Who would dare to compare it with the great, 
heavy silence cast like a cape over O's tortures? As for the passion, or 
vice, which the term designates, we can at most allot it a minor role in 
Pauline Reage's book, for it is so completely overwhelmed by the heroine's 
ardor, transfigured by a current which comes from the soul and not from the 
body and which in fact is directed against the body. 

Jean Paulhan, in his ingeniously arranged Preface, tells us that erotic 
books-Usage's book-are dangerous. This is an understatement and it is my 
opinion that there is much more seductive virtue in Story of O than in the 
others. Because innocent souls (if there are any) have an unreasoned but 
keen taste for suffering and nothing seduces them so easily as does the view 
of a martyr. Arid also because the innocent souls (assuming, also, that they 
know how to read) will at first glance be put off by the coarse vocabulary 
of classical erotology, whereas they will find all sorts of allurements in 
Pauline Reage's writing, which is incredibly decent in relation to the 
subjects dealt with. If the writing is not the foremost quality of the book, 
it is certainly not the least: pure as the writing of the Princesse de 
Cleves, warm as ... I shall refrain from saving what and of a simple density 
which emphasizes, or provokes, the movements of the heart. Her writing 
offers an example, which will not be heeded in an age when writers, 
following the perfidious example of Celine, have a tendency to use 
indiscriminately erotic or scatological language, which when used 
legitimately, can be extremely beautiful and effective. 

Shall we one day see on the finger of some woman the formidable iron ring 
which strips the person wearing it of her freedom, since she places her body 
at the disposal of all those who are able to read the insignia engraved in 
the setting? and what is especially important, shall we be able to tell 
which one is Pauline Reage? Probably not But already Baudelaire is offering 
his hand to her, the Portuguese Nun is approaching her a trifle timidly, the 
Nun of Dulmen is ready to open her arms to her and she is about to enter 
that small circle of blessed and accursed creatures which constitutes the 
only aristocracy which one can consider today with any degree of respect. 

 Happiness in Slavery 
by Jean Paulhan of l'Academie Francaise 

A Revolt in Barbados 

In the course of the year 1838, the peaceful island of Barbados was rocked 
by a strange and bloody revolt. About two hundred Negroes of both sexes, all 
of whom had recently been emancipated by the Proclamations of March, came 
one morning to beg their former master, a certain Glenelg, to take them back 
into bondage. An Anabaptist minister, acting as spokesman for the group, 
read out a list of grievances which lie had compiled and re-corded in a 
notebook. Then the discussion began. But Glenelg, either from timidity or 
because he was scrupulous, or simply afraid of the law, refused to be 
swayed. At which point he was at first mildly jostled, then set upon and 
massacred, together with his family, by the Negroes, who that same evening 
repaired to their cabins, their palavers, their labors and customary 
rituals. Swift action on the part of Governor MacGregor succeeded in 
suppressing the matter and the emancipation pursued its course. As for the 
notebook of grievances, it has never been recovered. 

There are times when I think of that notebook. It is quite likely that it 
contained, aside from the justified complaints concerning the organization 
of the workhouses, the substitution of cell for lash and the rule making it 
illegal for the "apprentices"-for such were the newly-freed workers 
called-to fall ill, it is likely that it contained at least the rough draft 
of an apologia for slavery. The remark, for instance, that the only freedoms 
we really appreciate are those which cast others into an equivalent state of 
servitude. There is not a man alive who thanks his lucky stars for the 
privilege of being able to breathe freely. But if, for example, I obtain 
permission to play the banjo merrily till two in the morning, my neighbor 
loses the right not to hear me play till two in the morning. If I manage to 
get along without working, my neighbor has to work for two and what is more, 
we know how an all-consuming passion for freedom in the world never fails to 
lead to conflicts and wars which are no less consuming. Add to this the fact 
that, since the slave, according to at least one dialectic, is in turn 
destined to become the master, then we would doubtless be wrong to 
precipitate the natural order of events. Finally, let it be said that to 
surrender oneself to the will of others (as often happens with lovers and 
mystics) and so find oneself at last rid of selfish pleasures, interests and 
personal complexes, is in no wise a joyless act, nor one lacking in 
grandeur. In short, this notebook would seem even more heretical today than 
it did some hundred and thirty years ago: today it would be considered a 
dangerous book. 

What we are concerned with here is another kind of dangerous book. To be 
more specific: with an erotic book. 

 I.-Decisive as a letter 

Why, in fact, are they called dangerous? A somewhat risky business, to say 
the least. For since there is courage in numbers, the very act of referring 
to them as such would seem bound to make us want to read them and expose 
ourselves to the danger. And it is with good reason that geographical 
societies warn their members that, whenever they are relating their 
adventures, they should avoid dwelling overly on the dangers they have 
encountered. It is not a question of modesty, but rather of not leading 
anyone else into temptation (witness the ease with which wars are begun). 
But what dangers? 

From where I stand, there is at least one danger I can easily perceive. It 
is a modest danger. From every indication, Story of O is one of those books 
which marks the reader, which leaves him not quite, or not at all, the same 
as he was before he read it. Such books are strangely involved with the 
influence they exert, changing in accordance with that influence. After a 
few years, they are no longer the same books and consequently the initial 
reviewers soon seem to have been a bit simple-minded. But that cannot be 
helped, a reviewer should never be afraid to make a fool of himself. With 
this thought in mind, the simplest thing for me to do is admit that I hardly 
know what to make of it, or what it all means. I advance through O with a 
strange feeling, as though I am moving through a fairy tale-we know that 
fairy tales are erotic novels for children-through one of those fairy 
castles which appears abandoned and yet the armchairs in their slip covers 
and the ottomans and the four-poster beds are all neatly dusted and the 
whips and riding crops are too: they are, if I may say so, dusted by 
definition. Not a speck of rust on the chains or a trace of steam on the 
multicolored window panes. If there is one word which comes to mind when I 
think of O, that word is decency. It is a word which would be far too 
difficult for me to try and justify, so I shall not even try. And then this 
wind which blows endlessly, through all the rooms. In O, there also blows 
some indefinable, always pure and violent spirit, endless and unadulterated. 
It is a decisive spirit which nothing disturbs, whether it be moans or 
horrors, ecstasy or nausea and if I must make another confession, this type 
of thing is not, generally speaking, my cup of tea. I incline to works in 
which the author is hesitant, indicating by some show of embarrassment that 
he was at first intimidated by his subject, that there were moments when he 
doubted he would ever be able to bring it off. But from beginning to end, 
the story of O is managed rather like some brilliant feat. It reminds you 
more of a speech than a mere effusion; of a letter rather than a secret 
diary. But to whom is the letter addressed? Whom is the speech trying to 
convince? Whom can we ask? I don't even know who you are. 

That you are a woman I have little doubt. Not so much because of the kind of 
detail you delight in describing-the green satin dresses, wasp-waist corsets 
and skirts rolled up a number of turns (like ban? rolled up in a curler)-but 
rather because of something like this: the day when Rene' abandons O to 
still further torments, she still manages to have enough presence of mind to 
notice that her lover's slippers are frayed and notes that she will have to 
buy him another pair. To me, such, a thought seems almost unimaginable. It 
is something a man would never have thought of, or at least would never have 
dared express. 

And yet in her own way O expresses a virile ideal. Virile, or at least 
masculine. At last a woman who admits it! Who admits what? Something that 
women' nave always refused till now to admit (and today more than ever 
before). Something that men have always reproached them with: that they 
never cease obeying their nature, the call of their blood, that everything 
in them, even their minds, is sex. That they have constantly to be 
nourished, constantly washed and made up, constantly beaten. That all they 
need is a good master, one who is not too lax or kind: for the moment we 
make any show of tenderness they draw upon it, turning all the zest joy and 
character at their command to make others love them. In short that we must 
when we go to see them, take a whip along. Here is the man who has not 
dreamed of possessing Justine. But so far as I know, no woman has ever 
dreamed of being Justine. I mean, dreamed aloud, with this same pride at 
being grieved and in tears, this consuming violence, with this voracious 
capacity for suffering and this amazing will, stretched to the breaking 
point and even beyond. Woman you may be, but descended from a knight or a 
crusader. As though yours was a dual personality, or the person for whom 
your letter was intended was so constantly present that you borrowed his 
taste and his voice. But what kind of woman and who are you? 

In any event, the story of O has deep roots. It has, in my opinion, that 
feeling of repose, of spaciousness as it were, which one finds only in a 
tale which the author has nurtured within her for a long time: a tale with 
which she is wholly familiar. Who is Pauline Reage? Is she-for there are 
such people-a mere dreamer? (It is enough, they say, to listen to the 
dictates of your heart. It is a heart that nothing can dissuade.) Is she a 
woman of the world, who knows whereof she speaks? Who knows whereof she 
speaks and is astonished that an adventure that began with such promise-or 
at least with such sobriety, in a climate of asceticism and 
chastisement-should turn out so badly and end on a note of dubious smugness, 
for, it seems generally to be agreed, O remains in that kind of brothel to 
which she was led by love; and not only does she remain there, she rather 
likes it. And yet, in this connection: 

 H. -A ruthless decency 

I too was surprised by the end. And nothing you can say will convince me it 
is the real end. That in reality (so to speak) your heroine convinces Sir 
Stephen to consent to her death. He will remove her irons only after she is 
dead. But, obviously, there are things that have been left unsaid and that 
busy little bee-I am referring to Pauline Reage-has kept part of the honey 
for herself. Who knows, perhaps this once she let herself be seduced by a 
writer's concern: that she might one day want to write a sequel to O's 
adventures. Besides, that ending is so obvious it was hardly worth stating. 
We discover it without any trouble. We discover it and somehow it obsesses 
us. But you, the author, how did you think it up-and what is the open sesame 
which explains it? I keep harping on this because I feel certain that once 
it has been found, then the ottomans and the four-posters and even the 
chains will be explained and will allow this tall, dim figure, this scheming 
phantom, these curious breaths of air, to move freely to and fro among them. 

At this point I must pause and consider what there is about masculine desire 
which is in fact strange and indefensible. We hear of those formations of 
rocks which suddenly shift, when the winds blow upon them, or else emit a 
soughing sound or give forth a mandolin-like music. People come from near 
and far to see them. And yet one's initial impulse is to turn and run from 
such phenomena, no matter how much one may love music. Actually, what if the 
role of the erotic (or of dangerous books, if you prefer) was to inform and 
instruct us? To reassure us on the subject, the way a father confessor does? 
I realize that, in general, people grow accustomed to it. Nor do men remain 
embarrassed for very long. They make up their minds, they claim that they 
were the ones who started it all. They are lying and if I may say so, the 
facts are clear: obvious, too obvious. 

Women do too, I shall be told. No doubt they do, but with them the act is 
not visible. They can always say that they're not, How decent! Whence no 
doubt derives the notion that women are the more beautiful of the two, that 
beauty is feminine. More beautiful, I'm not so sure. But more discreet in 
any case, less obvious and this is a kind of beauty. I have twice now 
alluded to the idea of decency with' respect to a book in which decency is 
hardly the question ... 

But is it true that decency is hardly germane here? I am Hot thinking of 
that kind of colorless, hypocritical decency which limits itself to 
dissimulation, which flees from the presence of the stone and denies having 
seen it move. There is another kind of decency, indomitable and quick to 
punish, a decency which humbles the flesh sufficiently to render it its 
original integrity, which by force returns it to the days when desire had 
not been made manifest and the rocks had not yet sung. A decency into whose 
hands it is dangerous to fall. For, to satisfy it, nothing less than the 
hands tied behind the back will do, than the knees spread apart and bodies 
spread-eagled, than sweat and tears. 

I seem to be saying frightful things. Perhaps I am, but in that case terror 
is our daily bread-and perhaps dangerous books are those which restore us to 
our natural state of danger. What lover would not be terrified if he were to 
weigh for one moment the full implication of his declaration, which is not 
made lightly, to commit himself for life? And what mistress, if she were to 
measure for a moment the meaning of her words: "Before I met you I have 
never loved anyone else ... I have never experienced real emotion before I 
knew you?" would not be equally terror-stricken at the words slipping past 
her lips? Or these, more sagacious-sagacious?-: "I should like to punish 
myself for having been happy before I met you!" There she is, trapped by her 
own words. There she is, so to speak, getting what she asked for. 

Thus, in the story of O, there is no lack of torture. There is no lack of 
flogging, with a riding crop, or even of branding with a red-hot iron, not 
to mention the leather collar and the spectacle on the terrace. Almost as 
many tortures as there are prayers in the life of ascetics in the desert. No 
less carefully distinguished and as though numbered- separated one from the 
other by little stones. They are not always joyous tortures-I mean inflicted 
joyfully. Rene refuses to inflict any and although Sir Stephen consents to 
them, it is as though he is performing a duty. So far as we can tell, they 
do not enjoy themselves. Here is nothing sadistic about them. It all happens 
as though it were O alone who, from the outset, demanded to be chastised, to 
be forced in her retreats. 

At this point some fool is going to mention masochism, I don't mind, but all 
it will do is to add a false mystery to the real one, a mystery of semantics 
pure and simple. What does masochism mean? That pain is at the same time 
pleasure, that suffering is also joy? That may well be. These are the kind 
of affirmations widely used by metaphysicians-who are also prone to proclaim 
that all absence is presence, all speech silence-and let me be the last one 
to deny that these declarations may indeed have their meaning (though one I 
do not understand), or at least their usefulness. But it is a usefulness 
that does not, in any event, derive from simple observation-and is therefore 
not the concern of doctors or mere psychologists and all the more so, of 
simpletons or fools. "No," I can hear someone saying to me, "while we are 
dealing here with pain, it is a pain the masochist is capable of 
transforming into pleasure; a suffering which he, by some secret alchemy he 
alone possesses, can turn into pure joy." 

What a wonderful piece of news! At last man has discovered what he has been 
searching for so doggedly through the ages, in medicine, ethics, philosophy 
and religion: the means to avoid pain-or at least to transcend it, to 
understand it (were it only by seeing therein the effect of our stupidity or 
mistakes). What is more, man might easily have made this discovery in ages 
past, for in truth masochists are not a recent invention. And so I am amazed 
that this discovery was not greeted by a great fanfare and bestowal of 
signal honors; that no attempt was made to steal the secret. And I'm also 
surprised that these masochists were not rounded up and herded into the' 
laboratories and museums, in cages, the better to be observed and studied. 

Perhaps men never pose themselves any questions which have not already been 
answered. Perhaps it would be enough to get them together to wrest them from 
their solitude (as though it were not some purely visionary, human desire). 
Well, here at least is the cage and here is this young woman in the cage. 
All we have to do now is listen to her. 

 DI. -Strange love letter 

She says: "You shouldn't be surprised. Take a closer look at your love. It 
would be terrified if it realized for one moment that I'm a woman and alive. 
And it is not by ignoring the fiery well-springs of the blood that you will 
dry them up." 

"Your jealousy does not deceive you. It is true that you make me healthy and 
happy and a thousand times more alive. Yet there is nothing I can do to 
prevent this happiness from turning against you. The stone also sings more 
loudly when the blood flows free and the body is at rest. Keep me rather in 
this cage and feed me sparingly, if you dare. Anything that brings me closer 
to illness and the edge of death makes me more faithful. It is only when you 
make me suffer that I feel safe and secure. You should never have agreed to 
be a god for me if you were afraid to assume the duties of a god and we all 
know that they are not as tender as all that. You have already seen me cry. 
Now you must learn to relish my tears. And my neck: is it not charming when, 
filled with a moan I am striving to stifle, it grows tense and contorted in 
spite of my attempts to control it? It is all too true that when you come to 
call on us, you should bring a whip along and for more than one among us, a 
cat-o'-nine-tails." 

She hastens to add: "That joke is in such poor taste! But the fact is you've 
missed the whole point. And if I were not so madly in love with you, do you 
think I would dare to speak to you in this way? and betray my peers?" 

She adds: "What constantly betrays you is my imagination, my vague dreams. 
Then weaken me. Rid me of these dreams. Deliver me. Take whatever steps are 
required, so that I won't even have time enough to dream of being unfaithful 
to you. (And reality, in any case, is less absorbing.) But first make sure 
to brand me with your mark. If I sport the mark of your riding crop or your 
chains, or if I am still wearing those rings in my lips, let the whole world 
know I am yours. As long as I am beaten and ravished on your behalf, I am 
naught but the thought of you, the desire of you, the obsession of you. 
That, I believe, is what you wanted. Well, I love you and that is what I 
want too." 

"If I have ceased, once and for all, to be my own mistress, if my mouth and 
loins and breasts no longer belong to me, then I become a creature of 
another world, a world in which everything has a new meaning. Perhaps one 
day I shall have lost all knowledge about myself. Then what will pleasure 
matter to me, what will the caresses of so many men-your envoys, whom I am 
incapable of telling one from the other-mean to me, when I can no longer 
compare them to you?" 

This is the way she speaks. I listen to her and I can see that she isn't 
lying. I try to follow her (what bothered me for a long time was her 
prostitution). Perhaps, after all, the burning mantle of mythology is not a 
simple allegory and sacred prostitution no mere historical curiosity. It may 
be that the chains in naive folk songs and the "I would die for love of 
thee" are not mere metaphors and that when streetwalkers tell their pimps: 
"I've got you under my skin; do whatever you like with me," this too is no 
simple figure of speech. (It is strange how, when we are intent upon ridding 
ourselves of some feeling which baffles us,, we ascribe it to hoodlums and 
whores.) It may be that when Heloise wrote to Abelard: "I shall be thy 
whore," she was not merely turning a pretty phrase. Without doubt, Story of 
O is the most ardent love letter any man has ever received. 

I am reminded of the Dutchman who was fated to sail the seven seas as long 
as he failed to find a girl ready to give up her life to save him; and of 
the knight Guiguemar who, to be healed of his wounds, awaited a woman who 
would suffer for him "what no woman has ever suffered.'" To be sure, the 
story of O is longer than a lay or a legend and far more detailed than a 
simple letter. Perhaps it also had to rise from greater depths. Perhaps it 
has never been more difficult than it is today to understand what boys and 
girls are saying in the streets-much the same thing, I suspect, that the 
Barbados slaves were saying. We live in a time when the simplest truths have 
no choice but to come back to us naked (like O), clothed in the mask of an 
owl. 

For today we hear seemingly normal people, even those with a level head on 
their shoulders, blithely speaking of love as though it were some frothy 
feeling of no real consequence. They say it offers many pleasures and that 
this contact of two epidermises is not completely devoid of charm. They go 
on to say that charm or pleasure is most rewarding for the person who is 
capable of keeping love imaginative, capricious and above all natural and 
free. Far be it from me to object and if it's all that simple for two people 
of the opposite sex (or even of the same sex) to give each other a good 
time, then indeed they should, they would be crazy not to. There are only 
one or two words in all this which disturb me: the word love and also the 
word free. Needless to say, it is quite the opposite. Love implies 
dependence-not only in its pleasure but by its very existence and in what 
precedes its existence: in our very desire to exist-dependence on half a 
hundred odd little things: on two lips (and the smile or grimace they make), 
on a shoulder (and the special way it has of rising or falling), on two eyes 
(and their expression, a little more flirtatious or forbidding), or, when 
you come down to it, on the whole foreign body, with the mind and soul 
enclosed therein-a body which is capable at any moment of becoming more 
dazzling than the sun, more freezing than a tract of snowy waste. To undergo 
the experience is no fun, you make me laugh with your entreaties. When this 
body stoops down to fasten the buckle of her dainty shoe, you tremble and 
you have the feeling the whole world is watching you. Rather the whip, the 
rings in the flesh! As for freedom ... any man, or any woman, who has been 
through the experience will rather be inclined to rant and rave against 
freedom, in the vilest, most horrible language possible. No, there is no 
dearth of abominations in Story of O. But it sometimes seems to me that it 
is an idea, or a complex of ideas, an opinion rather than a young woman we 
see being subjected to these tortures. 

 The Truth about the Revolt 

Strange, that the notion of happiness in slavery should today seem so novel. 
There is virtually nothing left of the ancient law which gives the family 
the power of life and death over their children; corporal punishment and 
hazing have practically been eliminated from the schools and the old 
prerogative of wife-beating banished from the home. Men who in past 
centuries were proudly decapitated on public squares are now left 
cheerlessly to rot in dank cellars. The only tortures we inflict these days 
are undeserved and anonymous ones. Therefore, they are a thousand times more 
terrible and wars today manage to roast, in a single, searing blast, the 
population of an entire city. The excessive kindness of father, teacher, or 
lover is paid for by blankets of napalm bombs and the atomic explosion. 
Everything happens as though there exists in the world a mysterious 
equilibrium of violence, for which we have lost all taste and even our 
understanding of the term and personally, I am not displeased that it is a 
woman who has found them again. I am not even surprised. 

To tell the truth, I do not have as many preconceived ideas about women as 
most men do. I am surprised there are any (women). More than surprised: 
somewhat amazed and filled with admiration. This perhaps explains why they 
seem so marvelous to me and why I can't stop envying them. What is it 
precisely that I envy? 

There are times when I regret my lost childhood. What I regret though, are 
not the surprises and the revelations of which the poets speak. No. I 
remember a time when I thought I was responsible for the whole world. I was 
by turns a champion boxer or a cook, an orator-politician (yes), a general, 
a thief, even a redskin, a tree, or a rock. I shall be told that this was 
only a game. Yes, for you adults it may have been, but not for me, not in 
the least". This was when I bore the whole weight of the world on my 
shoulders, with all the cares and dangers it comprised: this is when I was 
universal. What I am trying to say is this: 

Women at least are fated to resemble, throughout their lives, the children 
we once were. A woman understands a thousand things which totally escape me. 
She generally knows how to sew. She knows how to cook. She knows how to 
decorate an apartment and can tell which styles clash (I'm not saying she 
knows how to do all these tilings perfectly, but then I wasn't a perfect 
little redskin either). And she knows a lot more besides. She's comfortable 
with dogs and cats; she's able to converse with those half-mad creatures we 
allow among us, children: she teaches them cosmology and how to behave, to 
wash their hands and brush their teeth and other basics of hygiene and she 
tells them fairy tales; and she has even been known to go so far as to teach 
them the piano. In short, from earliest childhood we are constantly dreaming 
of a man who would be all men at once. But it would appear that to each 
woman is given the capacity to be all women (and all men) at once. And there 
is something even more curious. 

We hear it said nowadays that to understand fully is to forgive' fully. Now, 
it has always seemed to me that with women-however universal they may be-it 
is just the opposite. I've had a fair number of friends who have always 
accepted me for what I am and I in turn have taken them for what they 
are-without the slightest desire on my part or on theirs to change one 
another. I might even say that I was delighted-as were they-that each of us 
was so unique, so unlike the others. But there is not a woman alive who 
isn't interested in changing the man she loves and at the same time changing 
herself. As though the proverb were lying and the truth of the matter is 
that to understand fully is to forgive nothing at all. 

No, Pauline Reage does not forgive very much. And I even wonder, to pursue 
this thought to its conclusion, whether she does not exaggerate slightly, 
whether her fellow-females, her peers, are actually as much alike as she 
assumes. But this is what more than one man is all too willing to grant her. 

Should we regret the loss of the notebook compiled by the Barbados slaves? I 
fear, I must confess, that the worthy Anabaptist who drew it up may have 
cluttered it, in the section dedicated to apologetics, with a fair number of 
platitudes: for instance, that there will always be slaves, (which, in any 
case, seems to be borne out by the evidence); that they will always be the 
same (which is open to question); that one must resign oneself to one's 
condition and not waste in recriminations a time that might better be spent 
in games, meditation and customary pleasures. And so on and so forth. But I 
suspect that he was not telling the truth, which is that Glenelg's slaves 
were in love with their master, that they could not bear to be without him. 
The same truth, after all, which lends Story of O its resolute quality, it's 
incredible decency and that strong, fanatic wind which never ceases to blow. 

 I The Lovers of Roissy 

Her lover one day takes O for a walk in a section of the city where they 
never go-the Montsouris Park, the Monceau Park. After they have taken a 
stroll in the park and have sat together side by side on the edge of a lawn, 
they notice, at one comer of the park, at an intersection where there are 
never any taxis, a car which, because of its meter, resembles a taxi. 

"Get in," he says. 

She gets in. It is autumn and coming up to dusk. She is dressed as she 
always is: high heels, a suit with a pleated skirt, a silk blouse and no 
hat. But long gloves which come up over the sleeves of her jacket and in her 
leather handbag she has her identification papers, her compact and her 
lipstick. 

The taxi moves off slowly, the man still not having said a word to the 
driver. But he pulls down the shades of the windows on both sides of the car 
and the shade on the back window. She has taken off her gloves, thinking he 
wants to kiss her or that he wants her to caress him. But instead he says: 

"Your bag's in your way; let me have it." 

She gives it to him. He puts it out of her reach and adds: 

"You also have on too many clothes. Unfasten your stockings and roll them 
down to above your knees. Here are some garters." 

By now the taxi has picked up speed and she has some trouble managing it; 
she's also afraid the driver may turn around. Finally, though, the stockings 
are rolled down and she's embarrassed to feel her legs naked and free 
beneath her silk slip. Besides, the loose garter-belt suspenders are 
slipping back and forth. 

"Unfasten your garter belt," he says, "and take off your panties." 

That's easy enough, all she has to do is slip her hands behind her back and 
raise herself slightly. He takes the garter belt and panties from her, opens 
her bag and puts them in, then says: 

"You shouldn't sit on your slip and skirt. Pull them up behind you and sit 
directly on the seat" 

The seat is made of some sort of imitation leather which is slippery and 
cold: it's quite an extraordinary sensation to feel it sticking to your 
thighs. Then he says: 

"Now put your gloves back on." 

The taxi is still moving along at a good clip and she doesn't dare ask why 
Rene just sits there without moving or saying another word, nor can she 
guess what all this means to him-having her there motionless, silent, so 
stripped and exposed, so thoroughly gloved, in a black car going God knows 
where. He hasn't told her what to do or what not to do, but she's afraid 
either to cross her legs or press them together. She sits with gloved hands 
braced on either side of her seat 

"Here we are," he says suddenly. Here we are: the taxi stops on a lovely 
avenue, beneath a tree-they are plane trees-in front of some sort of small 
private tome which, can be seen nestled between the courtyard and the 
garden, the type of small private dwelling one finds along the Faubourg 
Saint-Germain. The street lamps are some distance away and it is still 
fairly dark inside the car. Outside it is raining. 

"Don't move," Rene says. "Sit perfectly still." 

His band reaches for the collar of her blouse, unties the bow, then 
unbuttons the blouse. She leans forward slightly, thinking be wants to 
fondle her breasts. No. He is merely groping for the shoulder straps of her 
brassiere, which he snips with a small penknife. Then he takes it off. . 
Now, beneath her blouse, which he has buttoned back up, her breasts are 
naked and free, as is the rest of her body, from waist to knee. 

"Listen," he says. "Now you're ready. This is where I leave you. You're to 
get out and go ring the doorbell. Follow whoever opens the door for you and 
do whatever you're told. If you hesitate about going in, they'll come and 
take you in. If you don't obey immediately, they'll force you to. Your bag? 
No, you have no further need for your bag. You're merely the girl I'm 
furnishing. Yes, of course I'll be there. Now run along." 

Another version of the same beginning was simpler and more direct: the young 
woman, dressed in the same way, was driven by her lover and an unknown 
friend. The stranger was driving, the lover was seated next to the young 
woman and it was the unknown friend who explained to the young woman that 
her lover had been entrusted with the task of getting her ready, that he was 
going to tie her hands behind her back, unfasten her stockings and roll them 
down, remove her garter belt, her panties and her brassiere and blindfold 
her. That she would then be turned over to the chateau, where in due course 
she would be instructed as to what she should do and in fact, as soon as she 
had been thus undressed and bound, they helped her to alight from the car 
after a trip that lasted half an hour, guided her up a few steps and,, with 
her blindfold still on, through one or two doors. Then, when her blindfold 
was removed, she found herself standing alone in a dark room, where they 
left her for half an hour, or an hour, or two hours, I can't be sure, but it 
seemed forever. Then, when at last the door was opened and the light turned 
on, you could see that she had been waiting in a very conventional, 
comfortable, yet distinctive room: there was a thick rug on the floor, but 
not a stick of furniture and all four walls were lined with closets. The 
door had been opened by two women, two young and beautiful women dressed in 
the garb of pretty eighteenth-century chambermaids: full skirts made out of 
some light material, which were long enough to conceal their feet; tight 
bodices, laced or hooked in front, which sharply accentuated the bust line; 
lace frills around the neck; half-length sleeves. They were wearing eye 
shadow and lipstick. Both wore a close-fitting collar and had tight 
bracelets on their wrists. 

I know it was at this point that they freed O's hands, which were still tied 
behind her back and told her to get undressed, they were going to bathe her 
and make her up. They proceeded to strip her till she hadn't a stitch of 
clothing left, then put her clothes away neatly in one of the closets. She 
was not allowed to bathe herself and they did her hair as at the 
hairdresser's, making her sit in one of those large chairs which tilts back 
when they wash your hair and straightens back up after the hair has been set 
and you're ready for the dryer. That always takes at least an hour. Actually 
it took more than an hour, but she was seated on this chair, naked and they 
kept her from either crossing her legs or bringing them together. And since 
the wall in front of her was covered from floor to ceiling with a large 
mirror, which was unbroken by any shelving, she could see herself, thus 
open, each time her gaze strayed to the mirror. 

When she was properly made up and prepared-her eyelids penciled lightly; her 
lips bright red; the tip and halo of her breasts highlighted with pink; the 
edges of her nether lips rouged; her armpits and pubis generously perfumed 
and perfume also applied to the furrow between her thighs, the furrow 
beneath her breasts and to the hollows of her hands-she was led into a room 
where a three-sided mirror and another mirror behind, enabled her to examine 
herself closely. She was told to sit down on the ottoman, which was set 
between the mirrors and wait. The ottoman was covered with black fur, which 
pricked her slightly; the rug was black, the walls red. She was wearing red 
mules. Set in one of the walls of the small bedroom was a large window, 
which looked out onto a lovely, dark park. The rain had stopped, the trees 
were swaying in the wind, the moon raced high among the clouds. 

I have no idea how long she remained in the red bedroom, or whether she was 
really alone, as she surmised, or whether someone was watching her through a 
peephole camouflaged in the wall. All I know is that when the two women 
returned, one was carrying a dressmakers tape measure and the other a basket 
With them came a man dressed in a long purple robe, the sleeves of which 
were gathered at the wrists and full at the shoulders. When he walked the 
robe flared open, from the waist down. One could see that beneath his robe 
he had on some sort of tights which covered his legs and thighs but left the 
sex exposed. It was the sex that O saw first, when he took his first step, 
then the whip, made of leather thongs, which he had stuck in his belt. Then 
she saw that the man was masked by a black hood-which concealed even his 
eyes behind a network of black gauze-and, finally, that he was also wearing 
fine black kid gloves. 

Using the familiar tu form of address, he told her not to move and ordered 
the women to hurry. The woman with the tape then took the measurements of 
O's neck and wrists. Though on the small side, her measurements were in no 
way out of the ordinary and it was easy enough to find the right-sized 
collar and bracelets, in the basket the other woman was carrying. Both 
collar and bracelets were made of several layers of leather (each layer 
being fairly thin, so that the total was no more than the thickness of a 
finger). They had clasps, which functioned automatically like a padlock when 
it closes and they could be opened only by means of a small key. Imbedded in 
the layers of leather, directly opposite the lock, was a snugly-fitting 
metal ring, which allowed one to get a grip on the bracelet, if one wanted 
to attach it, for both collar and bracelets fit the arms and neck so 
snugly-although not so tight as to be the least painful-that it was 
impossible to slip any bond inside. 

So they fastened the collar and bracelets to her neck and wrists and the man 
told her to get up. He took her place on the fur ottoman, called her over 
till she was touching his knees, slipped his gloved hand between her thighs 
and over her breasts and explained to her that she would be presented that 
same evening, after she had dined alone. 

She did in fact dine by herself, still naked, in a sort of little cabin 
where an invisible hand passed the dishes to her through a small window in 
the door. Finally, when dinner was over, the two women came for her. In the 
bedroom, they fastened the two bracelet rings together behind her back. They 
attached a long red cape to the ring of her collar and draped it over her 
shoulders. It covered her completely, but opened when she walked, since, 
with her hands behind her back, she had no way of keeping it closed. One 
woman preceded her, opening the doors and the other followed, closing them 
behind her. They crossed a vestibule, two drawing rooms and went into the 
library, where four men were having coffee. They were wearing the same long 
robes as the first, but no masks. And yet O did not have time to see their 
faces or ascertain whether her lover was among them (he was), for one of the 
men shone a light in her eyes and blinded her. Everyone remained stock 
still, the two women flanking her and the men in front, studying her. Then 
the light went out; the women left. But O was blindfolded again. Then they 
made her walk forward-she stumbled slightly as she went-until she felt that 
she was standing in front of the fire around which the four men were seated: 
she could feel the heat and in the silence she could hear the quiet 
crackling of the burning logs. She was facing the fire. Two hands lifted her 
cape, two others-after having checked to see that her bracelets were 
attached-descended the length of her back and buttocks. The hands were not 
gloved and one of them penetrated her in both places at once, so abruptly 
that she cried out. Someone laughed. Someone else said: 

"Turn her around, so we can see the breasts and the belly." 

They turned her around and the heat of the fire was against her back. A hand 
seized one of her breasts, a mouth fastened on the tip of the other. But 
suddenly she lost her balance and fell backward (supported by whose arms?), 
while they opened her legs and gently spread her lips. Hair grazed the 
insides of her thighs. She heard them saying that they would have to make 
her kneel down. This they did. She was extremely uncomfortable in this 
position, especially because they forbade her to bring her knees together 
and because her arms pinioned behind her forced her to lean forward. Then 
they let her rock back a bit, so that she was half-sitting on her heels, as 
nuns are wont to do. 

"You've never tied her up?" 

"No, never." 

"And never whipped her?" 

"No, never whipped her either. But as a matter of fact ... " 

It was her lover speaking. 

"As a matter of fact," the other voice went on, "if you do tie her up from 
time to time, or whip her just a little and she begins to like it, that's no 
good either. You have to get past the pleasure stage, until you reach the 
stage of tears." 

Then they made O get up and were on the verge of untying her, probably in 
order to attach her to some pole or wall, when someone protested that he 
wanted to take her first, right there on the spot. So they made her kneel 
down again, this time with her bust on an ottoman, her hands still tied 
behind her, with her hips higher than her torso. Then one of the men, 
holding her with both his hands on her hips, plunged into her belly. He 
yielded to a second. The third wanted to force his way into the narrower 
passage and driving hard, made her scream. When he let her go, sobbing and 
befouled by tears beneath her blindfold, she slipped to the floor, only to 
feel someone's knees against her face and she realized that her mouth was 
not to be spared. Finally they let her go, a captive clothed in tawdry 
finery, lying on her back in front of the fire. She could hear glasses being 
filled and the sound of the men drinking and the scraping of chairs. They 
put some more wood on the fire. All of a sudden they removed her blindfold. 
The large room, the walls of which were fined with bookcases, was dimly lit 
by a single wall lamp and by the fight of the fire, which was beginning to 
burn more brightly. Two of the men were standing and smoking. Another was 
seated, a riding crop on his knees and the one leaning over her fondling her 
breast was her lover. All four of them had taken her and she had not been 
able to distinguish him from the others. 

They explained to her that this was how it would always be, as long as she 
was in the chateau, that she would see the faces of those who violated or 
tormented her, but never at night and she would never know which ones had 
been responsible for the worst. The same would be true when she was whipped, 
except that they wanted her to see herself being whipped and so this once 
she would not be blindfolded. They, on the other hand, would don their masks 
and she would no longer be able to tell them apart. 

Her lover had helped her to her feet, still wrapped in her red cape, made 
her sit down on the arm of an easy chair near the fire, so that she could 
hear what they had to tell her and see what they wanted to show her. Her 
hands were still behind her back. They showed her the riding crop, which was 
long, black and delicate, made of thin bamboo encased in leather, the kind 
one sees in the windows of better riding equipment shops; the leather whip, 
which the first man she had seen had been carrying in his belt, was long and 
consisted of six lashes knotted at the end. There was a third whip of fairly 
thin cords, each with several knots at the end: the cords were quite stiff, 
as though they had been soaked in water, which in fact they had, as O 
discovered, for they caressed her belly with them and nudged open her 
thighs, so that she could feel how stiff and damp the cords were against the 
tender, inner skin. Then there were the keys and the steel chains on the 
console table. Along one entire wall of the library, halfway between floor 
and ceiling, ran a gallery which was supported by two columns. A hook was 
imbedded in one of them, just high enough for a man standing on tiptoe, with 
his arms stretched above his head, to reach. They told O, whose lover had 
taken her in his arms, with one" hand supporting her shoulders and the other 
in the furrow of her loins, which burned so she could hardly bear it, they 
told her that her hands would be untied, but merely so that they could be 
fastened anew, a short while later, to the pole, using these same bracelets 
and one of the steel chains. They said that, with the exception of her 
hands, which would be held just above her head, she would thus be able to 
move and see the blows coming: that in principle she would be whipped only 
on the thighs and buttocks, in other words between her waist and knees, in 
the same region which had been prepared in the car that had brought her 
here, when she had been made to sit naked on the seat; but that in all 
likelihood one of the four men present would Want to mark her thighs with 
the riding crop, which makes lovely long deep welts which last a long time. 
She would not have to endure all this at once; there would be ample time for 
her to scream, to struggle and to cry. They would grant her some respite, 
but as soon as she had caught her breath they would start in again, judging 
the results not from her screams or tears but from the size and color of the 
welts they had raised. They remarked to her that this method of judging the 
effectiveness of the whip-besides being equitable-also made it pointless for 
the victims to exaggerate their suffering in an effort to arouse pity and 
thus enabled them to resort to the same measures beyond the chateau walls, 
outdoors in the park-as was often done-or in any ordinary apartment or hotel 
room, assuming a gag was used (such as the one they produced and showed her 
there on the spot), for the gag stifles all screams and eliminates all but 
the most violent moans, while allowing tears to flow without restraint. 

There was no question of using it that night. On the contrary, they wanted 
to hear her scream; and the sooner the better. The pride she mustered to 
resist and remain silent did not long endure: they even heard her beg them 
to untie her, to stop for a second, just for a second. So frantically did 
she writhe, trying to escape the bite of the lashes, that she turned almost 
completely around, on the near side of the pole, for the chain which held 
her was long and although quite solid, was fairly slack. As a result, her 
belly and the front of her thighs were almost as marked as her backside. 
They made up their minds, after in fact having stopped for a moment, to 
begin again only after a rope had been attached first to her waist, then to 
the pole. Since they tied her tightly, to keep her waist snug to tie pole, 
her torso was forced slightly to one side and this in turn caused her 
buttocks to protrude in the opposite direction. From then on the blows 
landed on their target, unless aimed deliberately elsewhere. Given the way 
her lover had handed her over, had delivered her into this situation, O 
might have assumed that to beg him for mercy would have been the surest 
method for making him redouble his cruelty, so great was his pleasure in 
extracting, or having the others extract, from her this unquestionable proof 
of his power. And indeed he was the first to point out that the leather 
whip, the first they had used on her, left almost no marks (in contrast to 
the whip made of water-soaked cords, which marked almost upon contact and 
the riding crop, which raised immediate welts) and thus allowed them to 
prolong the agony and follow their fancies in starting and stopping. He 
asked them to use only the leather whip. 

Meanwhile, the man who liked women only for what they had in common with 
men, seduced by the available behind which was straining at the bonds 
knotted just below the waist, a behind made all the more enticing by its 
efforts to dodge the blows, called for an intermission in order to take 
advantage of it. He spread the two parts, which burned beneath his hands and 
penetrated-not without some difficulty-remarking as he did that the passage 
would have to be rendered more easily accessible. They all agreed that this 
could and would, be done. 

When they untied the young woman, she staggered and almost fainted, draped 
in her red cape. Before returning her to the cell she was to occupy, they 
sat her down in an armchair near the fire and outlined for her the rules and 
regulations she was to follow during her stay in the chateau and later in 
her daily life after she had left it (which did not mean regaining her 
freedom, however). Then they rang. The two young women who had first 
received her came in, bearing the clothes she was to wear during her stay 
and tokens by which those who had been hosts at the chateau before her 
arrival and those who would be after she had left, might recognize her. Her 
outfit was similar to theirs: a long dress with a full skirt, worn over a 
sturdy whalebone bodice gathered tightly at the waist and over a stiffly 
starched linen petticoat. The low-cut neck scarcely concealed the breasts 
which, raised by the constricting bodice, were only lightly veiled by the 
network of lace. The petticoat was white, as was the lace, and the dress and 
bodice were a sea-green satin. When O Was dressed and resettled in her chair 
beside the fire, her pallor accentuated by the color of the dress, the two 
young Women, who had not uttered a word, prepared to leave. One of the four 
friends seized one of them as she passed, made a sign for the other to wait 
and brought the girl he had stopped back toward O. He turned her around and 
holding her by the waist with one hand, lifted her skirt with the other, in 
order to demonstrate to O, he said, the practical advantages of the costume 
and show how well designed it was. He added that all one needed to keep the 
skirts raised was a simple belt, which made everything that lay beneath 
readily available. In fact, they often had the girls go about in the chateau 
or the park either like this, or with their skirts tucked up in front, waist 
high. They had the young woman show O how she would have to keep her skirt: 
rolled up several turns (like a lock of hair rolled in a curler) and secured 
tightly by a belt, either directly in front, to expose the belly, or in the 
middle of the back, to leave the buttocks free. In either case, skirt and 
petticoat fell diagonally away in large, cascading folds of intermingled 
material. Like O, the young woman's backside bore fresh welts from the 
riding crop. She left the room. 

Here is the speech they then delivered to O: 

"You are here to serve your masters. During the day, you will perform 
whatever domestic duties are assigned you, such as sweeping, putting back 
the books, arranging flowers, or waiting on table. Nothing more difficult 
than that But at the first word or sign from anyone you will drop whatever 
you are doing and ready yourself for what is really your one and only duty: 
to lend yourself. Your hands are not your own, nor are your breasts, nor, 
most especially, any of your bodily orifices, which we may explore or 
penetrate at will. You will remember at all times-or as constantly as 
possible-that you have lost all right to privacy or concealment and as a 
reminder of this fact, in our presence you will never close your lips 
completely, or cross your legs, or press your knees together (you may recall 
you were forbidden to do this the minute you arrived). This will serve as a 
constant reminder, to you as well as to us, that your mouth, your belly and 
your backside are open to us. You will never touch your breasts in our 
presences the bodice raises them toward us, that they may be ours. During 
the day you will therefore be dressed and if anyone should order you to lift 
your skirt, you will lift it; if anyone desires to use you in any manner 
whatsoever, he will use you, unmasked, but with this one reservation: the 
whip. The whip will be used only between dusk and dawn. But besides the 
whipping you receive from whoever may want to whip you, you will also be 
flogged in the evening, as punishment for any infractions of the rules 
committed during the day: for having been slow to oblige, for having raised 
your eyes and looked at the person addressing you or taking you-you must 
never look any of us in the face. If the costume we wear-in the evening-the 
one I am now wearing-leaves our sex exposed, it is not for the sake of 
convenience, for it would be just as convenient the other way, but for the 
sake of insolence, so that your eyes will be directed there upon it and 
nowhere else, so that you may learn that there resides your master, for 
whom, above all else, your lips are intended. During the day, when we are 
dressed in normal attire and you are clothed as you are now, the same rules 
will apply, except that when requested you will open your clothes and then 
close them again when we have finished with you. Another thing; at night you 
will have only your lips with which to honor us-and your widespread 
thighs-for your hands will be tied behind your back and you will be naked, 
as you were a short while ago. You will be blindfolded only to be maltreated 
and now that you have seen how you are whipped, to be flogged. And yes, by 
the way: while it is perfectly all right for you to grow accustomed to being 
whipped-since you are going to be every day throughout your stay-this is 
less for our pleasure than for your enlightenment. How true this is may be 
shown by the fact that on those nights when no one desires you, you will 
wait until the valet whose job it is comes to your solitary cell and 
administers what you are due to receive but we are not in the mood to mete 
out. Actually, both this flogging and the chain- which when attached to the 
ring of your collar keeps you more or less closely confined to your bed 
several hours a day-are intended less to make you suffer, scream, or shed 
tears than to make you feel, through this suffering, that you are not free 
but fettered and to teach you that you are totally dedicated to something 
outside yourself. When you leave here, you will be wearing on your third 
finger an iron ring, which will identify you. By then you will have learned 
to obey those who wear the same insignia and when they see it they will know 
that beneath your skirt you are constantly naked, however comely or 
commonplace your clothes may be and that this nakedness is for them. Should 
anyone find you in the least intractable, he will return you here. Now you 
will be shown to your cell." 

While they were talking to O, the two women who had come to dress her had 
been standing on either side of the stake where she had been whipped, 
without touching as though it terrified them, or as though they had been 
forbidden to touch it (which was more likely); when the man had finished, 
they came over to O, who realized that she was supposed to get up and follow 
them. She therefore got up, gathering her skirts in her arms to keep from 
tripping, for she was not used to long dresses and did not feel steady on 
the mules with thick soles and very high heels which only a thick satin 
strap, of the same green as her dress, kept from slipping off her feet. As 
she bent down she turned her head. The women were waiting, the men were no 
longer looking at her. Her lover, seated on the floor leaning against tike 
ottoman over which she had been thrown at the beginning of the evening, with 
his knees raised and his elbows on his knees, was toying with the leather 
whip. As she took her first step to join the women, her skirt grazed him. He 
raised his head and smiled, calling her by her name and he too stood up. 
Softly he caressed her hair, smoothed her eyebrows with the tip of his 
finger and softly kissed her on the lips. In a loud voice, he told her that 
he loved her. O, trembling, was terrified to notice that she answered "I 
love you," and that it was true. He pulled her against him and said: 
"Darling, sweetheart," kissed her on the neck and the curve of the cheek; 
she had let her head fall on his shoulder, which was covered by the purple 
robe. Very softly this time he repeated to her that he loved her and very 
softly added: "You're going to kneel down, caress me and kiss me," and he 
pushed her away, signaling to the women to move aside so he could lean back 
against the console. He was talk but the table was not very high and his 
long legs, sheathed in the same purple as his robe, were bent The open robe 
stiffened from beneath like drapes and the top of the console table slightly 
raised his heavy sex and the light fleece above it The three men approached. 
O knelt down on the rug, her green dress in a corolla around her. Her bodice 
squeezed her; her breasts, whose nipples were visible, were at the level of 
her lover's knees. "A little more light," said one of the men. As they were 
adjusting the lamp so that the beam of light would fall directly on his sex 
and on his mistress's face, which was almost touching it and on her hands 
which were caressing him from below, Rene suddenly ordered: "Say it again: I 
love you." O repeated "I love you," with such delight that her lips hardly 
dared brush the tip of his sex, which was still protected by its sheath of 
soft flesh. The three men, who were smoking, commented on her gestures, on 
the movement of her mouth closed and locked on the sex she had seized, as it 
worked its way up and down, on the way tears streamed down her ravaged face 
each time the swollen member struck the back of her throat and made her gag, 
depressing her tongue and causing her to feel nauseous. It was this same 
mouth which, half gagging on the hardened flesh which filled it, murmured 
again: "I love you." The two women had taken up positions to the right and 
left of Rene, who had one arm around each of their shoulders. O could hear 
the comments made by those present, but through their words she strained to 
hear her lover's moans, caressing him carefully, slowly and with infinite 
respect, the way she knew pleased him. O felt that her mouth was beautiful, 
since her lover condescended to thrust himself into it, since he deigned 
publicly to offer caresses to it, since, finally, he deigned to discharge in 
it. She received it as a god is received, she heard him cry out, heard the 
others laugh and when she had received it she fell, her face against the 
floor. The two women picked her up and this time they led her away. 

The mules hanged on the red tiles of the hallway, where doors succeeded 
doors, discreet and clean, with tiny locks, like the doors of the rooms in 
big hotels. O was working up the courage to ask whether each of these rooms 
was occupied and by whom, when one of her companions, whose voice she had 
not yet heard, said to her: 

'You're in the red wing and your valet's name is Pierre." 

"What valet?" said O, struck by the gentleness of the voice. "And what's 
your name?" 

"Andree." 

"Mine is Jeanne," said the second. 

"The valet is the one who has the keys," the first one went on, "the one who 
will chain and unchain you, who will whip you when you are to be punished 
and when the others have no time for you." 

"I was in the red wing last year," Jeanne said. Pierre was there already. He 
often came in at night. The valets have the keys and the right to use any of 
us in the rooms of their section." 

O was about to ask what kind of a person this Pierre was, but she did not 
have time to. As they turned a corner of the hallway, they made her halt 
before a door similar in all respects to the others: on a bench between this 
and the following door she noticed a sort of thick-set, ruddy peasant whose 
head was practically clean shaved, with small black eyes set deep in his 
skull and rolls of flesh on his neck He was dressed, like the valet in some 
operetta: a shirt whose lace frills peeked out from beneath his black vest, 
which itself was covered by a red jacket of the kind called a spencer. He 
had black breeches, white stockings and patent-leather pumps. He too was 
carrying a leather-thonged whip in his belt His hands were covered with red 
hair. He took a roaster key from his vest pocket, opened the door, ushered 
.the three women in and said: 

"I'm locking the door. Ring when you've finished." 

The cell was quite small and actually consisted of two -rooms. With the hall 
door closed, they found themselves in an antechamber which opened into the 
cell proper; in this same wall, inside the room itself, was another door 
which opened into the bathroom. Opposite the doors there was the window. 
Against the left wall, between the doors and the window, stood the head of a 
large square bed, which was very low and covered with furs. There was no 
other furniture, no mirror. The walls were bright red and the rug black. 
Andree pointed out to O that the bed was less a bed than a mattressed 
platform covered with a black, long-haired imitation fur material. The 
pillow, hard and flat like the mattress, was of the same reversible 
material. The only object on any of the walls was a thick, gleaming 
steel-ring which was set at about the same height above the bed as the hook 
in the stake had been above the floor of the library; from it descended a 
long steel chain directly onto the bed, its links forming a little pile, the 
other end being attached at arm's length to a padlocked hook, like a drapery 
pulled back and held in place by a curtain loop: 

"We have to give you your bath," Jeanne said. "I'll unfasten your dress." 

The only peculiar features of the bathroom were the Turkish-type toilet, 
located in the corner nearest the door and the fact that every inch of wall 
space was covered with mirrors. Jeanne and Andree did not allow O to go in 
until she was naked. They put her dress away in the closet next to the 
washbasin, where her mules and red cape already were and remained with her, 
so that when she had to squat down over the porcelain pedestal she found 
herself surrounded by a whole host of reflections, as exposed as in the 
library when unknown hands had taken her by force. 

"Wait until it's Pierre," said Jeanne, "and you'll see." 

"Why Pierre?" 

"When he comes to chain you, he may make you squat." 

O felt herself turn pale. "But why?" she said. 

"Because you have to," Jeanne replied. "But you're lucky." 

"Why lucky?" 

"Was it your lover who brought you here?" 

"Yes," O said. 

"They'll be a lot harder with you." 

"I don't understand ... ." 

"You will very soon. I'm ringing for Pierre. Well come and get you tomorrow 
morning." 

Andree smiled as she left and Jeanne, before following her, caressed the 
tips of O's breasts. O, completely taken aback, remained standing at the 
foot of the bed. With the exception of the collar and leather bracelets, 
which the water had stiffened when she had bathed and were tighter than 
before, O was naked. 

"Behold the lovely lady," said the valet as he entered. And he seized both 
her hands. He slipped one of the bracelet hooks into the other, so that her 
wrists were tightly joined, then clipped both these hooks to the ring of the 
necklace. Thus her hands were joined as in an attitude of prayer, at the 
level of her neck. All that remained to be done was to chain her to the wall 
with the chain that was lying on the bed and was attached to the ring above. 
He unfastened the hook by which the other end was attached and pulled on it 
in order to shorten it. O was forced to move to the head of the bed, where 
he made her He down. The chain clicked in the ring and was so tight that the 
young woman could do no more than move from one side of the bed to the other 
or stand up on either side of the headboard. Since the chain tended to 
shorten the collar, that is, pull it backward and her hands tended to pull 
it forward, an equilibrium was established, with her joined hands lying on 
her left shoulder and her head bending in that direction as well. The valet 
pulled the black cover up over O, but not before he had lifted her legs for 
a moment and pushed them back toward her chest, to examine the cleft between 
her thighs. He did not touch her further, did not say a word, turned out the 
light, which was a bracket lamp on the wall between the two doors and went 
out. 

Lying on her left side, alone in the darkness and silence, hot beneath her 
two layers of fur, of necessity motionless, O tried to figure out why there 
was so much sweetness mingled with the terror in her, or why her terror 
seemed itself so sweet. She realized that one of the things that most 
distressed her was the fact that she had been deprived of the use of her 
hands; not that her hands could have defended her (and did she really want 
to defend herself?), but had they been free they would at least have made 
the gesture, have made an attempt to repel the hands which seized her, the 
flesh which pierced her, to protect her loins from the whip. O's hands had 
been taken away from her; her body beneath the fur was inaccessible to her. 
How strange it was not to be able to touch one's own knees, or the hollow of 
one's own belly. The lips between her legs, her burning lips were forbidden 
her and perhaps they were burning because she knew they were open to the 
first comer: to the valet Pierre, if he cared to enter. She was surprised 
that the whipping she had received had left her so untroubled, so calm, 
whereas the thought that she would probably never know which of the four men 
had twice taken her from behind and whether it was the same man both times 
and whether it had been her lover, quite distressed her. She turned over 
slightly on her stomach, recalling that her lover loved the furrow between 
her buttocks which, except for this evening (if it had been he), he had 
never penetrated. She hoped it had been he; would she ask him? Ah, never! 
Again she saw the hand which in the car had taken her garter belt and 
panties and had stretched the garters so that she could roll her stockings 
down to above her knees. The memory was so vivid that she forgot her hands 
were bound and made the chain grate. And why, if she took the memory of the 
torture she had gone through so lightly, why did the very idea, the very 
word or sight of a whip make her heart beat wildly and her eyes close with 
terror? She did not stop to consider whether it was only terror; she was 
overwhelmed with panic: they would pull on her chain and haul her to her 
feet on the bed and they would whip her, with her belly glued to the wall 
they would whip her, whip her, the word kept turning in her head. Pierre 
would whip her, Jeanne had said he would. You're lucky, Jeanne had repeated, 
they'll be a lot harder on you. What had she meant by that? She no longer 
felt anything but the collar, the bracelets and the chain; her body was 
drifting away. She fell asleep. 

In the wee hours of the night, just before dawn when it is darkest and 
coldest, Pierre reappeared. He turned on the light in the bathroom, leaving 
the door open so that a square of light fell on the middle of the bed, on 
the spot where O's slender body was curled, making a small mound beneath the 
cover, which silently he pulled back. Since O was sleeping on her left side, 
her face to the window and her legs slightly drawn up, the view she offered 
him was that of her white flanks, which seemed even whiter against the black 
fur. He took the pillow from beneath her head and said politely: 

"Would you please stand up," and when she was on her knees, a position she 
managed by pulling herself up with the chain, he gave her a hand, taking her 
by the elbows so that she could stand up straight with her face to the wall. 
The square of light on the bed, which was faint, since the bed was black, 
illuminated her body, but not his gestures. She guessed, but could not see, 
that he was undoing the chain to rehook it to another link, so that it would 
remain taut and she could feel it growing tighter. Her feet, which were 
bare, were solidly planted on the bed. Nor was she able to see that he had 
in his belt not the leather whip but the black riding crop similar to the 
one they had hit her with while she was tied to the stake, but they had only 
used it twice on her and had not hit her hard. She felt Pierre's left hand 
on her waist, the mattress gave a little as, to steady himself, he put his 
right foot on it. At the same time as she heard a whistling noise in the 
semi-darkness O felt a terrible burning across her back and she screamed. 
Pierre flogged her with all his might. He did not wait for her screams to 
subside, but struck her again four times, being careful each time to lash 
her above or below the preceding spot, so that the traces would be all the 
clearer. Even after he had stopped she went on screaming and the tears 
streamed down into her open mouth. 

"Please be good enough to turn around," he said and since she, who was 
completely distracted, failed to obey, he took her by the hips without 
letting go of his riding crop, the handle of which brushed against her 
waist. When she was facing him, he moved back slightly and lowered his crop 
on the front of her thighs as hard as he could. The whole thing had lasted 
five minutes. When he had left, after having turned out the light and closed 
the bathroom door, O was left moaning in the darkness, swaying hack and 
forth along the wall at the end of her chain. She tried to stop moaning and 
to immobilize herself against the wall, whose gleaming percale was cool on 
her tortured flesh, as day slowly began to break. The tall window toward 
which she was turned, for she was leaning on one hip, was facing the east. 
It extended from floor to ceiling and except for the drapes-of the same red 
material as that on the wall- which graced it on either side and split into 
stiff folds below the curtain loops which held it, had no curtains. O 
watched the slow birth of pale dawn, trailing its mist among the clusters of 
asters outside at the foot of her window, until finally a poplar tree 
appeared. The yellow leaves from time to time fell in swirls, although there 
was no wind. In front of the window, beyond the bed of purple asters, there 
was a lawn, at the end of which was a pathway. It was broad daylight by now 
and O had not moved for a long time. A gardener appeared on the path, 
pushing a wheelbarrow. The iron wheel could be heard squeaking over the 
gravel. If he had come over to rake the leaves that had fallen in among the 
asters, the window was so tall and the room so small and bright that he 
would have seen O chained and naked and the marks of the riding crop on her 
thighs. The cuts were swollen and had formed narrow swellings much darker in 
color than the red of the walls. Where was her lover sleeping, the way he 
loved to sleep on quiet mornings? In what room, in what bed? Was he aware of 
the pain, the tortures to which he had delivered her? Was he the one who had 
decided what they would be? O recalled the prisoners she had seen in 
engravings and in history books, who also had been chained and whipped many 
years ago, centuries ago and had died. She did not wish to die, but if 
torture was the price she had to pay to keep her lover's love, then she only 
hoped he was pleased that she had endured it. All soft and silent she 
waited, waited for them to bring her back to him. 

None of the women had the keys to any locks, neither the locks to the doors 
nor the chains, the collars or bracelets, but every man carried a ring of 
three sets of keys, each of which, in the various categories, opened all the 
doors or all the padlocks, or all the collars. The valets had them too. But 
in the morning the valets who had been on the night shift were sleeping and 
it was one of the masters or another valet who came to open the locks. The 
man who came into O's cell was dressed in a leather jacket and was wearing 
riding breeches and boots. She did not recognize him. First he unlocked the 
chain on the wall and O was able to lie down on the bed. Before he unlocked 
her wrists, he ran his hand between her thighs, the way the first man with 
mask and gloves, whom she had seen in the small red drawing room, had done. 
It may have been the same one. His face was bony and fleshless, with that 
piercing look one associates with the portraits of old Huguenots and his 
hair was gray. O met his gaze for what seemed to be an endless time and 
suddenly freezing, she remembered it was forbidden to look at the masters 
above, the belt. She closed her eyes, but it was too late and she heard him 
laugh and say, as he finally freed her hands: 

"There will be a punishment for that after dinner." 

He said something to Jeanne and Andree, who had come in with him and were 
standing waiting on either side of the bed, after which he left. Andree 
picked up the pillow which was on the floor and the blanket that Pierre had 
turned down toward the foot of the bed when he had come to whip O, while 
Jeanne wheeled, toward the head of the bed, a serving table which had been 
brought into the hallway and on which were coffee, milk, sugar, bread, 
croissants and butter. 

"Hurry up and eat," said Andree. "It's nine o'clock. Afterward you can sleep 
till noon and when you hear the bell it will be time to get ready for lunch. 
You'll bathe and fix your hair. I'll come to make you up and lace up your 
bodice." 

"You won't be on duty till afternoon," Jeanne said. "In the library: you'll 
serve the coffee and liqueur and tend the fire." 

"And what about you?" O said. 

"We're only supposed to take care of you during the first twenty-four hours 
of your stay. After that you're on your own and will have dealings only with 
the men. We won't be able to talk to you and you won't be able to talk to us 
either." 

"Don't go," O said. "Stay a while longer and tell me ..." But she did not 
have time to finish her sentence. The door opened: it was her lover and he 
was not alone. It was her lover, dressed the way he used to when he had just 
gotten out of bed and lighted the first cigarette of the day: in striped 
pajamas and a blue dressing gown, the wool robe with the padded silk lapels 
which they had picked out together a year before. And his slippers were 
worn, she would have to buy him another pair. The two women disappeared, 
with no other sound except the rustling of silk as they lifted their skirts 
(all the skirts were a trifle long and trailed on the ground)-on the carpet 
the mules could not be heard. 

O, who was holding a cup of coffee in her left hand ass! a croissant in the 
other, was seated cross-legged, or rather half-cross-legged, on the edge of 
the bed, one of her legs dangling and the other tucked up under her. She did 
not move, but her cup suddenly began to shake in her hand and she dropped 
the croissant. 

"Pick it up," Rene said. They were his first words. 

She put the cup down on the table, picked up the partly eaten croissant and 
put it beside the cup. A fat croissant crumb still lay on the rug, beside 
her bare foot. This time Rene bent down and picked it up. Then he sat down 
near O, pulled her back down onto the bed and kissed her. She asked him if 
he loved her. He answered: "Yes, I love you!" then got to his feet and made 
her stand up too, softly running the cool palms of his hands, then his lips, 
over the welts. 

Since he had come in with her lover, O did not know whether or not she could 
look at the man who had entered with him and who, for the moment, had his 
back to them and was smoking a cigarette near the door. What followed was 
not of a nature to reassure her. 

"Come over here so we can see you," her lover said and having guided her to 
the foot of the bed, he pointed out to his companion that he had been right 
and he thanked him, adding that it would only be fair for him to take O 
first if he so desired. 

The unknown man, whom she still did not dare to look at, then asked her, 
after having run his hand over her breasts and down her buttocks, to spread 
her legs. 

"Do as he says," said Rene, who was holding her up. He too was standing and 
her back was against him. With his right hand he was caressing one breast 
and his other was on her shoulder. The unknown man had sat down on the edge 
of the bed, he had seized and slowly parted, drawing the fleece, the lips 
which protected the entrance itself. Rene pushed her forward, as soon as he 
realized what was wanted from her, so that she would be more accessible and 
his right arm slipped around her waist, giving him a better grip. 

This caress, to which she never submitted without a struggle and which 
always filled her with shame and from which she escaped as quickly as she 
could, so quickly in fact that she had scarcely had a chance to be touched, 
this caress which seemed a sacrilege to her, for she deemed it sacrilege for 
her lover to be on his knees, feeling that she should be on hers, she 
suddenly felt that she would not escape from it now and she saw herself 
doomed. For she moaned when the alien lips, which were pressing upon the 
mound of flesh whence the inner corolla emanates, suddenly inflamed her, 
left her to allow the hot tip of the tongue to inflame her even more; she 
moaned even more when the lips began again: she felt the hidden point harden 
and rise, that point caught in a long, sucking bite between teeth and lips, 
which did not let go, a long, soothing bite which made her gasp for breath. 
She lost her footing and found herself again lying on the bed, with Rene's 
mouth on her mouth; his two hands were pinning her shoulders to the bed, 
while two other hands beneath her knees were raising and opening her legs. 
Her own hands, which were beneath her back (for when Rene had propelled her 
toward the unknown man he had bound her wrists together by clipping the 
wristbands together), were grazed by the sex of the man who was caressing 
himself in the furrow of her buttocks before rising to strike hard into the 
depths of her belly. At the first stroke she cried out, as though it had 
been the lash of a whip, then again at each new stroke and her lover bit her 
mouth. The man tore himself abruptly away from her and fell back on the 
floor, as though struck by lightning and he too gave a cry. 

Rene freed O's hands, lifted her up and lay her down beneath the blanket on 
the bed. The man got up, Rene escorted him to the door. In a flash, O saw 
herself released, reduced to nothing, accursed. She had moaned beneath the 
lips of the stranger as never her lover had made her moan, cried out under 
the impact of a stranger's member as never her lover had made her cry out. 
She felt debased and guilty. She could not blame him if he were to leave 
her. But no, the door was closing again, he was staying with her, he was 
coming back, lying down beside her beneath the cover, he was slipping into 
her moist, hot belly and still holding her in this embrace, he said to her: 

"I love you. When I'll also have given you to the valets, I'll come in one 
night and have you flogged till you bleed." 

The sun had broken through the mist and flooded the room. But only the 
midday bell woke them up. 

O was at a loss what to do. Her lover was there, as close, as tenderly 
relaxed and surrendered as he was in the bed in that low-ceilinged room to 
which, almost every night since they had begun living together, he came to 
sleep with her. It was a big, mahogany, English-style four-poster bed, 
without the awning and the posters at the head were taller than those at the 
foot. He always slept on her left and whenever he awoke, even were it in the 
middle of the night, his hands inevitably reached down for her legs. This is 
why she never wore anything but a nightgown or, if she had on pajamas, never 
put on the bottoms. He did so now; she took that hand and kissed it, without 
ever daring to ask him for anything. But he spoke. Holding her by the 
collar, with two fingers slipped in between the neck and collar, he told her 
it was his intention that henceforth she should be shared by him and those 
of his choosing and by those whom he did not know who were connected to the 
society of the chateau, shared as she had been the previous evening. That 
she was dependent on him and on him alone, even though she might receive 
orders from persons other than himself, whether he was present or absent, 
for as a matter of principle he was participating in whatever might be 
demanded of or inflicted on her and that it was he who possessed and enjoyed 
her through those into whose hands she had been given, by the simple fact 
that he had given her to them. She must greet them and submit to them with 
the same respect with which she" greeted him, as though they were so many 
reflections of him. Thus he would possess her as a god possesses his 
creatures, whom he lays hold of in the guise of a monster or a bird, of an 
invisible spirit or a state of ecstasy. He did not wish to leave her. The 
more he surrendered her, the more he would hold her dear. The fact that he 
gave her was to him a proof and ought to be one for her as well, that she 
belonged to him: one can only give what belongs to you. He gave her only to 
reclaim her immediately, to reclaim her enriched in his eyes, like some 
common object which had been used for some divine purpose and has thus been 
consecrated. For a long time he had wanted to prostitute her and he was 
delighted to feel that the pleasure he was deriving was even greater than he 
had hoped and that it bound him to her all the more, as it bound her to him, 
all the more so because, through it, she would be more humiliated and 
ravaged. Since she loved him, she could not help loving whatever derived 
from him. O listened and trembled with happiness, because he loved her, all 
acquiescent she trembled. He doubtless guessed it, for he went on: 

"It's because it's easy for you to consent that I want from you what it will 
be impossible for you to consent to, even if you agree ahead of time, even 
if you say yes now and imagine yourself capable of submitting. You won't be 
able not to revolt. Your submission will be obtained in spite of you, not 
only for the inimitable pleasure that I and others will derive from it, but 
also so that you will be made aware of what has been done to you." 

O was on the verge of saying that she was his slave and that she bore her 
bonds cheerfully. He stopped her. 

"Yesterday you were told that as long as you are in the chateau you are not 
to look a man in the face or speak to him. The same applies to me as well: 
with me you shall remain silent and obey. I love you. Now get up. From now 
on the only times you will open your mouth here in the presence of a man 
will be to cry out or to caress." 

So O got up. Rene remained lying on the bed. She bathed and arranged her 
hair. The contact of her bruised loins with the tepid water made her shiver 
and she had to sponge herself without rubbing to keep from reviving the 
burning pain. She made up her mouth but not her eyes, powdered herself and 
still naked but with lowered eyes, came back into the room. 

Rene was looking at Jeanne, who had come in and was standing at the head of 
the bed, she too with her head bowed, unspeaking. He told her to dress O. 
Jeanne took the bodice of green satin, the white petticoat, the dress, the 
green mules and having hooked up O's bodice in front, began to lace it up 
tight in the back. The bodice was long and stiff, stoutly whale-boned as 
during the period when wasp waists were in style, with gussets to support 
the breasts. The more the bodice was tightened, the more the breasts were 
lifted, supported as they were by the gussets and the nipples displayed more 
prominently. At the same time, the constriction of the waist caused her 
stomach to protrude and her backside to arch put sharply. The strange thing 
was that this armor was very comfortable and to a certain extent restful. It 
made you stand up very straight, but it made you realize-why, it was hard to 
tell unless it was by contrast-the freedom, or rather the availability, of 
that part of the body left unrestricted. The full skirt and the 
trapezoid-shaped neckline running from the base of the neck to the tips of 
the breasts and across the full length of the bosom, seemed to the girl to 
be less a protective outfit than an instrument designed to provoke or 
present. When Jeanne had tied the laces in a double knot, O took her dress 
from the bed. It was a one-piece dress, with the petticoat attached to the 
skirt like a detachable lining and the bodice, cross-laced in front and tied 
in the back, was thus able to follow more or less the delicate contours of 
her bosom, depending on how tightly the bodice was laced. Jeanne had laced 
it very tight and through the open door O was able to see herself reflected 
in the bathroom mirror, slim and lost in the green satin which billowed at 
her hips, as a hoop skirt would have done. The two women were standing side 
by side. Jeanne reached out to smooth a wrinkle in the green dress and her 
breasts stirred in the lace fringes of her bodice, breasts whose tips were 
long and the halos brown. Her dress was of yellow faille. 

Rene, who had come over to the two women, said to O: "Watch." And to Jeanne: 
"Lift your dress." With both hands she raised the crackling silk and the 
crinoline which lined it, revealing as she did a golden belly, gleaming 
thighs and knees and a tight black triangle. Rene put his hand on it and 
slowly explored and with the other excited the nipple of one breast. 

"Merely so you can see," he said to O. 

O saw. She saw his ironic but attentive face, his eyes carefully watching 
Jeanne's half-open mouth and her neck, which was thrown back, tightly 
circled by the leather collar. What pleasure was she giving him, yes she, 
that this girl or any other could not? 

"That hadn't occurred to you?" he added. 

No, that had not occurred to her. She had collapsed against the wall, 
between the two doors, her arms hanging limp. There was no longer any need 
to tell her to keep quiet. How could she have spoken? Perhaps he was touched 
by her despair. He left Jeanne and took her in his arms, calling her his 
love and his life, saying over and over again that he loved her. The hand he 
was caressing her neck with was moist with the odor of Jeanne. And so? The 
despair which had overwhelmed her slowly ebbed: he loved her, ah he loved 
her. He was free to enjoy himself with Jeanne, or with others, he loved her. 
"I love you," he had whispered in her ear, "I love you," so softly it was 
scarcely audible. "I love you." He did not leave until he saw that her eyes 
were clear and her expression calm, contented. 

Jeanne took O by the hand and led her out into the hallway. Their mules 
again made a resounding noise on the tile floor and again they found a valet 
seated on a bench between the doors. He was dressed like Pierre, but it was 
not Pierre. This one was tall, dry and had dark hair. He preceded them and 
showed them into an antechamber where, before a wrought-iron door which 
stood between two tall green drapes, two other valets were waiting, some 
white dogs with russet spots lying at their feet. 

"That's the enclosure," Jeanne murmured. But the valet who was walking in 
front of them heard her and turned around. O was amazed to see Jeanne turn 
deathly pale and let go of her hand, let go of her dress which she was 
holding lightly with her other hand and sink to her knees on the black tile 
floor-for the antechamber was tiled in black marble. The two valets near the 
gate burst out laughing. One of them came over to O and politely invited her 
to follow him, opened a door opposite the one she had just entered and stood 
aside. She heard laughter and the sound of footsteps, then the door closed 
behind her. She never-no, never-learned what had happened, whether Jeanne 
had been punished for having spoken and if so what the punishment had been, 
or whether she had simply yielded to a caprice on the part of the valet, or 
whether in throwing herself on her knees she had been obeying some rule or 
trying to move the valet to pity and whether she had succeeded. During her 
initial stay in the chateau, which lasted two weeks, she only noted that, 
although the rule of silence was absolute, it was rare that they did not try 
and break it while they were alone with the valets, either being taken to or 
from some place in the chateau, or during meals, especially during the day. 
It was as though clothing gave them a feeling of assurance which nakedness 
and nocturnal chains and the masters' presence, destroyed. She also noticed 
that, whereas the slightest gesture which might have been construed as an 
advance toward one of the masters seemed quite naturally inconceivable, the 
same was not true for the valets. They never gave orders, although the 
courtesy of their requests was as implacable as an order. They had 
apparently been enjoined to punish to the letter infractions of the rules 
which occurred in their presence and to punish them on the spot. Thus on 
three occasions O saw girls who were caught talking thrown to the floor and 
whipped-once in the hallway leading to the red wing and twice again in the 
refectory they had just entered. So it was possible to be whipped in broad 
daylight, despite what they had told her the first evening, as though what 
happened with the valets did not count and was left to their discretion. 

Daylight made their outfits look strange and menacing. Some valets wore 
black stockings and in place of the red jacket and the white ruffled shirt, 
a soft, wide-sleeved shirt of red silk, gathered at the neck and with the 
sleeves also gathered at the wrists. It was one of these valets who, on the 
eighth day at noon, his whip already in his hand, made a buxom blonde named 
Madeleine, who was seated not far from O, get up off her stool. Madeleine, 
whose bosom was all milk and roses, had smiled at him and spoken a few words 
so quickly that O had missed them. Before he had time to touch her she was 
on her knees, her hands, so white against the black silk, lightly stroking 
the still dormant sex, which she took out and brought to her half-open 
mouth. That time she was not whipped. And since he was then the only monitor 
in the refectory and since he closed his eyes as he accepted the caress, the 
other girls began talking. So it was possible to bribe the valets. But what 
was the use? If there was one rule to which O had trouble submitting and 
indeed never really submitted to completely, it was the rule forbidding them 
to look the men in the face-considering that the rule applied to the valets 
as well, O felt herself in constant danger, so compelling was her curiosity 
about faces and she was in fact whipped by both the valets, not, in truth, 
each time they noticed her doing it (for they took some liberties with the 
instructions and perhaps cared enough about the fascination they exercised 
not to deprive themselves, by too strict or efficacious an application of 
the rules, of the gazes which would leave their face or mouth only to return 
to their sex, their whips and their hands and then start in all over again), 
but only when in all probability they wanted to humiliate her. No matter how 
cruelly they treated her when they had made up their minds to do so, she 
none the less never had the courage, or the cowardice, to throw herself at 
their knees and though she submitted to them at times she never tempted or 
urged them on. As for the rule of silence, it meant so little to her that, 
except in the case of her lover, she did not once break it, replying by 
signals whenever another girl would take advantage of their guards' 
momentary distraction to speak to her. This was generally during meals, 
which were taken in the room into which they had been ushered, when the tall 
valet accompanying them had turned around to Jeanne. The walls were black 
and the stone floor was black, the long table, of heavy glass, was black too 
and each girl had a round stool covered with black leather on which to sit. 
They had to lift their skirts to sit down and in so doing O rediscovered, 
the moment she felt the smooth, cold leather beneath her thighs, that first 
moment when her lover had made her take off her stockings and panties and 
sit in the same manner on the back seat of the car. Conversely, after she 
had left the chateau and dressed like everyone else except for the fact that 
beneath her innocuous suit or dress she was naked, whenever she had to lift 
her petticoat and skirt to sit down beside her lover, or beside another, 
were it on the seat of a car or the bench of a cafe, it was the chateau she 
rediscovered, the breasts proffered in the silk bodices, the hands and 
mouths to which nothing was denied and the terrible silence. And yet nothing 
had been such a comfort to her as the silence, unless it was the chains. The 
chains and the silence, which should have bound her deep within herself, 
which should have smothered her, strangled her, on the contrary freed her 
from herself. What would have become of her if she had been granted the 
right to speak and the freedom of her hands, if she had been free to make a 
choice, when her lover prostituted her before his own eyes? True, she did 
speak as she was being tortured, but can moans and cries be classed as 
words? Besides, they often stilled her by gagging. Beneath the gazes, 
beneath the hands, beneath the sexes that defiled her, the whips that rent 
her, she lost herself in a delirious absence from herself which restored her 
to love and perhaps, brought her to the edge of death. She was anyone, 
anyone at all, any one of the other girls, opened and forced like her, girls 
whom she saw being opened and forced, for she did see it, even when she was 
not obliged to have a hand in it. 

Thus, less than twenty-four hours after her arrival, during her second day 
there, she was taken after the meal into the library, there to serve coffee 
and tend the fire. Jeanne, whom the black-haired valet had brought back, 
went with her as did another girl named Monique. It was this same valet who 
took them there and remained in the room, stationed near the stake to which 
O had been attached. The library was still empty. The French doors faced 
west and in the vast, almost cloudless sky the autumn sun slowly pursued its 
course, its rays lighting, on a chest of drawers, an enormous bouquet of 
sulphur-colored chrysanthemums which smelled of earth and dead leaves. 

"Did Pierre mark you last night?" the valet asked O. 

She nodded that he had. 

"Then you should show it," he said. "Please roll up your dress." 

He waited till she had rolled her robe up behind, the way Jeanne had done 
the evening before and till Jeanne had helped her fasten it there. Then he 
told her to light the fire. O's backside up to her waist, her thighs, her 
slender legs, were framed in the cascading folds of green silk and white 
linen. The five welts had turned black. The fire was ready on the hearth, 
all O had to do was ignite the straw beneath the kindling, which leaped into 
flame. Soon the branches of apple wood caught, then the oak logs, which 
burned with tall, crackling, almost colorless flames which were almost 
invisible in the daylight, but which smelled good. Another valet entered and 
placed a tray filled with coffee cups on the console, from which the lamp 
had been removed, then left the room. O went over near the console, while 
Monique and Jeanne remained standing on either side of the fireplace. 

Just then two men came in and the first valet in turn left the room. O 
thought she recognized one of the men from his voice, one of those who had 
forced her the previous evening, the one who had asked that her rear be made 
more easily accessible. As she poured the coffee into the small black and 
gold cups, which Monique handed around with the sugar, she stole a glance at 
them. So it was this thin, blond boy, a mere stripling, with an English air 
about him. He was speaking again; now she was certain. The other man was 
also fair, thick set with a heavy face. Both of them were seated in the big 
leather armchairs, their feet near the fire, quietly smoking and reading 
their papers, paying no more heed to the women than if they had not been 
there. Now and then the rustle of a paper was heard, or the sound of coals 
falling on the hearth. From time to time O put another log on the fire. She 
was seated on a cushion on the floor beside the wood basket, Monique and 
Jeanne, also on the floor, across from her. Their flowing skirts overlapped 
one another. Monique's skirt was a dark red. Suddenly, but only after an 
hour had elapsed, the blond boy called Jeanne, then Monique. He told them to 
bring the ottoman (it was the same ottoman on which O had been spread-eagled 
the night before). Monique did not wait for further instructions, she 
kneeled down, bent over, her breasts crushed against the fur and holding 
both corners of the ottoman in her hands. When the young man had Jeanne lift 
the red skirt, she did not stir. Jeanne was then obliged to undo his 
clothing-and he gave her the order in the most churlish manner-and take 
between her hands that sword of flesh which had so cruelly pierced O at 
least once. It swelled and stiffened beneath the closed palm and O saw these 
same hands, Jeanne's tiny hands, spreading Monique's thighs, into the hollow 
of which, slowly and in short spasms which made her moan, the lad plunged. 

The other man, who was watching in silence, motioned to O to approach and 
without taking his eyes off the spectacle, toppled her forward over one arm 
of his chair- and her raised skirt gave him an unhindered view of her 
backside-and seized her womb with his hand. 

It was in this position that Rene found her when, a minute later, he opened 
the door. 

"Please don't let me disturb you," he said and he sat down on the floor, on 
the same cushion where O had been sitting beside the fire before she had 
been called. He watched her closely and smiled every time the hand which was 
holding her probed and returned, seizing both front and rear apertures at 
once and working deeper and deeper as they opened further, wrenching from 
her a moan which she could no longer restrain. 

Monique had long since gotten back to her feet, Jeanne was fiddling with the 
fire in place of O. She brought Rene a glass of whisky and he kissed her 
hand as she handed it to him, then drank it down without taking his eyes off 
O. 

The man who was still holding her then said: 

"Is she yours?" 

"Yes," Rene replied. 

"James is right," the other went on, "she's too narrow. She has to be 
widened." 

"Not too much, mind you," said James. 

"Whatever you say," Rene said, getting to his feet. "You're a better judge 
than I." And he rang. 

For the next eight days, between dusk when her stint in the library came to 
an end and that hour of the night-which was generally eight or ten 
o'clock-when she was returned to her cell, in chains and naked beneath her 
red cape, O wore an ebonite shaft simulating an erect male member which was 
inserted behind and held in place by three small chains connected to a 
leather belt around her hips, in such a way that the internal movements of 
her muscles could not expel it. One little chain followed the furrow of her 
buttocks, the two others the fold on either side of the belly's triangle, in 
order not to prevent anyone from penetrating that side if need be. 

When Rene had rung, it was to have the coffer brought in which contained, or 
one of whose compartments contained, an assortment of small chains and belts 
and whose other held a variety of these shafts, ranging from the very thin 
to the very thick. They all had one feature in common, namely that they 
flared at the base, to make it impossible for them to slide up inside the 
body, an accident which might have produced the opposite effect from that 
desired, that is it might have allowed the ring of flesh to tighten up 
again, whereas the purpose of the shaft was to distend it. Thus quartered 
and quartered each day a little more, for James, who made her kneel down, or 
rather He prone, to watch while Jeanne or Monique, or whichever girl 
happened to be there, fastened the shaft that he had chosen, each day chose 
a thicker one. At the evening meal, which the girls took together in the 
same refectory, after their bath, naked and powdered, O still wore it and 
everyone could see that she was wearing it, because of the little chains and 
the belt. It was only removed, by the valet, when he came to chain her to 
the wall for the night if no one had asked for her, or, if someone had, when 
he locked her hands behind her if he had to take her to the library. Rare 
were the nights when someone did not appear to make use of this passage thus 
rapidly rendered as easy as, though still narrower than, the other. After 
eight days, there was no longer any need for an instrument and O's lover 
told her that he was happy she was now doubly open and that he would make 
certain she remained so. At the same time, he warned her that he was leaving 
and that she would not see him during the last seven days she was to spend 
in the chateau, before he came back to pick her up and take her back to 
Paris. 

"But I love you," he added, "I do love you. Don't forget me." 

Oh, how could she forget him! He was the hand that blindfolded her, the whip 
wielded by the valet Pierre, he was the chain above her head, the unknown 
man who came down on her and all the voices which gave her orders were his 
voice. Was she growing weary? No. By dint of being defiled and desecrated, 
it seems that she must have grown used to outrages, by dint of being 
caressed, to caresses, if not to the whip by dint of being whipped. A 
terrible surfeit of pain and pleasure should have by slow degrees cast her 
upon benumbing banks, into a state bordering on sleep or somnambulism. On 
the contrary. The bodice which held her straight, the chains which kept her 
submissive, her refuge of silence-these may have been responsible in part-as 
was the constant spectacle of girls being handed over and used as she was 
and even when they were not, the spectacle of the constantly available 
bodies. Also the spectacle and the awareness of her own body. Daily and so 
to speak, ceremoniously soiled with saliva and sperm, she felt herself 
literally to be the repository of impurity, the sink mentioned in the 
Scriptures. And yet those parts of her body most constantly offended, having 
become less sensitive, at the same time seemed to her to have become more 
beautiful and as it were, ennobled: her mouth closed upon anonymous members, 
the tips of her breasts constantly fondled by hands and between her 
quartered thighs the twin, contiguous paths wantonly ploughed. That she 
should have been ennobled and gained in dignity through being prostituted 
was a source of surprise and yet dignity was indeed the right term. She was 
illuminated by it, as though from within and her bearing bespoke calm, while 
on her face could be detected the serenity and imperceptible smile that one 
surmises rather than actually sees in the eyes of hermits. 

When Rene had informed her that he was leaving, night had already fallen. O 
was naked in her cell and was waiting for them to come and take her to the 
refectory. As for her lover, he was dressed as usual, in a suit he wore 
every day in town. When he took her in his arms, the rough tweed of his 
clothes irritated the tips of her breasts. He kissed her, lay her down on 
the bed, lay down beside her and tenderly and slowly and gently, took her, 
alternating between the two tracks open to him, before finally spilling 
himself into her mouth, which he then kissed again. 

"Before I leave," he said, "I would like to have you whipped and this time 
I'll ask your permission. Do you agree?" 

She agreed to it. 

"I love you," he repeated. "Ring for Pierre." 

She rang. Pierre chained her hands above her head, to the chain of the bed. 
When she was thus bound, her lover kissed her again, standing beside her on 
the bed. Again he told her that he loved her, then he got down off the bed 
and nodded for Pierre. He watched her struggle, so fruitlessly; he listened 
to her moans swell and become cries. When her tears flowed, he sent Pierre 
away. She still found the strength to tell him again that she loved him. 
Then he kissed her drenched face, her gasping mouth, undid her bonds, laid 
her down and left. 

To say that O began to await her lover the minute he left her is a vast 
understatement: she was henceforth nothing but vigil and night. During the 
day she was like a painted countenance, whose skin is soft and mouth is meek 
and-this was the only time that she abided by the rule-whose eyes were 
constantly lowered. She made and tended the fire, poured and offered the 
coffee and liqueurs, lighted the cigarettes, she arranged the flowers and 
folded the newspapers like a young girl in her parents' living room, so 
limpid with her open neck and leather collar, her tight bodice and 
prisoner's bracelets, that all it took for the men whom she was serving was 
to order her to remain by their sides while they were violating another girl 
to make them want to violate her as well; which doubtless explains why she 
was treated even worse than before. Had she sinned? or had her lover left 
her so that the very people to whom he had loaned her would feel freer to 
dispose of her? In any case, the fact remains that on the second day 
following his departure as, at nightfall, she had just undressed and was 
looking in the bathroom mirror at the almost vanished welts made by Pierre's 
riding crop on the front of her thighs, Pierre entered. There were still two 
hours before dinner. He told her that she would not dine in the common room 
and said to get ready, pointing to the Turkish toilet in the corner, over 
which she had to squat, as Jeanne had warned her she would in the presence 
of Pierre. All the while she remained there, he stood contemplating her, she 
could see him in the mirrors and see herself and was incapable of holding 
back the water which escaped from her body. He waited then until she had 
bathed and powdered herself. She was going to get her mules and red cape 
when he stopped her and added, fastening her hands behind her back, that 
there was no need to, but that she should wait a moment for him. She sat 
down on a corner of the bed. Outside it was storming, a tempest of cold rain 
and wind and the poplar tree near the window swayed back and forth beneath 
the gusts. From time to time a pale wet leaf would splatter against the 
window panes. It was as dark as in the middle of the night, although the 
hour of seven had not yet struck, for autumn was well advanced and the days 
were growing shorter. 

When Pierre returned, he was carrying the same blindfold with which he had 
blindfolded her the first evening. He also had a long chain, which made a 
clanking noise, a chain similar to the one fastened to the wall. O had the 
impression that he couldn't make up his mind whether to put the blindfold or 
the chain on her first. She was gazing out at the rain, not caring what they 
wanted from her, thinking only that Rene had said he would come back, that 
there were still five days and five nights to go and that she had no idea 
where he was or whether he was alone and if he was not alone, who he was 
with. But he would come back. Pierre had laid the chain on the bed and 
without interrupting O's daydream, had covered her eyes with the blindfold 
of black velvet. It was slightly rounded below the sockets of the eyes and 
fitted the cheekbones perfectly, making it impossible to get the slightest 
peek or even to raise the eyelids. Blessed darkness like unto her own night, 
never had O greeted it with such joy, blessed chains that bore her away from 
herself. 

Pierre fastened the chain to the ring in her collar and invited her to 
follow him. She got up, felt herself being pulled forward and walked. Her 
bare feet were icy cold on the tiles and she gathered she was following the 
hallway of the red wing; then the ground, which was stall as cold, became 
rough underfoot: she was walking on a stone floor, made of sandstone or 
granite. Twice the valet made her stop, she heard the sound of a key in a 
lock, of a lock being turned and opened, then locked again. "Careful of the 
steps," said Pierre and she went down a staircase and once she stumbled. 
Pierre caught her around the waist. He had never touched her except to chain 
or beat her, but here he was now forcing her down onto the cold steps, which 
she tried to grasp with her bound hands to keep from slipping and he was 
taking her breasts. His mouth moved from one to the other and as he pressed 
against her, she could feel him slowly rising. He did not help her up until 
he had taken his pleasure with her. Damp and trembling with cold, she 
finally descended the last steps and heard another door open, which she went 
through and immediately felt a thick rug beneath her feet There was another 
slight tug on the chain, then Pierre's hands were loosing her hands and 
untying her blindfold: she was in a round, vaulted room, which was very 
small and low: the walls and arches were of unplastered stone and the joints 
in the masonry were visible. The chain which was attached to her collar was 
fastened to the wall by an eye-bolt opposite the door, which was set about 
three feet above the floor and allowed her to move no more than two steps 
forward. There was neither a bed nor anything that might have served as a 
bed, nor was there any blanket, only three or four Moroccan-type cushions, 
but they were out of reach and clearly not intended for her. Within reach, 
however, in a niche from which emanated the little light which lighted the 
room, was a wooden tray on which were some water, fruit and bread. The heat 
from the radiators, which had been installed along the base of the walls and 
set into the walls themselves to form around the entire room a sort of 
burning plinth, was none the less insufficient to overcome the odor of earth 
and mud which is the odor of ancient prisons and in old chateaux, of 
uninhabited dungeons. In that hot semi-darkness, into which no sound 
intruded, O soon lost all track of time. There was no longer any day or 
night, the light never went out. Pierre, or some other valet-it hardly 
mattered which-replaced the water, fruit and bread on the tray whenever it 
was gone and took her to bathe in a nearby dungeon. She never saw the men 
who came in, for each time a valet preceded them to blindfold her eyes and 
removed it only after they had left. She also lost track of them, of who 
they were and how many there were and neither her soft hands nor her lips 
blindly caressing were ever able to identify who they were touching. At 
times there were several, more often only one, but each time, before they 
came near her, she was made to kneel down facing the wall, the ring of her 
collar fastened to the same eye-bolt to which the chain was attached and 
whipped. She placed her palms against the wall and pressed her face against 
the back of her hands, to keep from scratching it against the stones; but 
she scraped her knees and her breasts on them. Thus she lost track of the 
tortures and screams which were smothered by the vault. She waited. Suddenly 
time no longer stood still. In her velvet night her chain was unfastened. 
She had been waiting for three months, three days, or ten days, or ten 
years. She felt herself being wrapped in a heavy cloth and someone taking 
her by the shoulders and knees, lifting and carrying her. She found herself 
in her cell, lying tinder the black fur cover, it was early afternoon, her 
eyes were open, her hands free and Rene was sitting beside her, stroking her 
hair. 

"You must get dressed now," he said, "we're leaving." 

She took a last bath, he brushed her hair, handed her powder and lipstick to 
her. When she returned to her cell, her suit, her blouse, her slip, her 
stockings and her shoes were on the foot of the bed, as were her gloves and 
handbag. There was even the coat she wore over her suit when the weather 
turned brisk and a square silk scarf to protect her neck, but no garter belt 
or panties. She dressed slowly, rolling her stockings down to just above her 
knees and she did not put on her suit coat because it was very warm in her 
cell. Just then, the man who had explained on the first evening what would 
be expected of her, came in. He unlocked the collar and bracelets which had 
held her captive for two weeks. Was she freed of them? or did she have the 
feeling something was missing? She said nothing, scarcely daring to run her 
hands over her wrists, not daring to lift them to her throat. 

Then he asked her to choose, from among the exactly identical rings which he 
showed to her in a small wooden box, the one which fit her left ring finger. 
They were strange iron rings, banded with gold inside and the signet was 
wide and as massive as that of an actual signet ring, but it was convex and 
for design bore a three-spoked wheel inlaid in gold, with each spoke 
spiraling back upon itself like the solar wheel of the Celts. The second 
ring she tried, though a trifle snug, fit her exactly. It was heavy on her 
hand and the gold gleamed as though furtively in the dull gray of the 
polished iron. Why iron and why gold and this insignia she did not 
understand? It was impossible to talk in this room draped in red, where the 
chain was still on the wall above the bed, where the black, still rumpled 
cover was lying on the floor, this room into which the valet Pierre might 
emerge, was sure to emerge, absurd in his opera outfit, in the dull light of 
November. 

She was wrong, Pierre did not appear. Rene had her put on the coat to her 
suit and her long gloves which covered the bottom of her sleeves. She took 
her scarf, her bag and carried her coat over her arm. The heels of her shoes 
made less noise on the hallway floor than had her mules, the doors were 
closed, the antechamber was empty. O was holding her lover by the hand. The 
stranger who was accompanying them opened the wrought-iron gates which 
Jeanne had said were the enclosure, which was now no longer guarded either 
by valets or dogs. He lifted one of the green velvet curtains and ushered 
them both through. The curtains fell back into place. They heard the gate 
closing. They were alone in another antechamber which looked onto the lawn. 
All there was left to do was descend the steps leading down from the stoop, 
before which O recognized the car. 

She sat down next to her lover, who took the wheel and started off. After 
they had left the grounds, through the porte-cochere which was wide open, he 
stopped a few hundred meters farther on and kissed her. It was on the 
outskirts of a small, peaceful town, which they crossed through as they 
continued on their route. O was able to read the name on the road sign: 
Roissy. 

 II Sir Stephan 

The apartment where O lived was situated on the He Saint-Louis, under the 
eaves of an old house which faced south and overlooked the Seine. All the 
rooms, which were spacious and low, had sloping ceilings and the two rooms 
at the front of the house each opened onto a balcony set into the sloping 
roof. One of them was O's room; the other, in which bookshelves filled one 
wall from floor to ceiling on either side of the fireplace, served as a 
living room, a study and even as a bedroom in case of necessity. Facing the 
two windows was a big couch and there was a large antique table before the 
fireplace. It was here that they dined whenever the tiny dining room, which 
faced the interior courtyard and was decorated with dark green serge, was 
really too small to accommodate the guests. Another room, which also looked 
onto the courtyard, was Rene's and it was here that he dressed and kept his 
clothes. O shared the yellow bathroom with him; the kitchen, also yellow, 
was tiny. A cleaning woman came in every day. The flooring of the rooms 
overlooking the courtyard was of red tile, those antique hexagonal tiles 
which in old Paris hotels are used to cover the stairs and landings above 
the second story. Seeing them again gave O a shock and made her heart beat 
faster: they were the same tiles as the ones in the hallways at Roissy, Her 
room was small, the pink and black chintz curtains were closed, the fire was 
glowing behind the metallic screen, the bed was made, the covers turned 
back. 

"I bought you a nylon nightgown," Rene said. "You've never had one before." 

Yes, a white pleated nylon nightgown, tailored and tasteful like the 
clothing of Egyptian statuettes, an almost transparent nightgown was 
unfolded on the edge of the bed, on the side where O slept. O tied a thin 
belt around her waist, over the elastic waistband of the nightgown itself 
and the material of the gown was so light that the projection of the 
buttocks colored it a pale pink. Everything-save for the curtains and the 
panel hung with the same material against which the head of the bed was set 
and the two small armchairs upholstered with the same chintz-everything in 
the room was white: the walls, the fringe around the mahogany four-poster 
bed and the bearskin rug on the floor. Seated before the fire in her white 
nightgown, O listened to her lover. 

He began by saying that she should not think that she was now free. With one 
exception and that was that she was free not to love him any longer and to 
leave him immediately. But if she did love him, then she was in no wise 
free. She listened to him without saying a word, thinking how happy she was 
that he wanted to prove to himself-it mattered little how-that she belonged 
to him and thinking too that he was more than a little naive not to realize 
that this proprietorship was beyond any proof. But did he perhaps realize it 
and want to emphasize it merely because he derived a certain pleasure from 
it? She gazed into the fire as he talked, but he did not, not daring to meet 
her eyes. He was standing, pacing back and forth. Suddenly he said to her 
that, for a start, he wanted her to listen to him with her knees unclasped 
and her arms unfolded, for she was sitting with her knees together and her 
arms folded around them. So she lifted her nightgown and on her knees, or, 
rather, squatting on her heels in the manner of Carmelites or of Japanese 
women, she waited. The only thing was, since her knees were spread, she 
could feel the light, sharp pricking of the white fur between her half-open 
thighs; he came back to it again: she was not opening her legs wide enough. 
The word "open" and the expression "opening her legs" were, on her lover's 
lips, charged with such uneasiness and power that she could never hear them 
without experiencing a kind of internal prostration, a sacred submission, as 
though a god and not he, had spoken to her. So she remained motionless and 
her hands were lying palm upward beside her knees, between which the 
material of her nightgown was spread, With the pleats reforming. 

What her lover wanted from her was very simple: that she be constantly and 
immediately accessible. It was not enough for him to know that she was: she 
was to be so without the slightest obstacle intervening and her bearing and 
clothing both were to bespeak, as it were, the symbol of that availability 
to experienced eyes. That, he went on, meant two things. The first she, 
knew, having been informed of it the evening of her arrival at the chateau: 
that she must never cross her knees, as her lips had always to remain open. 
She doubtless thought that this was nothing (that was indeed what she did 
think), but she would learn that to maintain this discipline would require a 
constant effort on her part, an effort which would remind her, in the secret 
they shared between them and perhaps with a few others, of the reality of 
her condition, when she was with, those who did not share the secret and 
engaged in ordinary pursuits. 

As for her clothes, it was up to her to choose them, or if need be to invent 
them, so that this semi-undressing to which he had subjected her in the car 
on their way to Roissy would no longer be necessary: tomorrow she was to go 
through her closet and sort out her dresses and to do the same with her 
underclothing by going through her dresser drawers. She would hand over to 
him absolutely everything she found in the way of belts and panties; the 
same for any brassieres like the one whose straps he had had to cut before 
he could remove it, any full slips which covered her breasts, all the 
blouses and dresses which did not open up the front and any skirts too tight 
to be raised with a single movement. She was to have other brassieres, other 
blouses, other dresses made. Meanwhile, was she supposed to visit her corset 
maker with nothing on under her blouse or sweater? Yes, she was to go with 
nothing on underneath. If someone should notice, she could explain it any 
way she liked, or not explain it at all, whichever she preferred, but it was 
her problem and hers alone. Now, as for the rest of what he still had to 
teach her, he preferred to wait for a few days and wanted her to be dressed 
properly before hearing it. She would find all the money she needed in the 
little drawer of her desk. When he had finished speaking, she murmured "I 
love you" without the slightest gesture. It was he who added some wood to 
the fire, lighted the bedside lamp, which was of pink opaline. Then he told 
O to get into bed and wait for him, that he would sleep with her. When he 
came back, O reached over to turn out the lamp: it was her left hand and the 
last thing she saw before the room was plunged into darkness was the somber 
glitter of her iron ring. She was lying half on hex side: her lover called 
her softly by name and, simultaneously, seizing her with his whole hand, 
covered the nether part of her belly and drew her to him. 

The next day, O, in her dressing gown, had just finished lunch alone in the 
green dining room-Rene had left early in the morning and was not due home 
until evening, to take her out to dinner-when the phone rang. The phone was 
in the bedroom, beneath the lamp at the head of the bed. O sat down on the 
floor to answer it. It was Rene, who wanted to know whether the cleaning 
woman had left. Yes, she had just left, after having served lunch and would 
not be back till the following morning. 

"Have you started to sort out your clothes yet?" Rene said. 

"I was just going to start," she answered, "but I got up late, took a bath 
and it was noon before I was ready." 

"Are you dressed?" 

"No, I have on my nightgown and my dressing gown." 

"Put the phone down, take off your robe and your nightgown." 

O obeyed, so startled that the phone slipped from the bed where she had 
placed it down onto the white rug and she thought she had been cut off. No, 
she had not been cut off. 

"Are you naked?" Rene went on. 

"Yes," she said. "But where are you calling from?" 

He ignored her question, merely adding: 

"Did you keep your ring on?" 

She had kept her ring on. 

Then he told her to remain as she was until he came home and to prepare, 
thus undressed, the suitcase of clothing she was to get rid of. Then he hung 
up. 

It was past one o'clock and the weather was lovely. A small pool of sunlight 
fell on the rug, lighting the white nightgown and the corduroy dressing 
gown, pale green like the shells of fresh almonds, which O had let slip to 
the floor when she had taken them off. She picked them up and went to take 
them into the bathroom, to hang them up in a closet. On her way, she 
suddenly saw her reflection in one of the mirrors fastened to a door and 
which, together with another mirror covering part of the wall and a third on 
another door, formed a large three-faced mirror: all she was wearing was a 
pair of leather mules the same green as her dressing gown-and only slightly 
darker than the mules she wore at Roissy-and her ring. She was no longer 
wearing either a collar or leather bracelets and she was alone, her own sole 
spectator. And yet never had she felt herself more totally committed to a 
will which, was not her own, more totally a slave and more content to be so. 

When she bent down to open a drawer, she saw her breasts stir gently. It 
took her almost two hours to lay out on her bed the clothes which she then 
had to pack away in the suitcase. There was no problem about the panties; 
she made a little pile of them near one of the bedposts. The same for her 
brassieres, not one would stay, for they all had a strap in the back and 
fastened on the side. And yet she saw how she could have the same model 
made, by shifting the catch to the front, in the middle, directly beneath 
the cleavage of the breasts. The girdles and garter belts posed no further 
problems, but she hesitated to add to the pile the corset of pink satin 
brocade which laced up in the back and so closely resembled the bodice she 
had worn at Roissy. She put it aside on the dresser. That would be Rene's 
decision. He would also decide about the sweaters, all of which went on over 
the head and were tight at the neck, therefore could not be opened. But they 
could be pulled up from the waist and thus bare the breasts. All the slips, 
however, were piled on her bed. In the dresser drawer there still remained a 
half-length slip of black faille, hemmed with a pleated flounce and fine 
Valenciennes lace, which was made to be worn under a pleated sun skirt of 
black wool which was too sheer not to be transparent. She would need other 
half-length slips, short, light-colored ones. She also realized that she 
would either have to give up wearing sheath dresses or else pick out the 
kind of dress that buttoned all the way down the front, in which case she 
would also have to have her slips made in such a way that they would open 
together with the dress. As for the petticoats, that was easy, the dresses 
too, but what would her dressmaker say about the underclothes? She would 
explain that she wanted a detachable lining because she was cold-blooded. As 
a matter of fact, she was sensitive to the cold and suddenly she wondered 
how in the world she would stand the winter cold when she was dressed so 
lightly? 

When she had finally finished and had kept from her entire wardrobe only her 
blouses, all of which buttoned down the front, her black pleated skirt, her 
coats of course and the suit she had worn home from Roissy, she went to 
prepare tea. She turned up the thermostat in the kitchen; the cleaning woman 
had not filled the wood basket for the living-room fire and O knew that her 
lover liked to find her in the living room beside the fire when he arrived 
home in the evening. She filled the basket from the woodpile in the hallway 
closet, carried it back to the living-room fireplace and lighted the fire. 
Thus she waited for him, curled up in a big easy chair, the tea tray beside 
her, waited for him to come home, but this time she waited, the way he had 
ordered her to, naked. 

The first difficulty O encountered was in her work. Difficulty is perhaps an 
exaggeration. Astonishment would be a better term. O worked in the fashion 
department of a photography agency. This meant that it was she who 
photographed, in the studios where they had to pose for hours on end, the 
most exotic and prettiest girls whom the fashion designers had chosen to 
model their creations. 

They were surprised that O had postponed her vacation until this late in the 
fall and had thus been away at a time of year when the fashion world was 
busiest, when the new collections were about to be presented. But that was 
nothing. What surprised them most was how changed she was. At first glance, 
they found it hard to say exactly what was changed about her, but none the 
less they felt it and the more they observed her the more convinced they 
were. She stood and walked straighter, her eyes were clearer, but what was 
especially striking was her perfection when she was in repose and how 
measured her gestures were. 

She had always been a conservative dresser, the way girls do whose work 
resembles that of men, but she was so skillful that she brought it off; and 
because the otter girls-who constituted her subjects-were constantly 
concerned, both professionally and personally, with clothing and its 
adornments, they were quick to note what might have passed unperceived to 
eyes other than theirs. Sweaters worn right next to the skin, which gently 
molded the contours of the breasts-Rene had finally consented to the 
sweaters-pleated skirts so prone to swirling when she turned: O wore them so 
often it was a little as though they formed a discreet uniform. 

"Very little-girl-like," one of the models said to her one day, a blond, 
green-eyed model with high Slavic cheekbones and the olive complexion that 
goes with it. "But you shouldn't wear garters," she added. "You're going to 
ruin your legs." 

This remark was occasioned by O, who, without stopping to think, had sat 
down somewhat hastily in her presence and obliquely in front of her, on the 
arm of a big leather easy chair and in so doing had lifted her skirt. The 
tall girl had glimpsed a flash of naked thigh above the rolled stocking, 
which covered the knee but stopped just above it. 

O had seen her smile, so strangely that she wondered what the girl had been 
thinking at the time, or perhaps what she had understood. She adjusted her 
stockings, one at a time, pulling them up to tighten them, for it was not as 
easy to keep them tight this way as it was when the stockings ended at 
mid-thigh and were fastened to a garter belt and answered Jacqueline, as 
though to justify herself: 

It's practical." 

"Practical for what?" Jacqueline wanted to know. 

"I dislike garter belts," O replied. 

But Jacqueline was not listening to her and was looking at the iron ring. 

During the next few days, O took some fifty photographs of Jacqueline. They 
were like nothing she had ever taken before. Never, perhaps, had she had 
such a model. Anyway, never before had she been able to extract such meaning 
and emotion from a face or body. And yet all she was aiming for was to make 
the silks, the furs and the laces more beautiful by that sudden beauty of an 
elfin creature surprised by her reflection in the mirror, which Jacqueline 
became in the simplest blouse, as she did in the most elegant mink. She had 
short, thick, blond hair, only slightly curly and at the least excuse she 
would cock her head slightly toward her left shoulder and nestle her cheek 
against the upturned collar of her fur, if she were wearing fur. O caught 
her once in this position, tender and smiling, her hair gently blown as 
though by a soft wind and her smooth, hard cheekbone snuggled against the 
gray mink, soft and gray as the freshly fallen ashes of a wood fire. Her 
lips were slightly parted and her eyes half-closed. Beneath the gleaming, 
liquid gloss of the photograph she looked like some blissful girl who had 
drowned, she was pale, so pale. O had had the picture printed with as little 
contrast as possible. She had taken another picture of Jacqueline which she 
found even more stunning: back lighted, it portrayed her bare-shouldered, 
with her delicate head and her face as well, enveloped in a large-meshed 
black veil surmounted by an absurd double aigrette whose impalpable tufts 
crowned her. Like wisps of smoke; she was wearing an enormous robe of heavy 
brocaded silk, red like the dress of a bride in the Middle Ages, which came 
down to below her ankles, flared at the hips and tight at the waist and the 
armature of which traced the outline of her bosom. It was what the dress 
designers called a gala gown, the kind no one ever wears. The spike-heeled 
sandals were also of red silk. And all the time Jacqueline was before O 
dressed in that gown and sandals and that veil which was like the 
premonition of a mask, O, in her mind's eye, was completing, was innerly 
modifying the model: a trifle here, a trifle there- the waist drawn in a 
little tighter, the breasts slightly raised-and it was the same dress as at 
Roissy, the same dress that Jeanne had worn, the same smooth, heavy, 
cascading silk which one takes by the handful and raises whenever one is 
told to ... Why yes, Jacqueline was lifting it in just that way as she 
descended from the platform on which she had been posing for the past 
fifteen minutes. It was the same rustling, the same crackling of dried 
leaves. No one wears these gala gowns any longer? But they do. Jacqueline 
was also wearing a gold choker around her neck and on her wrists two gold 
bracelets. O caught herself thinking that she would be more beautiful, with 
a leather collar and leather bracelets. And then she did something she had 
never done before: she followed Jacqueline into the large dressing room 
adjacent to the studio, where the models dressed and made up and where they 
left their clothing and make-up kits after hours. She remained standing, 
leaning against the doorjamb, her eyes glued to the mirror of the dressing 
table before which Jacqueline, without removing her gown, had sat down. The 
mirror was so big-it covered the entire back wall and the dressing table 
itself was a simple slab of black glass-that she could see Jacqueline's and 
her own reflection, as well as the reflection of the costume girl who was 
undoing the aigrettes and the tulle netting. Jacqueline removed the choker 
herself, her bare arms lifted like two handles; a touch of perspiration 
gleamed in her armpits, which were shaved (Why? O wondered, what a pity, 
she's so fair) and O could smell the sharp, delicate, slightly plantlike 
odor and wondered what perfume Jacqueline ought to wear-what perfume they 
would make her wear. Then Jacqueline unclasped her bracelets and put them on 
the glass slab, where they made a momentary clanking sound like the sound of 
chains. Her hair was so fair that her skin was actually darker than her 
hair, a grayish beige like fine-grained sand just after the tide has gone 
out. On the photograph, the red silk would be black. Just then, the thick 
eyelashes, which Jacqueline was always reluctant to make up, lifted and in 
the mirror O met her gaze, a look so direct and steady that, without being 
able to detach her own eyes from it, she felt herself slowly blushing. That 
was all. 

"I'm sorry," Jacqueline said, "I have to undress." 

"Sorry," O murmured and closed the door. 

The next day she took home with her the proofs of the shots she had made the 
day before, not really knowing whether she wanted, or did not want, to show 
them to her lover, with whom she had a dinner date. She looked at them as 
she was putting on her make-up at the dressing table in her room, pausing to 
trace on the photographs with her finger the curve of an eyebrow, the 
suggestion of a smile. But when she heard the sound of the key in the front 
door, she slipped them into the drawer. 

For two weeks, O had been completely outfitted and ready for use and could 
not get used to being so, when she discovered one evening upon returning 
from the studio a note from her lover asking her to be ready at eight to 
join him and one of his friends for dinner. A car would stop by to pick her 
up, the chauffeur would come up and ring her bell. The postscript specified 
that she was to take her fur jacket, that she was to dress entirely in black 
(entirely was underlined) and was to be at pains to make up and perfume 
herself as at Roissy. 

It was six o'clock. Entirely in black and for dinner-and it was 
mid-December, the weather was cold, that meant black silk stockings, black 
gloves, her pleated fan-shaped skirt, a heavy-knit sweater with spangles or 
her short jacket of faille. She decided on the jacket of faille.' It was 
padded and quilted in large stitches, close fitting and hooked from neck to 
waist like the tight-fitting doublets that men used to wear in the sixteenth 
century and if it molded the bosom so perfectly, it was because the 
brassiere was built into it. It was lined of the same faille and its slit 
tails were hip length. The only bright foil were the large gold hooks like 
those on children's snow boots which made a clicking sound as they were 
hooked or unhooked from their broad flat rings. 

After she had laid out her clothes on her bed and at the foot of the bed her 
black suede shoes with raised soles and spiked heels, nothing seemed 
stranger to O than to see herself, solitary and free in her bathroom, 
meticulously making herself up and perfuming herself, after she had taken 
her bath, as she had done at Roissy. The cosmetics she owned were not the 
same as those used at Roissy. In the drawer of her dressing table she found 
some face rouge-she never used any-which she utilized to emphasize the halo 
of her breasts. It was a rouge which was scarcely visible when first 
applied, but which darkened later. At first she thought she had put on too 
much and tried to take a little off with alcohol-it was very hard to 
remove-and started all over: a dark peony pink flowered at the tips of her 
breasts. Vainly she tried to make up the lips which the fleece of her loins 
concealed, but the rouge left no mark. Finally, among the tubes of lipstick 
she had in the same drawer, she found one of those kissproof lipsticks which 
she did not like to use because they were too dry and too hard to remove. 
There, it worked. She fixed her hair and freshened her face, then finally 
put on the perfume. Rene had given her, in an atomizer which released a 
heavy spray, a perfume whose name she didn't know, which had the odor of dry 
wood and marshy plants, a pungent, slightly savage odor. On her skin the 
spray melted, on the fur of the armpits and belly it ran and formed tiny 
droplets. 

At Roissy O had learned to take her time: she perfumed herself three times, 
each time allowing the perfume to dry. First she put on her stockings and 
high heels, then the petticoat and skirt, then the jacket. She put on her 
gloves and took her bag. In her bag were her compact, her lipstick, a comb, 
her key and ten francs. Wearing her gloves, she took her fur coat from the 
closet and glanced at the time at the head of her bed: quarter to eight. She 
sat down diagonally on the edge of the bed and her eyes riveted to the alarm 
clock, waited without moving for the bell to ring. When she heard it at last 
and rose to leave, she noticed in the mirror above her dressing table, 
before turning out the light, her bold, gentle, docile expression. 

When she pushed open the door of the little Italian restaurant before which 
the car had stopped, the first person she saw, at the bar, was Rene. He 
smiled at her tenderly, took her by the hand and turning toward a sort of 
grizzled athlete, introduced her in English to Sir Stephen H. O was offered 
a stool between the two men and as she was about to sit down Rene said to 
her in a. half-whisper to be careful not to muss her dress. He helped her to 
slide her skirt out from under her and down over the edges of the stool, the 
cold leather of which she felt against her skin, while the metal rim around 
it pressed directly against the furrow of her thighs, for at first she had 
dared only half sit down, for fear that if she were to sit down completely 
she might yield to the temptation to cross her legs. Her skirt billowed 
around her. Her right heel was caught in one of the rungs of the stool, the 
tip of her left foot was touching the floor. The Englishman, who had bowed 
without uttering a word, had not taken his eyes off her, she saw that he was 
looking at her knees, her hands and finally at her lips-but so calmly and 
with such precise attention, with such self-assurance, that O felt herself 
being weighed and measured as the instrument she knew full well she was and 
it was as though compelled by his gaze and so to speak, in spite of herself 
that she withdrew her gloves: she knew that he would speak when her hands 
were bare-because she had unusual hands, more like those of a young boy than 
the hands of a woman and because she was wearing on the third finger of her 
left hand the iron ring with the triple spiral of gold. But no, he said 
nothing, he smiled: he had seen the ring. 

Rene was drinking a martini, Sir Stephen a whisky. He nursed his whisky, 
then waited till Rene had drunk his second martini and O the grapefruit 
juice that Rene had ordered for her, meanwhile explaining that if O would be 
good enough to concur in their joint opinion, they would dine in the room 
downstairs, which was smaller and less noisy than the one on the first 
floor, which was simply the extension of the bar. 

"Of course," O said, already gathering up her bag and gloves which she had 
placed on the bar. 

Then, to help her off the stool, Sir Stephen offered her his right hand, in 
which she placed hers, he finally addressing her directly by observing that 
she had hands that were made to wear irons, so becoming was iron to her. But 
as he said it in English, there was a trace of ambiguity in his words, 
leaving one in some doubt as to whether he was referring to the metal alone 
or whether he were not also and perhaps even specifically, referring to iron 
chains. 

In the room downstairs, which was a simple whitewashed cellar, but cool and 
pleasant, there were in fact only four tables, one of which was occupied by 
guests who were finishing their meal. On the walls had been drawn, like a 
fresco, a gastronomical and tourist map of Italy, in soft, ice-cream colors: 
vanilla, raspberry and pistachio. It reminded O that she wanted to order ice 
cream for dessert, with lots of almonds and whipped cream. For she was 
feeling fight and happy, Rene's knee was touching her knee beneath the table 
and whenever he spoke she knew he was talking fox her ears alone. He too was 
observing her lips. They let her have the ice cream, but not the coffee. Sir 
Stephen invited O and Rene to have coffee at his place. They had all dined 
very lightly and O realized that they had been careful to drink very little 
and had kept her virtually from drinking at all: half a liter of Chianti for 
the three of them. They had also dined very quickly: it was barely nine 
o'clock. 

"I sent the chauffeur home," said Sir Stephen. "Would you drive, Rene. The 
simplest thing would be to go straight to my house." 

Rene took the wheel, O sat beside him and Sir Stephen was next to her. The 
car was a big Buick, there was ample room for three people in the front 
seat. 

After the Alma intersection, the Cours la Reine was visible because the 
trees were bare and the Place de la Concorde sparkling and dry with, above 
it, the sort of sky which promises snow, but from which snow has not yet 
fallen. O heard a little click and felt the warm air rising around her legs: 
Sir Stephen had turned on the heater. Rene was still keeping to the Right 
Bank of the Seine, then be turned at the Pont Royal to cross over to the 
Left Bank: between its stone yokes, the water looked as frozen as the stone 
and just as black. O thought of hematites, which are black. When she was 
fifteen her best friend, who was then thirty and with whom she was in love, 
wore a hematite ring set in a cluster of tiny diamonds. O would have liked a 
necklace of those black stones, without diamonds, a tight-fitting necklace, 
perhaps even a choker. But the necklaces that were given to her now-no, they 
were not given to her--would she exchange them for the necklace of 
hematites, for the hematites of the dream? She saw again the wretched room 
where Marion had taken her, behind the Turbigo intersection and remembered 
bow she bad untied-she, not Marion-her two big schoolgirl pigtails when 
Marion had undressed her and laid her down on the iron bed. How lovely 
Marion was when she was being caressed and it's true that eyes can resemble 
stars; hers looked like quivering blue stars. 

Rene stopped the car. O did not recognize the little street, one of the 
cross streets which joins the rue de l'Universite and the rue de Lille. 

Sir Stephen's apartment was situated at the far end of a courtyard, in one 
wing of an old private mansion and the rooms were laid out in a straight 
line, one opening into the next. The room at the very end was also the 
largest and the most reposing, furnished in dark English mahogany and pale 
yellow and gray silk drapes. 

"I shan't ask you to tend the fire," Sir Stephen said to O, "but this sofa 
is for you. Please sit down, Rene will make coffee. I would be most grateful 
if you would hear what I have to say." 

The large sofa of light-colored Damascus silk was set at right angles to the 
fireplace, facing the windows which overlooked the garden and with its back 
to those behind, which looked onto the courtyard. O took off her fur and lay 
it over the back of the sofa. When she turned around, she noticed that her 
lover and her host were standing, waiting for her to accept Sir Stephen's 
invitation. She set her bag down next to her fur and unbuttoned her gloves. 
When, when would she ever learn and would she ever learn, a gesture stealthy 
enough so that when she lifted her skirt no one would notice, so that she 
herself could forget her nakedness, her submission? Not, in any case, as 
long as Rene and that stranger were staring at her in silence, as they were 
presently doing. Finally she gave in. Sir Stephen stirred the fire, Rene 
suddenly went behind the sofa and seizing O by the throat and the hair, 
pulled her head down against the back of the couch and kissed her on the 
mouth, a kiss so prolonged and profound that she gasped for breath and could 
feel her loins melting and burning. He let her go only long enough to tell 
her that he loved her and then immediately took her again. O's hands, 
overturned in a gesture of utter abandon and defeat, her palms upward, lay 
quietly on her black dress that spread like a corolla around her. Sir 
Stephen had come nearer and when at last Rend let her go and she opened her 
eyes, it was the gray, unflinching gaze of the English man which she 
encountered. 

Completely stunned and bewildered, as she still was and gasping with joy, 
she none the less was easily able to see that he was admiring her and that 
he desired her. Who could have resisted her moist, half-open mouth, with its 
full lips, the white stalk of her arching neck against the black collar of 
her page-boy jacket, her eyes large and clear, which refused to be evasive? 
But the only gesture Sir Stephen allowed himself was to run his .finger 
softly over her eyebrows, then over her lips. Then he sat down facing her on 
the opposite side of the fireplace and when Rene had also sat down in an 
armchair, he began to speak. 

"I don't believe Rend has ever spoken to you about his family," he said. 
"Still, perhaps you do know that his another, before she married his father, 
had previously been married to an Englishman, who had a son from his first 
marriage. I am that son and it was she who raised me, until she left my 
father. So Rene and I are not actually relatives and yet, in a way, we are 
brothers. That Rene loves you I have no doubt. I would have known even if he 
hadn't told me, even if he hadn't made a move: all one has to do is to see 
the way he looks at you. I know too that you are among those girls who have 
been to Roissy and I imagine you'll be going back again. In principle, the 
ring you're wearing gives me the right to do with you what I will, as it 
does to all those men who know its meaning. But that involves merely a 
fleeting assignation and what we expect from you is more serious. I say 'we' 
because, as you see, Rene is saying nothing: he prefers to have me speak for 
both of us. 

"If we are brothers, I am the eldest, ten years older than he. There is also 
between us a freedom so absolute and of such long standing that what belongs 
to me has always belonged to him and what belongs to him has likewise 
belonged to me. Will you agree to join with us? I beg of you to and I ask 
you to swear to it because it will involve more than your submission, which 
I know we can count on. Before you reply, realize for a moment that I am 
only and can only be, another form of your lover: you will still have only 
one master. A more formidable one, I grant you, than the men to whom you 
were surrendered at Roissy, because I shall be there every day and besides I 
am fond of habits and rites ... " (This last phrase he uttered in English.) 

Sir Stephen's quiet, self-assured voice rose in an absolute silence. Even 
the flames in the fireplace flickered noiselessly. O was frozen to the sofa 
like a butterfly impaled upon a pin, a long pin composed of words and looks 
which pierced the middle of her body and pressed her naked, attentive loins 
against the warm silk. She was no longer mistress of her breasts, her hands, 
the nape of her neck. But of this much she was sure: the object of the 
habits and rites of which he had spoken were patently going to be the 
possession of (among other parts of her body) her long thighs concealed 
beneath the black skirt, her already opened thighs. 

Both men were sitting across from her. Rend was smoking, but before he had 
lighted his cigarette he had lighted one of those black-hooded lamps which 
consumes the smoke and the air, already purified by the wood fire, smelled 
of the cool odors of the night 

"Will you give me an answer, or would you like to know more?" Sir Stephen 
repeated. 

"If you give your consent," Rene said, "I'll personally explain to you Sir 
Stephen's preferences." 

"Demands," Sir Stephen corrected. 

The hardest thing, O was thinking; was not the question of giving her 
consent and she realized that never for a moment did either of them dream 
that she might refuse; nor, for that matter, did she. The hardest thing was 
simply to speak. Her lips were burning and her mouth was dry, all her saliva 
was gone, an anguish both of fear and desire constricted her throat and her 
new-found hands were cold and moist If only she could have closed her eyes. 
But she could not Two gazes stalked her eyes, gazes from which she could 
not-and did not desire to-escape. They drew her toward something she thought 
she had left behind for a long time, perhaps forever, at Roissy. For since 
her return, Rene had taken her only by caresses and the symbol signifying 
that she belonged to anyone who knew the secret of her ring had been without 
consequence: either she had not met anyone who was familiar with the secret 
or else those who had had remained silent-the only person she suspected was 
Jacqueline (and if Jacqueline had been at Roissy, why wasn't she also 
wearing the ring? Besides, what right did Jacqueline's knowledge of this 
secret give her over O and did it in fact give her any?). In order to speak, 
did she have to move? But she could not move of her own free will-an order 
from them would immediately have made her get up, but this time what they 
wanted from her was not blind obedience, acquiescence to an order, they 
wanted her to anticipate orders, to judge herself a slave and surrender 
herself as such. This, then, is what they called her consent. She remembered 
that she had never told Rene' anything but "I love you" or "I'm yours." 
Today it seemed that they wanted her to speak and to agree to, specifically 
and in detail, what till now she had only tacitly consented to. 

Finally she straightened up and as though what she was going to say was 
stifling her, unfastened the top hooks of her tunic, until the cleavage of 
her breasts was visible. Then she stood up. Her hands and her knees were 
shaking. 

"I'm yours," she said at length to Rene. "I'll be whatever you want me to 
be." 

"No," he broke in, "ours. Repeat after me: I belong to both of you. I shall 
be whatever both of you want me to be." 

Sir Stephen's piercing gray eyes were fixed firmly upon her, as were Rene's 
and in them she was lost, slowly repeating after him the phrases he was 
dictating to her, but like a lesson of grammar, she was transposing them 
into the first person. 

"To Sir Stephen and to me you grant the right ... " The right to dispose of 
her body however they wished, in whatever place or manner they should 
choose, the right to keep her in chains, the right to whip her like a slave 
or prisoner for the slightest failing or infraction, or simply for their 
pleasure, the right to pay no heed to her pleas and cries, if they should 
make her cry out. 

"I believe," said Rene, "that at this point Sir Stephen would like me to 
take over, both you and I willing and have me brief you concerning his 
demands." 

O was listening to her lover and the words which he had spoken to her at 
Roissy came back to her: they were almost the same words. But then she had 
listened snuggled up against him, protected by a feeling of improbability, 
as though it were all a dream, as though she existed only in another life 
and perhaps did not really exist at all. Dream or nightmare, the prison 
setting, the lavish party gowns, men in masks: all this removed her from her 
own life, even to the point of being uncertain how long it would last. 
There, at Roissy, she felt the way you do at night, lost in a dream you have 
had before and are now beginning to dream all over again: certain that it 
exists and certain that it will end and you want it to end because you're 
not sure you'll be able to bear it and you also want it to go on so you'll 
know how it comes out. Well, the end was here, where she least expected it 
(or no longer expected it at all) and in the form she least expected 
(assuming, she was saying to herself, that this really was the end, that 
there was not actually another hiding behind this one and perhaps still 
another behind the next one). The present end was toppling her from memory 
into reality and besides, what had only been reality in a closed circle, a 
private universe, was suddenly about to contaminate all the customs and 
circumstances of her daily life, both on her and within her, now no longer 
satisfied with signs and symbols-the bare buttocks, bodices that unhook, the 
iron ring-but demanding fulfillment. 

It was true that Rene had never whipped her and the only difference between 
the period of their relationship prior to his taking her to Roissy and the 
time elapsed since her return was that now he used both her backside and 
mouth the way he formerly had used only her womb (which he continued to 
use). She had never been able to tell whether the floggings she had 
regularly received at Roissy had been administered, were it only once, by 
bin (whenever there was any question about it, that is when she herself had 
been blindfolded or when those with whom she was dealing were masked), but 
she tended to doubt it. The pleasure he derived from the spectacle of her 
body hound and surrendered, struggling vainly and of her cries, was 
doubtless so great that he could not bear the idea of lending a hand himself 
and thus having his attention distracted from it. It was as though he were 
admitting it, since he was now saying to her, so gently, so tenderly, 
Without moving from the deep armchair in which he was half reclining with 
his legs crossed, he was saying how happy he was to be turning her over to, 
how happy he was that she was handing herself over to, the commands and 
desires of Sir Stephen. Whenever Sir Stephen, would like her to spend the 
night at his place, or only an hour, or if he should want her to accompany 
him outside Paris or, in Paris itself, to join him at some restaurant or for 
some show, he would telephone her and send his car for her-unless Rene 
himself came to pick her up. Today, now, it was her turn to speak. Did she 
consent? But words failed her. This willful assent they were suddenly asking 
her to express was the agreement to surrender herself, to say yes in advance 
to everything to which she most assuredly wanted to say yes but to which her 
body said no, at least insofar as the whipping was concerned. As for the 
rest, if she were honest with herself, she would have to admit to a feeling 
of both anxiety and excitement caused by what she read in Sir Stephen's 
eyes, a feeling too intense for her to delude herself and as she was 
trembling like a leaf and perhaps for the very reason that she was 
trembling, she knew that she was waiting more impatiently than he for the 
moment when he would place his hand and perhaps his lips, upon her. It was 
probably up to her to hasten the moment. Whatever courage, or whatever surge 
of overwhelming desire she may have had, she felt herself suddenly grow so 
weak as she was about to reply that she slipped to the floor, her dress in 
full bloom around her and in the silence Sir Stephen's hollow voice remarked 
that fear was becoming to her too. His words were not intended for her, but 
for Rene. O had the feeling that he was restraining himself from advancing 
upon her and regretted his restraint. And yet she avoided his gaze, her eyes 
fixed upon Rene, terrified lest he should see what was in her eyes and 
perhaps deem it a betrayal. And yet it was not a betrayal, for if she were 
to weigh her desire to belong to Sir Stephen against her belonging to Rene, 
she would not have had a second's hesitation: the only reason she was 
yielding to this desire was that Rene had allowed her to and to a certain 
extent, given her to understand that he was ordering her to. And yet there 
was still a lingering doubt in her mind as to whether Rene might not be 
annoyed to see her acquiesce too quickly or too well. The slightest sign 
from him would obliterate it immediately. But he made no sign, confining 
himself to ask her for the third time for an answer. She mumbled: 

"I consent to whatever you both desire," and lowered her eyes toward her 
hands, which were waiting unclasped in the hollows of her knees, then added 
in a murmur: "I should like to know whether I shall be whipped ..." 

There was a long pause, during which she regretted twenty times over having 
asked the question. Then Sir Stephen's voice said slowly: 

"From time to time." 

Then O heard a match being struck and the sound of glasses: both men were 
probably helping themselves to another round of whisky. Rene was leaving O 
to her own devices. Rene was saying nothing. 

"Even if I agree to it now," she said, "even if I promise now, I couldn't 
bear it." 

"All we ask you to do is submit to it, and if you scream or moan, to agree 
ahead of time that it will be in vain," Sir Stephen went on. 

"Oh, please, for pity's sake, not yet!" said O, for Sir Stephen was getting 
to his feet, Rene was following suit, he leaned down and took her by the 
shoulders. 

"So give us your answer," he said. "Do you consent?" 

Finally she said that she did. Gently he helped her up and having sat down 
on the big sofa, made her kneel down alongside him facing the sofa, on which 
reclined her outstretched arms, her bust and her head. Her eyes were closed 
and an image she had seen several years before flashed across her mind: a 
strange print portraying a woman kneeling, as she was, before an armchair. 
The floor was of tile and in .one corner a dog and child were playing. The 
woman's skirts were raised and standing close beside her was a man 
brandishing a handful of switches, ready to whip her. They were all dressed 
in sixteenth-century clothes and the print bore a title which she had found 
disgusting: Family Punishment. 

With one hand, Rene took her wrists in a viselike grip and with the other 
lifted her skirts so high that she could feel the muslin lining brush her 
cheek. He caressed her flanks and drew Sir Stephen's attention to the two 
dimples that graced them and the softness of the furrow between her thighs. 
Then with that same hand he pressed her waist, to accentuate further her 
buttocks and ordered her to open her knees wider. She obeyed without saying 
a word. The honors Rene was bestowing upon her body and Sir Stephen's 
replies and the coarseness of the terms the men were using so overwhelmed 
her with a shame as violent as it was unexpected that the desire she had 
felt to be had by Sir Stephen vanished and she began to wish for the whip as 
a deliverance, for the pain and screams as a justification. But Sir 
Stephen's hands pried open her loins, forced the buttocks' portal, 
retreated, took her again, caressed her until she moaned. She was 
vanquished, undone and humiliated that she had moaned. 

"I leave you to Sir Stephen," Rene then said. "Remain the way you are, hell 
dismiss you when he sees fit." 

How often had she remained like this at Roissy, on her knees, offered to one 
and all? But then she had always had her hands bound together by the 
bracelets, a happy prisoner upon whom everything was imposed and from whom 
nothing was asked. Here it was through her own free will that she remained 
half-naked, whereas a single gesture, the same that would have sufficed to 
bring her back to her feet, would also have sufficed to cover her. Her 
promise bound her as much as had the leather bracelets and chains. Was it 
only the promise? And however humiliated she was, or rather because she had 
been humiliated, was it not somehow pleasant to be esteemed only for her 
humiliation, for the meekness with which she surrendered, for the obedient 
way in which she opened? 

With Rene gone, Sir Stephen having escorted him to the door, she waited thus 
alone, motionless, feeling more exposed in the solitude and more prostituted 
by the wait than she had ever felt before, when they were there. The gray 
and yellow silk of the sofa was smooth to her cheek; through her nylon 
stockings she felt, below her knees, the thick wool rug and along the full 
length of her left thigh, the warmth from the fireplace hearth, for Sir 
Stephen had added three logs which were blazing noisily. Above a chest of 
drawers, an antique clock ticked so quietly that it was only audible when 
everything around was silent. O listened carefully, thinking how absurd her 
position was in this civilized, tasteful living room. Through the Venetian 
blinds could be heard the sleepy rumbling of Paris after midnight. In the 
light of day, tomorrow morning, would she recognize the spot on the sofa 
cushion where she had laid her head? Would she ever return, in broad 
daylight, to this same living room, would she ever be treated in the same 
way here? 

Sir Stephen was apparently in no hurry to return and O, who had waited so 
submissively for the strangers at Roissy to take their pleasure, now felt a 
lump rise in her throat at the idea that in one minute, in ten minutes, he 
would again put his hands on her. But it was not exactly as she had imagined 
it. 

She heard him open the door and cross the room. He remained for some time 
with his back to the fire, studying O, then in a near whisper he told her to 
get up and then sit back down. Surprised, almost embarrassed, she obeyed. He 
courteously brought her a glass of whisky and a cigarette, both of which she 
refused. Then she saw that he was in a dressing gown, a very conservative 
dressing gown of gray homespun-a gray that matched his hair. His hands were 
long and dry and his flat fingernails, cut short, were very white. He caught 
her staring and O blushed: these were indeed the same hands which had seized 
her body, the hands she now dreaded and desired. But he did not approach 
her. 

"I'd like you to get completely undressed," he said. "But first simply undo 
your jacket, without getting up." 

O unhooked the large gold hooks and slipped her close-fitting jacket down 
over her shoulders; then she put it at the other end of the sofa, where her 
fur, her gloves and her bag were. 

"Caress the tips of your breasts, ever so lightly," Sir Stephen said then, 
before adding: "You must use a darker rouge, yours is too light." 

Taken completely aback, O fondled her nipples with her fingertips and felt 
them stiffen and rise. She covered them with her palms. 

"Oh, no!" Sir Stephen said. 

She withdrew her hands and lay back against the back of the couch: her 
breasts were heavy for so slender a torso, and parting, rose gently toward 
her armpits. The nape of her neck was resting against the back of the sofa 
and her hands were lying on either side of her hips. Why did Sir Stephen not 
bend over, bring his mouth close to hers, why did his hands not move toward 
the nipples which he had seen stiffen and which she, being absolutely 
motionless, could feel quiver whenever she took a breath. But he had drawn 
near, had sat down across the arm of the sofa and was not touching her. He 
was smoking and a movement of his hand-O never knew whether or not it was 
voluntary-flicked some still-warm ashes down between her breasts. She had 
the feeling he wanted to insult her, by his disdain, his silence, by a 
certain attitude of detachment. Yet he had desired her a while ago, he still 
did now, she could see it by the tautness beneath the soft material of his 
dressing gown. Then let him take her, if only to wound her! O hated herself 
for her own desire and loathed Sir Stephen for the self control he was 
displaying. She wanted him to love her, there, the truth was out: she wanted 
him to be chafing under the urge to touch her lips and penetrate her body, 
to devastate her if need be, but not to remain so calm and self-possessed. 
At Roissy, she had not cared in the slightest whether those who used her had 
had any feeling whatsoever: they were the instruments by which her lover 
derived pleasure from her, by which she became what he wanted her to be, 
polished and smooth and gentle as a stone. Their hands were his hands, their 
orders his orders. But not here. Rene had turned her over to Sir Stephen, 
but it was clear that he wanted to share her with him, not to obtain 
anything further from her, nor for the pleasure of surrendering her, but in 
order to share With Sir Stephen what today he loved most, as no doubt in 
days gone by, when they were young, they had shared a trip; a boat, a horse. 
And today, this sharing derived its meaning from Rene's relation to Sir 
Stephen much more than it did from his relation to her. What each of them 
would look for in her would be the other's mark, the trace of the other's 
passage. Only a short while before, when she had been kneeling half-naked 
before Rene and Sir Stephen had opened her thighs with both his hands, Rene 
had explained to Sir Stephen why O's buttocks were so easily accessible and 
why he was pleased that they had been thus prepared: it was because it had 
occurred to him that Sir Stephen would enjoy having his preferred path 
constantly at his disposal. He had even added that, if Sir Stephen wished, 
he would grant him the sole use of it. 

"Why, gladly," Sir Stephen had said, but he had remarked that, in spite of 
everything, there was a risk he might rend O. 

"O is yours," Rene had replied, "O will be pleased to be rent" 

And he had leaned down over her and kissed her hands. 

The very idea that Rene could imagine giving up any part of her left O 
stunned. She had taken it as the sign that her lover cared more about Sir 
Stephen than he did about her. And too, although he had so often told her 
that what he loved in her was the object he had made of her, her absolute 
availability to him, his freedom with respect to her, as one is free to 
dispose of a piece of furniture, which one enjoys giving as much as and 
sometimes even more than, one may enjoy keeping it for oneself, she realized 
that she had not believed him completely. 

She saw another sign of what could scarcely be termed anything but a certain 
deference or respect toward Sir Stephen, in the fact that Rene, who so 
passionately loved to see her beneath the bodies or the blows of others 
besides himself, whose look was one of constant tenderness, of unflagging 
gratitude whenever he saw her mouth open to moan or scream, her eyes closed 
over tears, had left her after having made certain, by exposing her to him, 
by opening her as one opens a horse's mouth to prove that it is young 
enough, that Sir Stephen found her beautiful enough or, strictly speaking, 
suitable enough for him and vouchsafed to accept her. However offensive and 
insulting his conduct may have been, O's love for Rene remained unchanged. 
She considered herself fortunate to count enough in his eyes for him to 
derive pleasure from offending her, as believers give thanks to God for 
humbling them. 

But, in Sir-Stephen, she thought she detected a will of ice and iron, which 
would not be swayed by desire, a will in whose judgment, no matter how 
moving and submissive she might be, she counted for absolutely nothing, at 
least till now. Otherwise why should she have been so frightened? The whip 
at the valets' belt at Roissy, the chains borne almost constantly had seemed 
to her less terrifying than the equanimity of Sir Stephen's gaze as it 
fastened on the breasts he refrained from touching. She realized to what 
extent their very fullness, smooth and distended on her tiny shoulders and 
slender torso, rendered them fragile. She could not keep them from 
trembling, she would have had to stop breathing. To hope that this fragility 
would disarm Sir Stephen Was futile and she was fully aware that it was 
quite the contrary: her proffered gentleness cried for wounds as much as 
caresses, fingernails as much as lips. She had a momentary illusion: Sir 
Stephen's right hand, which was holding his cigarette, grazed their tips 
with the end of his middle finger and obediently, they stiffened further. 
That this, for Sir Stephen, was a game, or the guise of a game, nothing 
more, or a check, the way one checks to ascertain whether a machine is 
functioning properly, O had no doubt. 

Without moving from the arm of his chair, Sir Stephen then told her to take 
off her skirt. O's moist hands made the hooks slippery and it took her two 
tries before she succeeded in undoing the black faille petticoat under her 
skirt. 

When she was completely naked, her high-heeled patent-leather sandals and 
her black nylon stockings rolled down flat above her knees, accentuating the 
delicate lines of her legs and the whiteness of her thighs, Sir Stephen, who 
had also gotten to his feet, seized her loins with one hand and pushed her 
toward the sofa. He had her kneel down, her back against the sofa and to 
make her press more tightly against it with her shoulders than with her 
waist, he made her spread her thighs slightly. Her hands were lying on her 
ankles, thus forcing her belly ajar and above her still proffered breasts, 
her throat arched back. 

She did not dare look Sir Stephen in the face, but she saw his hands undoing 
his belt. When he had straddled O, who was still kneeling and had seized her 
by the nape of the neck, he drove into her mouth. It was not the caress of 
her lips the length of him he was looking for, but the back of her throat. 
For a long time he probed and O felt the suffocating gag of flesh swell and 
harden, its slow repeated hammering finally bringing her to tears. In order 
to invade her better, Sir Stephen ended by kneeling on the sofa, one knee on 
each side of her face and there were moments when his buttocks rested on O's 
breast and in her heart she felt her womb, useless and scorned, burning her. 
Although he delighted and reveled in her for a long time, Sir Stephen did 
not bring his pleasure to a climax, but withdrew from her in silence and 
rose again to his feet, without closing his dressing gown. 

"You are easy, O," he said to her. "You love Rene, but you're easy. Does 
Rene realize that you covet and long for all the men who desire you, that by 
sending you to Roissy or surrendering you to others he is providing you with 
a string of alibis to cover your easy virtue?" 

"I love Rene," O replied. 

"You love Rene, but you desire me, among others," Sir Stephen went on. 

Yes, she did desire him, but what if Rene, upon learning it, were to change? 
All she could do was remain silent and lower her eyes: even to have looked 
Sir Stephen directly in the eyes would have been tantamount to a confession. 

Then Sir Stephen bent down over her and taking her by the shoulders, made 
her slide down onto the rug. Again she was on her back, her legs raised and 
doubled up against her. Sir Stephen, who had sat down on that part of the 
couch against which she had just been leaning, seized her right knee and 
pulled her toward him. Since she was facing the fireplace, the light from 
the nearby hearth shed a fierce light upon the double, quartered furrow of 
her belly and rear. Without loosing his grip, Sir Stephen abruptly ordered 
her to caress herself, without closing her legs. Startled, O meekly 
stretched her right hand toward her loins, where her fingers encountered the 
ridge of flesh -already emerging from the protective fleece beneath, already 
burning-where her belly's fragile lips merged. 

But her hand recoiled and she mumbled: 

"I can't" 

And in fact she could not. The only times she had ever caressed herself 
furtively had been in the warmth and obscurity of her bed, when she slept 
alone, but she had never tried to carry it to a climax. But later she would 
sometimes come upon it in her sleep and would wake up disappointed that it 
had been so intense and yet so fleeting. 

Sir Stephen's gaze was persistent. She could not bear it and repeating "I 
can't," she closed her eyes. 

What she was seeing in her mind's eye, what she had never been able to 
forget, what still filled her with the same sensation of nausea and disgust 
that she had felt when she had first witnessed it when she was fifteen, was 
the image of Marion slumped in the leather armchair in a hotel room, Marion 
with one leg sprawled over one arm of the chair and her head half hanging 
over the other, caressing herself in her, O's, presence and moaning. Marion 
had related to her how she had one day caressed herself this way in her 
office when she had thought she was alone and her boss had happened to walk 
in and caught her in the act. 

O remembered Marion's office, a bare room with pale green walls, with the 
north light filtering in through dusty windows. There was only one easy 
chair, intended for visitors, facing the table. 

"Did you run away?" O had asked. 

"No," Marion had answered, "he asked me to begin all over again, but he 
locked the door, made me take off my panties and pushed the chair over in 
front of the window." 

O had been overwhelmed with admiration-and with horror-for what she took to 
be Marion's courage and had steadfastly refused to fondle herself in 
Marion's presence and sworn that she never would, in anyone's presence. 
Marion had laughed and said: 

"You'll see. Wait till your lover asks you to." 

Rene never had asked her to. Would she have obeyed? Yes, of course she 
would, but she would also have been terrified at the thought that she might 
see Rene's eyes filling with the same disgust that she had felt for Marion. 
Which was absurd. And since it was Sir Stephen, it was all the more absurd; 
what did she care whether Sir Stephen was disgusted? But no, she couldn't. 
For the third time she murmured: 

"I can't." 

Though she uttered the words in almost a whisper, he heard them, let her go, 
rose to his feet, closed his dressing gown and ordered O to get up. 

"Is this your obedience?" he said. 

Then he caught both her wrists with his left hand and with his right he 
slapped her on both sides of the face. She staggered and would have fallen 
had he not held her up. 

"Kneel down and listen to me," he said. "I'm afraid Rene's training leaves a 
great deal to be desired." 

"I always obey Rene," she mumbled. 

"You're confusing love and obedience. You'll obey me without loving me and 
without my loving you." 

With that, she felt a strange inexplicable storm of revolt rising within 
her, silently denying in the depths of her being the words she was hearing, 
denying her promises of submission and slavery, denying her own agreement, 
her own desire, her nakedness, her sweat, her trembling limbs, the circles 
under her eyes. She struggled and clenched her teeth with rage when, having 
made her bend over, with her elbows on the floor and her head between her 
arms, her buttocks raised, he forced her from behind, to rend her as Rene 
had said he would. 

The first time she did not cry out He went at it again, harder now and she 
screamed. She screamed as much out of revolt as of pain and he was fully 
aware of it She also knew-which meant that in any event she was 
vanquished-that he was pleased to make her cry out. When he had finished 
with her and after he had helped her to her feet; he was on the point of 
dismissing her when he remarked to her that what he had spilled in her was 
going to seep slowly out tinted with the blood of the wound he had inflicted 
on her, that this wound would burn her as long as her buttocks were not used 
to him and he was obliged to keep on forcing his way. Rene had reserved this 
particular use of her to him and he certainly intended to make full use of 
it, she had best have no illusions on that score. He reminded her that she 
had agreed to be Rene's slave and his too, but that it appeared unlikely 
that she was aware-consciously aware-of what she had consented to. By the 
time she had learned, it would be too late for her to escape. 

Listening, O told herself that perhaps it would also be too late for him to 
escape becoming enamored of her, for she had no intention of being quickly 
tamed and by the time she was he might have learned to love her a little. 
For all her inner resistance and the timid refusal she had dared to display, 
had one object and one object alone: she wanted to exist for Sir Stephen, in 
however modest a way, in the same way she existed for Rene and wanted him to 
feel something more than desire for her. Not that she was in love, but 
because she clearly saw that Rene loved Sir Stephen in that passionate way 
boys love their elders and she sensed that he was ready, if need be, to 
sacrifice her to any and all of Sir Stephen's whims, in an effort to satisfy 
him. She knew with an infallible intuition that Rene would follow Sir 
Stephen's example and emulate his attitude and that if Sir Stephen were to 
show contempt for her, Rene would be contaminated by it, no matter how much 
he loved her, contaminated in a way he had never before been, or bad dreamed 
of being, by the opinions and example of the men at Roissy. This was because 
at Roissy, with regard to her, he was the master and the opinions of all the 
men there to whom he gave her derived from and depended on his own. Here he 
was not the master any longer. On the contrary. Sir Stephen was Rene's 
master, without Rene's being fully aware of it, which is to say that Rene 
admired him and wanted to emulate him, to compete with him and this was why 
he was sharing everything with him and why he had given O to him: tins time 
it was apparent that she had been given with no strings attached. Rene would 
probably go on loving her insofar as Sir Stephen deemed that she was worth 
the trouble and would love her himself. Till then, it was clear that Sir 
Stephen would be her master and regardless of what Rene might think, her 
only master, in the precise relationship of master to slave. She did not 
expect any pity from him; but could she not hope to wrest some slight 
feeling of love from him? 

Sprawled in the same big armchair, next to the fire, which he had been 
occupying before Rene's departure, he had left her standing there naked and 
told her to await his further orders. She had waited without saying a word. 
Then he had got to his feet and told her to follow him. Still naked, except 
for her high-heeled sandals and black stockings, she had followed him up a 
flight of stairs which went from the ground-floor landing and entered a 
small bedroom, a room so tiny there was only space enough for a bed in one 
corner and a dressing table and chair between the bed and window. This small 
room communicated with a larger room, which was Sir Stephen's, with a common 
bathroom between. 

O washed and wiped herself-the towel was faintly stained with pink-removed 
her sandals and stockings, and crawled in between the cold sheets. The 
curtains of the window were open, but the night was dark. 

Before be closed the door between their rooms, after O was already in bed, 
Sir Stephen came over to her and kissed her fingertips, as he had done when 
she had slipped down off her stool in the bar and he had complimented her on 
her iron ring. Thus, he had thrust his hands and sex into her, ransacked and 
ravaged her mouth and rear, but condescended only to place his lips upon her 
fingertips. O wept and did not fall asleep until dawn. 

The following day, a little before noon, Sir Stephen's chauffeur drove O 
home. She had awakened at ten, an elderly mulatto servant had brought her a 
cup of coffee, prepared her bath and given, her her clothes, except for her 
fur wrap, her gloves and her bag, which she had found on the living-room 
couch when she had gone downstairs. The living room was empty, the Venetian 
blinds were raised and the curtains were open. Through the window opposite 
the couch, she could see a garden green and narrow as an aquarium, planted 
in nothing but ivy, holly and spindle hedges. 

As she was putting on her coat, the mulatto servant told her that Sir 
Stephen had left and handed her an envelope on which there was nothing but 
her initial; the white sheet inside consisted of two lines: "Rene phoned 
that he would come by for you at the studio at six o'clock," signed With an 
S and with a postscript: "The riding crop is for your next visit." 

O glanced around her: on the table, between the two chairs in which Sir 
Stephen and Rene had been sitting the evening before, there was a long, 
slender, leather riding crop near a vase of yellow roses. The servant was 
waiting at the door. O put the letter in her bag and left. 

So Rene had phoned Sir Stephen and not her. Back home, after having taken 
off her clothes and having had lunch in her dressing gown, she still had 
plenty of time to freshen her make-up and rearrange her hair and to get 
dressed to go to the studio, where she was due at three o'clock. The 
telephone did not ring; Rene did not call her. Why? What had Sir Stephen 
told him? How had they talked about her? She remembered the words they both 
had used in her presence, their casual remarks concerning the advantages of 
her body with respect to the demands of theirs. Perhaps it was merely that 
she was not used to this kind of vocabulary in English, but the only French 
equivalents she could find seemed utterly base and contemptible to her. It 
was true that she had been passed from hand to hand as often as were the 
prostitutes in brothels, so why should they treat her otherwise? "I love 
you, I love you Rene," she repeated, softly calling to him in the solitude 
of her room, "I love you, do whatever you want with me, but don't leave me, 
for God's sake don't leave me." 

Who pities those who wait? They are easily recognized: by their gentleness, 
by their falsely attentive looks-attentive, yes, but to something other than 
what they are looking at-by their absent-mindedness. For three long hours, 
in the studio where a short, plump red-haired model whom O did not know and 
who was modeling hats for her, O was that absent-minded person, withdrawn 
into herself by her desire for the minutes to hasten by and by her own 
anxiety. 

Over a blouse and petticoat of red silk she had put on a plaid skirt and a 
short suede jacket. The bright red of her blouse beneath her partly opened 
jacket made her already pale face seem even paler and the little red-haired 
model told her that she looked like a femme fatale. "Fatal for whom?" O said 
to herself. 

Two years earlier, before she had met and fallen in love with Rene, she 
would have sworn: "Fatal for Sir Stephen" and have added: "and hell know it 
too." But her love for Rene and Rene's love for her had stripped her of all 
her weapons and instead of providing her with any new proof of her power, 
had stripped her of those she had previously possessed. Once she had been 
indifferent and fickle, someone who enjoyed tempting, by a word or gesture, 
the boys who were in love with her, but without giving them anything, then 
giving herself impulsively, for no reason, once and only once, as a reward, 
but also to inflame them even more and render a passion she did not share 
even more cruel. She was sure that they loved her. One of them had tried to 
commit suicide; when he had been released from the hospital where they had 
taken him, she had gone to his place, had stripped naked and forbidding him 
to touch her, had lain down on his couch. Pale with pain and passion, he had 
stared at her silently for two hours, petrified by the promise he had made. 
She had never wanted to see him again. It wasn't that she took lightly the 
desire she aroused. She understood it, or thought she understood, all the 
more so because she herself felt a similar desire (or so she thought) for 
her girl friends, or for young strangers, girls she encountered by chance. 
Some of them yielded to her and she would take them to some discreet hotel 
with its narrow hallways and paper-thin walls, while others, horrified, 
spurned her. But what she took-or mistook-to be desire was actually nothing 
more than the thirst for conquest and neither her tough-guy exterior nor the 
fact that she had had several lovers-if you could call them lovers-nor her 
hardness, nor even her courage was of any help to her when she met Rene. In 
the space of a week she learned fear, but certainty; anguish, but happiness. 
Rene threw himself at her like a pirate at his prisoner and she reveled in 
her captivity, feeling on her wrists, her ankles, feeling on all her members 
and in the secret depths of her heart and body, bonds less visible than the 
finest strands of hair, more powerful than the cables the Lilliputians used 
to tie tip Gulliver, bonds her lover loosened or tightened with a glance. 
She was no longer free? Yes! thank God, she was no longer free. But she was 
light, a nymph on clouds, a fish in water, lost in happiness. Lost because 
these fine strands of hair, these cables which Rene held, without exception, 
in his hand, were the only network through which the current of life any 
longer flowed into her. 

This was true to such a degree that when Rene relaxed his grip upon her-or 
when she imagined he had-when he seemed distracted, when he left her in a 
mood which she took to be indifference or let some time go by without seeing 
her or replying to her letters and she assumed that he no longer cared to 
see her and was on the verge of ceasing to love her, then everything was 
choked and smothered within her. The grass turned black, day was no longer 
day nor night any longer night, but both merely infernal machines which 
alternately provided, as part of her torture, periods of light and darkness. 
Cool water made her nauseous. She felt as though she were a statue of 
ashes-bitter, useless, damned-like the salt statues of Gomorrah. For she was 
guilty. Those who love God and by Him are abandoned in the dark of night, 
are guilty, because they are abandoned. They cast back into their memories, 
searching for their sins. She looked back, hunting for hers. All she found 
were insignificant acts of kindness or self-indulgence, which were not so 
much acts as an innate part of her personality, such, as arousing the 
desires of men other than Rene, men she noticed only to I the extent that 
the love Rene gave her, the certainty of belonging to Rene, made her happy 
and filled her cup of happiness to overflowing and insofar as her total 
submission to Rene rendered her vulnerable, irresponsible and all her 
trifling acts-but what acts? For all she had to reproach herself with were 
thoughts and fleeting temptations. Yet, he was certain that she was guilty 
and without really wanting to, Rene was punishing her for a sin he knew 
nothing about (since it remained completely internal), although Sir Stephen 
had immediately detected it: her wantonness. 

O was happy that Rene had had her whipped and had prostituted her, because 
her impassioned submission would furnish her lover with the proof that she 
belonged to him, but also because the pain and shame of the lash and the 
outrage inflicted upon her by those who compelled her to pleasure when they 
took her and at the same time delighted in their own without paying the 
slightest heed to hers, seemed to her the very redemption of her sins. There 
had been embraces she had found foul, hands that had been an intolerable 
insult on her breasts, mouths which had sucked in her lips and tongue like 
so many soft; vile leeches and tongues and sexes, viscous beasts which, 
caressing themselves at her closed mouth, at the double furrow, before and 
behind, which she had squeezed tight with all her might, had stiffened her 
with disgust and kept her stiffened so long that it was all the whip could 
do to unbend her, but she had finally yielded to the blows and opened, with 
disgust and abominable servility. And what if, in spite of that, Sir Stephen 
was right? What if she actually enjoyed her debasement? In that case, the 
baser she was, the more merciful was Rene to consent to make O the 
instrument of his pleasure. 

As a child, O had read a Biblical text in red letters on the white wall of a 
room in Wales where she had lived for two months, a text such as the 
Protestants often inscribe in their houses: 

IT IS A FEARFUL THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD 

No, O told herself now, that isn't true. What is fearful is to be cast out 
of the hands of the living God. Every time Rene postponed, or was late to, a 
rendezvous with her, as he had done today-for six o'clock had come and gone, 
as had six-thirty-O was prey to a dual feeling of madness and despair, but 
for nothing. Madness for nothing, despair for nothing, nothing was true. 
Rene would arrive, he would be there, nothing was changed, he loved her but 
had been held up by a staff meeting or some extra work, he had not had time 
to let her know; in a flash, O emerged from her airless chamber and yet each 
of these attacks of terror would leave behind, somewhere deep inside her, a 
dull premonition, a warning of woe: for there were also times when Rene 
neglected to let her know when the reason for the delay was a game of golf 
or a hand of bridge, or perhaps another face, for he loved O but he was 
free, sure of her and fickle, so fickle. Would a day of death and ashes not 
come, a day in the long string of other days which would give the nod to 
madness, a day when the gas chamber would reopen? Oh, let the miracle 
continue, let me still be touched by grace, Rene don't leave me! Each day, O 
did not look, nor did she care to look, any further than the next day and 
the day after; nor, each week, any further than the following week. And for 
her every night with Rene was a night which would last forever. 

Rene finally arrived at seven, so happy to see her again that he kissed her 
in front of the electrician who was repairing a floodlight, in front of the 
short, red-haired model who was just coming out of the dressing room and in 
front of Jacqueline, whom no one expected, who had come in suddenly on the 
heels of the other model. 

"What a lovely sight," Jacqueline said to O. "I was just passing, I wanted 
to ask you for the last shots of me you took, but I gather this isn't the 
right moment I'll be on my way." 

"Mademoiselle, please don't go," Rene called after her, without letting go 
of O, whom he was holding around the waist, "please don't go!" 

O introduced them: Jacqueline, Rene; Rene, Jacqueline. 

Piqued, the red-haired model had gone back into her dressing room, the 
electrician was pretending to be busy. O was looking at Jacqueline and could 
feel Rene's eyes following her gaze. Jacqueline was wearing a ski outfit, 
the kind that only movie stars who never go skiing wear. Her black sweater 
accentuated her small, widely spaced breasts, her tight-fitting ski pants 
did the same for her long, winter-sports-girl legs. Everything about her 
looked like snow: the bluish sheen of her gray sealskin jacket was snow in 
the shade; the hoar-frost reflection of her hair and eyelashes, snow in 
sunlight. She had on lipstick whose deep red shaded almost to purple and 
when she smiled and lifted her eyes till they were fixed on O, O said to 
herself that no one could resist the desire to drink of that green and 
moving water beneath the silvery lashes, to rip off her sweater to lay his 
hands on the fairly small breasts. There, you see: no sooner had Rene 
returned than, completely reassured by his presence, she recovered her taste 
for others and for herself, her zest for life itself. 

They left together, all three of them. On the rue Royals the snow, which had 
been falling in large flakes for two hours, fell now in eddies of thin 
little white flies which stung the face. The rock salt scattered on the 
sidewalk crunched beneath their feet and melted the snow and O felt the icy 
breath it emitted rising along her legs and fasten on her naked thighs. 

O had a fairly clear idea of what she was looking for in the young women she 
pursued. It wasn't that she wanted to give the impression she was vying with 
men, nor that she was trying to compensate by her manifest masculinity for a 
female inferiority which she in no wise felt' It's true that when she was 
twenty she had caught herself courting the prettiest of her girl friends by 
doffing her beret, by standing aside to let her pass and by offering a hand 
to help her out of a taxi. In the same vein, she would not tolerate not 
paying whenever they had tea together in some pastry shop. She would lass 
her hand and if she had a chance, her mouth, if possible in the street. But 
these were so many affectations she paraded for the sake of scandal, 
displayed much more from childishness than from conviction. On the other 
hand, her penchant for the sweetness of sweetly made-up-lips yielding 
beneath her own, for the porcelain or pearly sparkle of eyes half-closed in 
the half-light of couches at five in the afternoon, when the curtains are 
drawn and the lamp on the fireplace mantel lighted, for the voices that say: 
"Again, oh, please, again ..." for the marine odor clinging to her fingers: 
this was a real, deeply-rooted taste. And she also enjoyed the pursuit just 
as much. Probably not for the pursuit itself, however amusing or fascinating 
it might be, but for the complete sense of freedom she experienced in the 
act of hunting. She and she alone, set the rules and directed the 
proceedings (something she never did with men, or only in a most oblique 
manner). She initiated the discussions and set the rendezvous, the kisses 
came from her too, so much so that she preferred not to have someone kiss 
her first and since she had first had lovers she almost never allowed the 
girl whom she was caressing to return her caresses. As much as she was in a 
hurry to behold her girl friend naked, she was equally quick to find excuses 
why she herself should not undress. She often looked for excuses to avoid 
it, saying that she was cold, that it was the wrong time of the month for 
her and what is more, rare was the woman in whom she failed to detect some 
element of beauty. She remembered that, just out of the lycee, she had tried 
to seduce an ugly, disagreeable, constantly ill-natured little girl for the 
sole reason that she had a wild mop of blond hair which, by its unevenly cut 
curls, created a forest of light and shade over a skin that, while 
lusterless, had a texture which was soft, smooth and totally flat. But the 
little girl had repelled her advances and if one day pleasure had ever 
lighted up the ungrateful wench's face, it had not been because of O. For O 
passionately loved to see faces enveloped in that mist which makes them so 
young and smooth, a timeless youth that does not restore, childhood but 
enlarges the lips, widens the eyes the way makeup does and renders the iris 
sparkling and clear. In this, admiration played a larger part than pride, 
for it was not her handiwork which moved her: at Roissy she had experienced 
the same uncomfortable feeling in the presence of the transfigured face of a 
girl possessed by a stranger. The nakedness and surrender of the bodies 
overwhelmed her and she had the feeling that her girl friends, when they 
simply agreed to display themselves naked in a locked room, were giving her 
a gift which she could never repay in kind. For the nakedness of vacations, 
in the sun and on the beaches, made no impression on her-not simply because 
it was public but because, being public and not absolute, she was to some 
extent protected from it The beauty of other women, which with unfailing 
generosity she was inclined to find superior to her own, nevertheless 
reassured her concerning her own beauty, in which she saw, whenever she 
unexpectedly caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror, a kind of reflection 
of theirs. The power she acknowledged that her girl friends held over her 
was at the same time a guarantee of her own power over men. And what she 
asked of women (and never returned, or ever so little), she was happy and 
found it quite natural that men should be eager and impatient to ask of her. 
Thus was she constantly and simultaneously the accomplice of both men and 
women, having, as it were, her cake and eating it too. There were times when 
the game was not all that easy. That O was in love with Jacqueline, no more 
and no less than she had been in love with many others and assuming that the 
term "in love" (which was saying a great deal) was the proper one, there 
could be no doubt. But why did she conceal it so? 

When the buds burst open on the poplar trees along the quays and daylight, 
lingering longer, gave lovers time to sit for a while in the gardens after 
work, she thought she had at last found the courage to face Jacqueline. In 
winter, Jacqueline had seemed too triumphant to her beneath her cool furs, 
too iridescent, untouchable, inaccessible. And Jacqueline knew it. Spring 
put her back into suits, flat-heeled shoes, sweaters. With her short Dutch 
bob, she finally resembled those fresh school girls whom O, as a lycee 
student herself, used to grab by the wrists and drag silently into an empty 
cloakroom and push back against the hanging coats. The coats would tumble 
from the hangers. Then O would burst out laughing. They used to wear uniform 
blouses of raw cotton, with their initials embroidered in red cotton on 
their breast pockets. Three years later, three kilometers away, Jacqueline 
had worn the same blouses in another lycee. It was by chance that O learned 
that one day when Jacqueline was modeling some high-fashion dresses and said 
with a sigh that, really, if only they had had as pretty dresses at school, 
they would have been much happier there. Or if they had been allowed to wear 
the jumper they gave you, without anything on underneath. "What do you mean, 
without anything on?" O said. "Without a dress, naturally," Jacqueline 
replied. To which O began to blush. She could not get used to being naked 
beneath her dress and any equivocal remark seemed to her to be an allusion 
to her condition. It did no good to keep on repeating to herself that one is 
always naked beneath one's clothes. No, she felt as naked as that woman from 
Verona who went out to offer herself to the chief of the besieging army in 
order to free her city: naked beneath a coat, which only needed to be opened 
a crack. It also seemed to her that, like the Italian, her nakedness was 
meant to redeem something. But what? Since Jacqueline was sure of herself, 
she had nothing to redeem; she had no need to be reassured, all she needed 
was a mirror. O looked at her humbly, thinking that the only flowers one 
could offer her were magnolias, because their thick, lusterless petals 
slowly turn to bister as they fade and wither, or else camellias, because 
their waxen whiteness is sometimes infused with a pink glow. As winter 
waned, the pale tan that gilded Jacqueline's skin vanished with the memory 
of the snow. Soon, only camellias would do. But O was afraid of making a 
fool of herself with these melodramatic flowers. One day she brought a big 
bouquet of blue hyacinths, whose odor is overwhelming, like that of 
tuberoses: oily, cloying, clinging, exactly the odor camellias ought to have 
but don't. Jacqueline buried her Mongolian nose in the warm, stiff-stemmed 
flowers, her small nose and her pink lips, for she had been wearing a pink 
lipstick for the past two weeks and not red any longer. 

"Are they for me?" she said, the way women do who are used to receiving 
gifts. 

Then she thanked O and asked her if Rene were coming for her. Yes, he was 
coming, O said. He's coming, she repeated to herself and it will be for him 
that Jacqueline will lift her icy, liquid eyes for a second, those eyes 
which never look at anyone squarely, as she stands there falsely motionless, 
falsely silent. No one would need to teach her anything: neither to remain 
silent nor how to keep her hands unclenched at her sides, nor indeed how to 
arch her head half back. O was dying to seize a handful of that too blond 
hair at the nape of the neck and pull her docile head all the way back, to 
run at least her ringer over the line of her eyebrows. But Rene would want 
to do it too. 

She was fully aware why she, once so daring and bold, had become so shy, why 
she had wanted Jacqueline for two months without betraying it by the least 
word or gesture and giving herself lame excuses to explain her timidity. It 
was not true that Jacqueline was intangible. The obstacle was not in 
Jacqueline, it lay deep within O herself, its roots deeper than anything she 
had ever before encountered. It was because Rene was leaving her free and 
because she loathed her freedom. Her freedom was worse than any chains. Her 
freedom was separating her from Rene. She could have taken Jacqueline by the 
shoulders any number of times and without saying a word, pinned her against 
the wall with her two hands, the way a butterfly is impaled; Jacqueline 
would not have moved and probably not even done so much as smile. But O was 
henceforth like those wild animals which have been taken captive and either 
serve as decoys for the hunter or, leaping forward only at the hunter's 
command, head off the game for him. 

It was she who sometimes leaned back against a wall, pale and trembling, 
stubbornly impaled by her silence, bound there by her silence, so happy to 
remain silent She was waiting for more than permission, since she already 
had permission. She was waiting for an order. It came to her sot from Rene, 
but from Sir Stephen. 

As the months went by since the day Rene had given her to Sir Stephen, O was 
terrified to note the growing Importance Sir Stephen was assuming in her 
lover's eyes. Moreover, she realized at the same time that, in this matter, 
she was perhaps mistaken, imagining a progression in the fact or the feeling 
where actually the only progression had been in the acknowledgment of this 
fact or the admission of this feeling. Be that as it may, she had been quick 
to note that Rene chose to spend with her those nights and only those 
nights, following those she had spent with Sir Stephen (Sir Stephen keeping 
her the whole night only when Rene was away from Paris). She also noticed 
that when Rene remained for one of those evenings at Sir Stephen's he would 
never touch O except to make her more readily available or an easier 
offering to Sir. Stephen, if she happened to be struggling. It was extremely 
rare for him to stay and he never did unless at Sir Stephen's express 
request Whenever he did, he remained fully dressed, as he had done the first 
time, keeping quiet lighting one cigarette after another, adding wood to the 
fire, serving Sir Stephen something to drink-but not drinking himself. O 
felt that he was watching her the way a lion trainer watches the animal he 
has trained, careful to see that it performs with complete obedience and 
thus does honor to him, but even more the way a prince's bodyguard or a 
bandit's second-in-command keeps an eye on the prostitute he has gone down 
to fetch in the street. The proof that he was indeed yielding to the role of 
servant or acolyte resided in the fact that he watched Sir Stephen's face 
more closely than he did hers -and beneath his gaze O felt herself stripped 
of the very voluptuousness in which her features were immersed: for this 
sensual pleasure Rene paid obeisance, expressed admiration and even 
gratitude to Sir Stephen, who had engendered it, pleased that he had deigned 
to take pleasure in something he had given him. 

Everything would probably have been much simpler if Sir Stephen had liked 
boys and O did not doubt that Rene, who was not so inclined, still would 
have readily granted to Sir Stephen both the slightest and the most 
demanding of his requests. But Sir Stephen only liked women. 

O realized that through the medium of her body, shared between them, they 
attained something more mysterious and perhaps more acute, more intense than 
an amorous communion, the very conception of which was arduous but whose 
reality and force she could not deny. Still, why was this division in a way 
abstract? At Roissy, O had, at the same time and in the same place, belonged 
both to Rene and to other men. Why did Rene; in Sir Stephen's presence, 
refrain not only from taking her, but from giving her any orders? (All he 
ever did was pass on Sir Stephen's.) She asked him why, certain beforehand 
of the reply. 

"Out of respect," Rene replied. 

"But I belong to you," O said. 

"You belong to Sir Stephen first." 

And it was true, at least in the sense that when Rene Bad surrendered her to 
his friend the surrender had been absolute, that Sir Stephen's slightest 
desires took precedence over Rene's decisions as far as she was concerned 
and even over her own. If Rene had decided that they would dine together and 
go to the theater and Sir Stephen happened to phone an hour before he was to 
pick up O, Rene would come by for her at the studio as agreed, but only to 
drive her to Sir Stephen's door and leave her there. Once and only once, O 
had asked Rene to please ask Sir Stephen to change the day, because she so 
much wanted to go with Rene to a party to which they were both invited. Rene 
had refused. 

"My sweet angel," he had said, "you mean you still haven't understood that 
you no longer belong to me, that I'm no longer the master who's in charge of 
you?" 

Not only had he refused, but he had told Sir Stephen of O's request and in 
her presence, asked him to punish her harshly enough so that she would never 
again dare even to conceive of shirking her duties. 

"Certainly," Sir Stephen had replied. 

The scene had taken place in the little oval room with the inlaid floor, in 
which the only piece of furniture was a table encrusted with 
mother-of-pearl, the room adjoining the yellow and gray living room. Rene 
remained only long enough to betray O and hear Sir Stephen's reply. Then he 
shook hands with him, smiled at O and left Through the window, O saw him 
crossing the courtyard; he did not turn around; she heard the car door slam 
shut, the roar of the motor and in a little mirror imbedded in the wall she 
caught a glimpse of her own image: she was white with fear and despair. 
Then, mechanically, when she walked past Sir Stephen, who opened the 
living-room door for her and stood back for her to pass, she looked at him: 
he was as pale as she. In a flash, she was absolutely certain that he loved 
her, but it was a fleeting certainty that vanished as fast as it had come. 
Although she did not believe it and chided herself for having thought of it, 
she was comforted by it and undressed meekly, on a mere signal from him. 
Then and for the first time since he had been making her come two or three 
times a week and using her slowly, sometimes making her wait for an hour 
naked without coming near her, listening to her entreaties without ever 
replying, for there were times when she did beg and beseech, enjoining her 
to do the same things always at the same moments, as in a ritual, so that 
she knew when her mouth was supposed to caress him and when, on her knees, 
her head buried in the silken sofa, she should offer him only her back, 
which he now possessed without hurting her, for the first time, for in spite 
of the fear which convulsed her-or perhaps because of that fear-she opened 
to him, in spite of the chagrin she felt at Rene's betrayal, but perhaps too 
because of it she surrendered herself completely. And for the first time, so 
gentle were her yielding eyes when they fastened on Sir Stephen's pale, 
burning gaze, that he suddenly spoke to her in French, employing the 
familiar tu form with her: 

"I'm going to put a gag in your mouth, O, because I'd like to whip you till 
I draw blood. Do I have your permission?" 

"I'm yours," O said. 

She was standing in the middle of the drawing room and her arms, raised and 
held together by the Roissy bracelets, which were attached by a chain to a 
ring in the ceiling from which a chandelier had formerly hung, thrust her 
breasts forward. Sir Stephen caressed them, then kissed them, then kissed 
her mouth, once, ten times. (He had never kissed her.) And when he had put 
on the gag, which filled her mouth with the taste of wet canvas and pushed 
her tongue to the back of her throat, the gag so arranged that she could 
scarcely clench it in her teeth, he took her gently by the hair. Held in 
equilibrium by the chain, she stumbled on her bare feet. 

"Excuse me, O," he murmured (he had never before begged her pardon), then he 
let her go and struck. 

When Rene returned to O's apartment after midnight, after having gone alone 
to the party they had intended to go to together, he found her in bed, 
trembling in the white nylon of her long nightgown. Sir Stephen had brought 
her home and put her to bed himself and kissed her again. She told Rene that 
She also told him that she no longer had any inclination not to obey Sir 
Stephen, realizing full well that from this Rene would conclude that she 
deemed it essential and even pleasant, to be beaten (which was true; but 
this was not the only reason). What she was also certain of was that it was 
equally essential to Rene that she be beaten. He was as horrified at the 
idea of striking her-so much so that he had never been able to bring himself 
to do it-as he enjoyed seeing her struggle and hearing her scream. Once, in 
his presence, Sir Stephen had used the riding crop on her. Rene had forced O 
back against the table and held her there, motionless. Her skirt had slipped 
down; he had lifted it up. Perhaps he-needed even more to know that while he 
was not with her, while he was away walking or working, O was writhing, 
moaning and crying beneath the whip, was asking for his pity and not 
obtaining it-and was aware that this pain and humiliation had been inflicted 
on her by the will of the lover whom she loved and for his pleasure. At 
Roissy, he had had her flogged by the valets. In Sir Stephen he had found 
the stern master he himself was unable to be. The fact that the man he most 
admired in the world could take a fancy to her and take the trouble to tame 
her, only made Rene's passion all the greater, as O could plainly see. All 
the mouths that had probed her mouth, all the hands that had seized her 
breasts and her belly, all the members that had been thrust into her and so 
perfectly provided the living proof that she was indeed prostituted, had at 
the same time provided the proof that she was worthy of being prostituted 
and had, so to speak, sanctified her. But this, in Rene's eyes, was nothing 
compared to the proof Sir Stephen provided. Each time she emerged from his 
arms, Rene looked for the mark of a god upon her. O knew full well that if 
he had betrayed her a few hours before, it was in order to provoke new and 
more cruel, marks. And she also knew that, though the reasons for provoking 
them might disappear, Sir Stephen would not turn back. So much the worse. 
(But to herself she was thinking the exact opposite.) Rene, impressed and 
overwhelmed, gazed for a long time at the thin body marked by thick, purple 
welts like so many ropes spanning the shoulders, the back, the buttocks, the 
belly and the breasts, welts which sometimes overlapped and crisscrossed. 
Here and there a little blood still oozed. 

"Oh, how I love you," he murmured. 

With trembling hands he took off his clothes, turned out the light and lay 
down next to O. She moaned in the darkness, all the time he possessed her. 

The welts on O's body took almost a month to disappear. In places where the 
skin had been broken, she still bore the traces of slightly whiter lines, 
like very old scars. If ever she were inclined to forget where they came 
from, the attitude of Rene and Sir Stephen were there to remind her. 

Rene, of course, had a key to O's apartment. He hadn't thought to give one 
to Sir Stephen, probably because, till now, Sir Stephen had not evinced the 
desire to visit O's place. But the fact that he had brought her home that 
night suddenly made Rene realize that this door, which only he and O could 
open, might be considered by Sir Stephen as an obstacle, a barrier, or as a 
restriction deliberately imposed by Rene and that it was ridiculous to give 
him O if he did not at the same time give him the freedom to come and go at 
O's whenever he pleased. In short, he had a key made, gave it to Sir Stephen 
and told O only after Sir Stephen had accepted it. She did not dream of 
protesting and she soon discovered Chat, while she was waiting for Sir 
Stephen to appear, she felt incomprehensibly peaceful. She waited for a long 
time, wondering whether he would surprise her by coming in the middle of the 
night, whether he would take advantage of one of Rene's absences, whether he 
would come alone, or indeed whether he would even come at all. She did not 
dare speak about it to Rene. 

One morning when the cleaning woman happened not to be there and O had 
gotten up earlier than usual and at ten o'clock, was already dressed and 
ready to go out, she heard a key turning in the lock and flew to the door 
shouting: "Rene" (for there were times when Rene did arrive in this way and 
at this hour and she had not dreamed it could be anyone but he). It was Sir 
Stephen, who smiled and said to her: 

"All right, why don't we call up Rene?" 

But Rene, tied up at his office by a business appointment, would be there 
only in an hour's time. 

O, her heart pounding wildly (and she wondering why), watched Sir Stephen 
hang up. He sat her down on the bed, took her head in both his hands and 
forced her mouth open slightly in order to kiss her. She was so out of 
breath that she might have slipped and fallen if he had not held her. But he 
did hold her and straightened her up. 

She could not understand why her throat was knotted by such a feeling of 
anxiety and anguish, for, after all, what did she have to fear from Sir 
Stephen that she had not already experienced? 

He bade her remove all her clothes and watched her, without saying a word, 
as she obeyed. Wasn't she, in fact, quite accustomed to being naked beneath 
his gaze, as she was accustomed to his silence, as she was accustomed to 
waiting for him to decide what his pleasure would be? She had to admit she 
had been deceiving herself and that if she was taken aback by the time and 
the place, by the fact that she had never been naked in this room for anyone 
except Rene, the basic reason for her being upset was actually still the 
same: her own self-consciousness. The only difference was that this 
self-consciousness was made all the more apparent to her because it was not 
taking place in some specific spot to which she had to repair in order to 
submit to it and not at night, thereby partaking of a dream or of some 
clandestine existence in relation to the length of the day, as Roissy had 
been in relation to the length of her life with Rene. The bright light of a 
May day turned the clandestine into something public: henceforth the reality 
of the night and the reality of day would be one and the same. 
Henceforth-and O was thinking at last. This is doubtless the source of that 
strange sentiment of security, mingled with terror, to which she felt she 
was surrendering herself and of which, without understanding it, she had had 
a, premonition. Henceforth there were no more hiatuses, no dead time, no 
remission. He whom one awaits is, because he is expected, already present, 
already master. Sir Stephen was a far more demanding but also a far surer 
master than Rene. And however passionately O loved Rene and he her, there 
was between them a kind of equality (were it only the equality of age) which 
eliminated in her any feeling of obedience, the awareness of her submission. 
Whatever he wanted of her she wanted too, solely because he was asking it of 
her. But it was as though he had instilled in her, insofar as Sir Stephen 
was concerned, his own admiration, his own respect. She obeyed Sir Stephen's 
orders as orders about which there was no question and was grateful to him 
for having given them to her. Whether he addressed her in French or English, 
employed the familiar tu or the less personal vous form with her, she, like 
a stranger or a servant, never addressed him as anything but Sir Stephen. 
She told herself that the term "Lord" would have been more appropriate, if 
she had dared utter it, as he, in referring to her, would have been better 
advised to employ the word "slave." She also told herself that all was well, 
since Rene was happy loving in her Sir Stephen's slave. 

And so, her clothes neatly arranged at the foot of the bed; having again put 
on her high-heeled mules, she waited, with lowered eyes, facing Sir Stephen, 
who was leaning against the window. Bright sunlight was streaming through 
the dotted muslin curtains and gently warmed her hips and thighs. She was 
not looking for any special effect, but it immediately occurred to her that 
she should have put on more perfume, she realized that she had not made up 
the tips of her breasts and that, luckily, she had on her mules, for the 
nail polish on her toenails was beginning to peel off. Then she suddenly 
knew that what she was in fact waiting for in this silence and this light, 
was for Sir Stephen to make some signal to her, or for him to order her to 
kneel down before him, unbutton him and caress him. But no. Because she 
alone had been the one to whom such a thought had occurred, she turned 
scarlet and as she was blushing she was thinking what a fool she was to 
blush: such modesty and shame in a whore! 

Just then, Sir Stephen asked O to sit down before her dressing table and 
hear what he had to say. The dressing table was not, properly speaking, a 
dressing table, but next to a low ledge set into the wall, on which were 
arranged brushes and bottles, a large Restoration swing-mirror in which O, 
seated in her low-slung chair, could see herself full length. 

Sir Stephen paced back and forth behind her as he talked; from time to time 
his reflection crossed the mirror, behind the image of O, but his was a 
reflection which seemed far away, because the silvering of the mirror was 
discolored and slightly murky. 

O, her hands unclasped and her knees apart, had an urge to seize the 
reflection and stop it, in order to reply more easily. For Sir Stephen, 
speaking in a clipped English, was asking question after question, the last 
questions O would ever have dreamed he would ask, even assuming he would ask 
any in the first place. Hardly had he begun, however, when he broke off to 
settle O deeper and farther back in the chair; with her left leg over the 
arm of the chair and the other curled up slightly, O, in that bath of bright 
light, was then presented, to her own eyes and to Sir Stephen's, as 
perfectly open as though an invisible lover had withdrawn from her and left 
her slightly ajar. 

Sir Stephen resumed his questioning, with a judgelike resolution and the 
skill of a father-confessor. O did not see him speaking and saw herself 
replying. Whether she had, since she had returned from Roissy, belonged to 
other men besides Rene and himself? No. Whether she had wanted to belong to 
any other she might have met? No. Whether she caressed herself at night, 
when she was alone? No. Whether she had any girl friends she caressed or who 
she allowed to caress her? No (the "no" was more hesitant). Any girl friends 
she did desire? Well, there was Jacqueline, but "friend" was stretching the 
term. Acquaintance would be closer, or even chum, the way well-bred school 
girls refer to each other in high-class boarding schools. 

Whereupon Sir Stephen asked her whether she had any photographs of 
Jacqueline and he helped her to her feet so she could go and get them. It 
was in the living room that Rene, entering out of breath, for he had dashed 
up the four flights of stairs, came upon them: O was standing in front of 
the big table on which there shone, black and white, like puddles of water 
in the night, all of the pictures of Jacqueline. Sir Stephen, half-seated on 
the table, was taking them one by one as O handed them to him and putting 
them back on the table; his other hand was holding O's womb. From that 
moment on, Sir Stephen, who had greeted Rene without letting go of her-in 
fact she felt his hand probe deeper into her-had ceased addressing her and 
addressed himself to Rene. She thought she knew why: with Rene there, the 
accord between Sir Stephen and Rene concerning her was re-established, but 
apart from her, she was only the occasion for it or the object of it, they 
no longer had to question her, nor she to reply; what she had to do and even 
what she had to be, was decided without her. 

It was almost noon. The sun, falling directly on the table, curled the edges 
of the photographs. O wanted to move them and flatten them out to keep them 
from being ruined, but her fingers fumbled, she was on the verge of yielding 
to the burning probe of Sir Stephen's hand and allowing a moan to escape 
from her lips. She failed to hold it back, did in fact moan and found 
herself sprawled flat on her back among the photographs, where Sir Stephen 
had rudely shoved her as he left her, with her legs spread and dangling. Her 
feet were not touching the floor; one of her mules slipped from her foot and 
dropped noiselessly onto, the white rug. Her face was flooded with sunshine: 
she closed her eyes. 

Later, much later, she must have remembered overhearing the conversation 
between Sir Stephen and Rene, but at the time she was not struck by it, as 
though it did not concern her and simultaneously, as though she had already 
experienced it before. And it was true that she had already experienced a 
similar scene, since the first time that Rene had taken her to Sir 
Stephen's, they had discussed her in the same way. But on that initial 
occasion she had been a stranger to Sir Stephen and Rene had done most of 
the talking. Since then, Sir Stephen had made heir submit to all his 
fantasies, had molded her to his own taste, had demanded and obtained from 
her, as something quite routine, the most outrageous and scurrilous acts. 
She had nothing more to give than what he already possessed. At least so she 
thought. 

He was speaking, he who generally was silent in her presence and his 
remarks, as well as Rent's, revealed that they were renewing a conversation 
they often engaged in together, with her as the subject. It was a question 
of how she could best be utilized and how the things each of them had 
learned from his particular use of her could best be shared. Sir Stephen 
readily admitted that O was infinitely more moving when her body was covered 
with marks, of whatever kind, if only because these marks made it impossible 
for her to cheat and immediately proclaimed, the moment they were seen, that 
anything went as far as she was concerned. For to know this was one thing, 
"but to see the proof of it and to see the proof constantly renewed, was 
quite another. Rene, Sir Stephen said, was perfectly right in wishing to 
have her whipped. They decided that she would be, irrespective of the 
pleasure they might derive from her screams and tears, as often as necessary 
so that some trace of the flogging could always be seen upon her. 

O, still lying motionless on her back, her loins still aflame, was listening 
and she had the feeling that by some strange substitution Sir Stephen was 
speaking for her, in her place. As though he was somehow in her body and 
could feel the anxiety, the anguish and the shame, but also the secret pride 
and harrowing pleasure that she was feeling, especially when she was alone 
in a crowd of strangers, of passers-by in the street, or when she got into a 
bus, or when she was at the studio with the models and technicians and she 
told herself that any and all of these people she was with, if they should 
have an accident and have to be laid down on the ground or if a doctor had 
to be called, would keep their secrets, even if they were unconscious and 
naked; but not she: her secret did not depend upon her silence alone, did 
not depend on her alone. Even if she wanted to, she could not indulge in the 
slightest caprice-and that was indeed the meaning of one of Sir Stephens 
questions-without immediately revealing herself, she could not allow herself 
to partake of the most innocent acts, such as playing tennis or swimming. 
That these things were forbidden her was a comfort to her, a material 
comfort, as the bars of the convent materially prevent the cloistered girls 
from belonging to one another and from escaping. For this reason too, how 
could she run the risk that Jacqueline would not spurn her, without at the 
same time running the risk of having to explain the truth to Jacqueline, or 
at least part of the truth? 

The sun had moved and left her face. Her shoulders were sticking to the 
glossy surface of the photographs on which she was lying and against her 
knee she could feel the rough edge of Sir Stephens suitcoat, for he had come 
back beside her. He and Rene each took her by one hand and helped her to her 
feet. Rene picked up one of her mules. It was time for her to get dressed. 

It was during the lunch that followed, at Saint-Cloud on the banks of the 
Seine, that Sir Stephen, who had remained alone with her, began to question 
her once again. The restaurant tables, covered with white tablecloths, were 
arranged on a shaded terrace which was bordered by privet hedges, at the 
foot of which was a bed of dark red, scarcely opened peonies. 

Even before Sir Stephen could make a sign to her, O Had obediently lifted 
her skirts as she sat down on the iron chair and it had taken her bare 
thighs a long time to warm the cold iron. They heard the water slapping 
against the boats tied up to the wooden jetty at the end of the terrace. Sir 
Stephen was seated across from her and O was speaking slowly, determined not 
to say anything that was not true. What Sir Stephen wanted to know was why 
she liked Jacqueline. Oh! that was easy: it was because she was too 
beautiful for O, like the full-sized dolls given to the poor children for 
Christmas, which they're afraid to touch. And yet she knew that if she had 
not spoken to her and had not accosted her, it was because she really didn't 
want to. As she said this she raised her eyes, which had been lowered, fixed 
on the bed of peonies and she realized that Sir Stephen was staring at her 
lips. Was he listening to what she was saying, or was he merely listening to 
the sound of her voice or watching the movement of her lips? Suddenly she 
stopped speaking and Sir Stephen's gaze rose and intercepted her own. What 
she read in it was so clear this time and it was so obvious to him that she 
had seen it, that now it was his turn to blanch. If indeed he did love her, 
would he ever forgive her for having noticed it? She could neither avert her 
gaze nor smile, nor speak. Had her life depended on it, she would have been 
incapable of making a gesture, incapable of fleeing, her legs would never 
have carried her. He would probably never want anything from her save her 
submission to his desire, as long as he continued to desire her. But was 
desire sufficient to explain the fact that, from the day Rene had handed her 
over to him, he asked for her and kept her more and more frequently, 
sometimes merely to have her with him, without asking anything from her? 

There he sat across from her, silent and motionless. Some businessmen, at a 
neighboring table, were talking as they drank a coffee so black and aromatic 
that the aroma was wafted all the way to their own table. Two well-groomed, 
contemptuous Americans lighted cigarettes halfway through their meal; the 
gravel crunched beneath the waiters' feet-one of them came over to refill 
Sir Stephens glass, which was three-quarters empty, but what was the point 
of wasting good wine on a statue, a sleepwalker? The waiter did not belabor 
the point. 

O was delighted to feel that if his gray, ardent gaze wandered from her 
eyes, it was to fasten on her breasts, her hands, before returning to her 
eyes. Finally she saw the trace of a smile appear on his lips, a smile she 
dared to answer. But utter a single word, impossible! She could scarcely 
breathe. 

"O ..." Sir Stephen said. 

"Yes," O said, faintly. 

"O, what I'm going to speak to you about I have already discussed with Rene 
and we're Both in accord on it. But also, I ... " He broke off. 

O never knew whether it was because, seized by a sudden chill, she had 
closed her eyes, or whether he too had difficulty catching his breath. He 
paused; the waiter was changing the plates, bringing O the menu so she could 
choose the dessert. O handed it to Sir Stephen. A souffle? Yes, a souffle. 
It will take twenty minutes. All right, twenty minutes. The waiter left. 

"I need more than twenty minutes," Sir Stephen said. 

And he went on in a steady voice and what he said quickly convinced O that 
one thing at least was certain and that was, if he did love her, nothing 
would be changed, unless one considered this curious respect a change, this 
ardor with which he was saying to her: "I'd be most pleased if you would 
care to ..." instead of simply asking her to accede to his requests. Yet 
they were still orders and there was no question of O's not obeying them. 
She pointed this out to Sir Stephen. He admitted as much. 

"I still want you to answer," he said. 

"I'll do whatever you like," O responded and the echo of what she was saying 
resounded in her memory: "I'll do whatever you like," she was used to saying 
to Rene, the only difference being her use of the tu form with Rene. Almost 
in a whisper, she murmured: "Rene ... " 

Sir Stephen heard it. 

"Rene knows what I want from you. Listen to me." 

He was speaking English, but in a low, carefully controlled voice which was 
inaudible at the neighboring tables. Whenever the waiters approached their 
table, he fell silent, resuming his sentence where he had left off as soon 
as they had moved away. What he was saying seemed strange and out of keeping 
with, this peaceful, public place and yet what was strangest of all was that 
he could say it and O hear it, so naturally. 

He began by reminding her that the first evening when she had come to his 
apartment he had given her an order she had refused to obey and he noted 
that although he might have slapped her then, he had never repeated the 
order since that night. Would she grant him now what she had refused him 
then? O understood that not only must she acquiesce, but that he wanted to 
hear her say it herself, in her own words, say that she would caress herself 
any time he asked her to. She said it and again she saw the yellow and gray 
drawing room, Rene's departure from it, her revulsion that first evening, 
the fire glowing between her open knees when she was lying naked on the rug. 
Tonight, in this same drawing room ... No, Sir Stephen had not specified and 
was going on. 

He also pointed out to her that she had never been possessed in his presence 
by Rene (or by anyone else), as she had been by him in Renews presence (and 
at Roissy by a whole host of others). From this she should not conclude that 
Rene would be the only one to humiliate her by handing her over to a man who 
did not love her-and perhaps derive pleasure from it-in the presence of a 
man who did. (He went on at such length and with such cruelty-she soon would 
open her thighs and back and her mouth, to those of his friends who, once 
they had met her, might desire her-that O suspected that this coarseness was 
aimed as much at himself as it was at her and the only thing she remembered 
was the end of the sentence: in the presence of a man who did love her. What 
more did she want in the way of a confession?) What was more, he would bring 
her back to Roissy sometime in the course of the summer. Hadn't it ever 
struck her as surprising, this isolation in which first Rene, then he, had 
kept her? They were the only men she saw, either together, or one after the 
other. Whenever Sir Stephen had invited people to his apartment on the rue 
de Poitiers, O was never invited. She had never lunched or dined at his 
place. Nor had Rene ever introduced her to any of his friends, except for 
Sir Stephen. In all probability he would continue to keep her in the 
background, for to Sir Stephen was henceforth reserved the privilege of 
doing as he liked with her. But she should not get the idea that she 
belonged to him, that she would be detained more legally; on the contrary. 
(But what hurt and wounded O most was the realization that Sir Stephen was 
going to treat her in exactly the same way Rene had, in the same, identical 
way.) The iron and gold ring that she was wearing on her left hand-and did 
she recall that the ring had been chosen so tight-fitting that they had had 
to force it on her ring finger? she could not take it off-that ring was the 
sign that she was a slave, but one who was common property. It had been 
merely by chance that, since this past autumn, she had not met any Roissy 
members who might have noticed her irons, or revealed that they had noticed 
them. 

The word irons, used in the plural, which she had taken to be an equivocal 
term when Sir Stephen had told her that irons were becoming to her, had in 
no wise been equivocal; it had been a mode of recognition, a password. Sir 
Stephen had not had to use the second formula: namely, whose irons was she 
wearing? But if today this question were asked of O, what would she reply? O 
hesitated. 

"Rene's and yours," she said. 

"No," Sir Stephen said, "mine. Rene wants you to be answerable first of all 
to me." 

O was fully cognizant of this, why did she pretend she was not? In a short 
while and in any case prior to her return to Roissy, she would have to 
accept a definitive mark, which would not absolve her from the obligation of 
being a common-property slave but would, besides, reveal her to be a 
personal slave, Sir Stephen's and the traces of the floggings on her body, 
or the marks raised by the riding crop, if indeed they were inflicted again, 
would be discreet and futile compared to this ultimate mark. (But what would 
this mark be, of what would it consist, in what way would it be definitive? 
O, terrified and fascinated, was dying to know, she had to know immediately. 
But it was obvious that Sir Stephen was not yet ready to explain it. And it 
was true that she had to accept, to consent in the real sense of the term, 
for nothing would be inflicted upon her by force to which she had not 
already previously consented; she could refuse, nothing was keeping her 
enslaved except her love and her self-enslavement. What prevented her from 
leaving?) And yet, before this mark was imposed upon her, even before Sir 
Stephen became accustomed to flogging her, as had been decided by Rene and 
himself, to flogging her in such a way that the traces were constantly 
visible, she would be granted a reprieve-the time required for her to make 
Jacqueline submit to her. Stunned, O raised her head and looked at Sir 
Stephen. Why? Why Jacqueline? And if Jacqueline interested Sir Stephen, why 
was it in relation to O? 

"There are two reasons," Sir Stephen said. "The first and least important, 
is that I would like to see you kiss and caress a woman." 

"But even assuming she gives in to me," cried O, "how in the world do you 
expect me to make her consent to your being present?" 

"That's the least of my worries," Sir Stephen said. "If necessary, by 
betrayal and anyway I'm counting on you for a great deal more than that, for 
the second reason why I want you to seduce her is that you're to be the bait 
that lures her to Roissy." 

O set down the cup of coffee she was holding in her hand, shaking so 
violently that she spilled the viscous dregs of coffee and sugar at the 
bottom of the cup. Like a soothsayer, she saw unbearable images in the 
spreading brown stain on the tablecloth: Jacqueline's glazed eyes 
confronting the valet Pierre; her flanks, doubtless as golden as her 
breasts, though O had never seen them, exposed to view below the folds of 
her long red velvet dress with its tucked-up skirt; her downy cheeks stained 
with tears and her painted mouth open and screaming and her straight hair, 
in a Dutch bob along her forehead, straight as new-mown hay-no, it was 
impossible, not her, not Jacqueline. 

"No, it's out of the question," she said. 

"Of course it's not," Sir Stephen retorted. "How do you think girls are 
recruited for Roissy? Once you have brought her there, the matter will be 
completely out of your hands and anyway, if she wants to leave she can 
leave. Come along now." 

He had gotten suddenly to his feet, leaving the money for the bill on the 
table. O followed him to the car, climbed in and sat down. Scarcely had they 
entered the Bois de Boulogne when he turned in to a side road, stopped the 
car in a narrow lane and took her in his arms. 

 III Anne-Marie and the Rings 

O had believed, or wanted to believe, in order to give herself a good 
excuse, that Jacqueline would be uncommonly shy. She was enlightened on this 
score the moment she decided to open her eyes. 

The modest air Jacqueline assumed-closing the door to the mirrored make-up 
room where she dressed and undressed-was in fact clearly intended to inflame 
O, to instill in her the desire to force the door which, had it been left 
wide open, she would never have made up her mind to enter. That O's decision 
finally came from an authority outside herself and was not the result of 
that basic strategy, could not have been further from Jacqueline's mind. At 
first O was amused by it. As she helped Jacqueline arrange her hair, for 
example, after Jacqueline had taken off the clothes she had posed in and was 
slipping into her turtle-neck sweater and the turquoise necklace the same 
color as her eyes, O found herself amazingly delighted at the idea that the 
very same evening Sir Stephen would be apprised of Jacqueline's every 
gesture- whether she had allowed O to fondle, through the black sweater, her 
small, well-spaced breasts, whether she had lowered her eyelids till those 
lashes, fairer than her skin, were touching her cheeks; whether she had 
sighed or moaned. When O embraced her, she became heavy, motionless and 
seemingly expectant in her arms, her lips parted slightly and her hair 
cascaded back. O always had to be careful to hold her by both her shoulders 
and lean her up against the frame of a door or against a table. Otherwise 
she would have slipped to the floor, her eyes closed, without a sound. The 
minute O let go of her, she would again turn into ice and snow, laughing and 
distant and would say: "You've got lipstick on me," and would wipe her 
mouth. It was this distant stranger that O enjoyed betraying by carefully 
noting-so as not to forget anything and be able to relate everything in 
detail-the slow flush of her cheeks, the smell of sage and sweat. Of 
Jacqueline it was impossible to say that she was forbearing or that she was 
on her guard. When she yielded to the kisses-and all she had so far granted 
O were kisses, which she accepted without returning-she yielded abruptly and 
it seemed, totally, as though for ten seconds, or five minutes, she had 
become someone else. The rest of the time she was both coquettish and coy, 
incredibly clever at parrying an attack, contriving never to lay herself 
open either to a word or gesture, or even a look which would allow the 
victor to coincide with the vanquished or give O to believe that it was all 
that simple to take possession of her mouth. The only indication one had as 
a guide, the only thing that gave one to suspect troubled waters beneath the 
calm surface of her look was an occasional, apparently involuntary trace of 
a smile on her triangular face, similar to the smile of a cat, as fleeting 
and as disturbing and also as uncertain, as a cat's. Yet it did not take O 
long to realize that this smile could be provoked by two things and 
Jacqueline was totally unaware of either. The first was the gifts that were 
given to her, die second, any clear evidence of the desire she 
aroused-providing, however, that the person who desired her was someone who 
might be useful to her or who flattered her vanity. In what way was O useful 
to her? Or was it simply that O was an exception and that Jacqueline enjoyed 
being desired by O both because she took solace in O's manifest admiration 
and also because a woman's desire is harmless and of no consequence? Still 
in all, O was convinced that if, instead of bringing Jacqueline a 
mother-of-pearl brooch or the latest creation of Hermes' scarves, on which I 
Love You was printed in every language under the sun, she were to offer 
Jacqueline the hundred or two hundred francs she seemed constantly to need, 
Jacqueline would have changed her tune about never having the time to have 
lunch or tea at O's place, or would have stopped evading her caresses. But 
of this O never had any proof. She had only barely mentioned it to Sir 
Stephen, who was chiding her for her slowness, when Rene stepped in. The 
five or six times that Rene had come by for O, when Jacqueline had happened 
to be there, the three of them had gone together to the Weber bar or to one 
of the English bars in the vicinity of the Madeleine; on these occasions 
Rene would contemplate Jacqueline with precisely the same mixture of 
interest, self-assurance and arrogance with which he would gaze, at Roissy, 
at the girls who were completely at his disposal. The arrogance slid 
harmlessly off Jacqueline's solid, gleaming armor and Jacqueline was not 
even aware of it. By a curious contradiction, O was disturbed by it, judging 
an attitude which she considered quite natural and normal for herself, 
insulting for Jacqueline. Was she taking up cudgels in defense of 
Jacqueline, or was it merely that she wanted her all to herself? She would 
have been hard put to answer that question, all the more so because she did 
not have her all to herself-at least not yet. But if she finally did 
succeed, she had to admit that it was thanks to Rene. On three occasions, 
upon leaving the bar where they had given Jacqueline considerably more 
whisky than she should have drunk-her cheeks were flushed and shining, her 
eyes hard-he had driven her home before taking O to Sir Stephen's. 

Jacqueline lived in one of those lugubrious Passy lodging houses into which 
hordes of White Russians had piled immediately following the Revolution and 
from which they had never moved. The entrance hall was painted in imitation 
oak and on the stairway the spaces between the banisters were covered with 
dust and the green carpeting had been worn down till it was threadbare in 
many places. Each time Rene wanted to come in-and to date he had never got 
beyond the front door-Jacqueline would jump out of the car, cry "not 
tonight" or "thanks so much," and slam the car door behind her as though she 
had suddenly been burned by some tongue of flame. And it was true, O would 
say to herself, that she was being pursued by fire. It was admirable that 
Jacqueline had sensed it, even though she had no concrete evidence of it as 
yet. At least she realized that she had to be on her guard with Rene, whose 
detachment did not seem to affect her in the slightest (or did it? and as 
far as seeming unaffected, two could play at that game and Rene was a worthy 
opponent for her). 

The only time that Jacqueline let O come into the house and follow her up to 
her room, O had understood why she had so adamantly refused Rene permission 
to set foot in the house. What would have happened to her prestige, her 
black-and-white legend on the slick pages of the posh fashion magazines, if 
someone other than a woman like herself had seen the sordid lair from which 
the glorious creature issued forth every day? The bed was never made, at 
most the bedclothes were more or less pulled up and the sheet which was 
visible was dirty and greasy, for Jacqueline never went to bed without 
massaging her face with cold cream and she fell asleep too quickly to think 
of wiping it off. Sometime in the past a curtain had apparently partitioned 
off the toilet from the room: all that remained on the triangular shaped 
curtain rod were two rings and a few shreds of cloth. The color was faded 
from everything: from the rug, from the wallpaper whose pink and gray 
flowers were crawling upward like vegetation gone wild and become petrified 
on the imitation white trellis. One would have had to throw everything out 
and start again from scratch: scrape off the wallpaper, throw out the rug, 
sand the floors. But without waiting for that, one could in any case have 
cleaned off dirt that, like so many strata, ringed the enamel of the basin, 
immediately wiped off and put into some kind of order the bottles of make-up 
remover and the jars of cream, cleaned up the powder box, wiped off the 
dressing table, thrown out the dirty cotton, opened the windows. But, 
straight and cool and clean and smelling of eau de Cologne and wild flowers, 
dirt-proof and impeccable, Jacqueline could not have cared less about her 
filthy room. What she did care about, however, what caused her no end of 
concern, was her family. 

It was because of her hovel, which O was frank enough to have mentioned to 
Rene, that Rene made a proposal which was to alter their lives, but it was 
because of her family that Jacqueline accepted. Rene's suggestion was that 
Jacqueline should come and live with O. "Family" was a gross 
misunderstatement: it was a clan, or rather a horde. Grandmother, mother, 
aunt and even a maid-four women ranging in age from fifty to seventy, 
strident, heavily made up, smothered beneath their onyx and their black 
silks, sobbing and wailing at four in the morning in the faint red light of 
the icons, with the cigarette smoke swirling thickly about them, four women 
drowning in the clicking of tea glasses and the harsh hissing of a language 
Jacqueline would gladly have given half her life to forget-she was going out 
of her mind having to submit to their orders, to listen to them, merely 
having to see them. Whenever she saw her mother lifting a piece of sugar to 
her mouth before drinking her tea, Jacqueline would set down her own glass 
and retreat to her dry" and dusty-pigsty, leaving all three of them behind, 
her grandmother, her mother and her mother's sister, with their hair dyed 
black, their closely knit eyebrows and their wide, doe-like, disapproving 
eyes-there in her mother's room which doubled as a living room, there where, 
besides, the fourth female, the maid, ended by resembling them. She fled, 
banging the doors behind her and they called after her: "Choura, Choura, 
little dove," just as in the novels of Tolstoy, for her name was not 
Jacqueline. Jacqueline was her professional name, a name chosen to forget 
her real name and with it this sordid but tender gynaeceum and to set 
herself up in the French sun, in a solid world where there are men who do 
marry you and not disappear, as had the father she had never known, into the 
vast Arctic wastes from which he had never returned. She took after him 
completely, she used to tell herself with a mixture of anger and delight, 
she had his hair and high cheekbones, his complexion and his slanting eyes. 
All she was grateful for to her mother was having given her this blond devil 
as a father, this demon whom the snows had reclaimed as the earth reclaims 
other men. What she resented was that her mother had forgotten him quickly 
enough to have given birth one fine day to a dark-complexioned little girl, 
the issue of a short-lived liaison, her half-sister by an unknown father, 
whose name was Natalie. Now fifteen, Natalie only saw them during vacation. 
Her father, never. But he provided for Natalie's room and board in a lycee 
not far from Paris and gave her mother a monthly stipend on which the three 
women and the maid-and even Jacqueline till now-had subsisted, albeit 
poorly, in an idleness which to them was paradise. Whatever remained from 
Jacqueline's earnings as a model, after she had bought her cosmetics and 
lingerie and her shoes and dresses-all of which came from the top fashion 
houses and were, even after the discount she received as a model, 
frightfully expensive-was swallowed by the gaping maw of the family purse 
and disappeared, God only knows where. 

Obviously, Jacqueline could have chosen to have a lover to support her and 
she had not lacked the opportunity. She had in fact had a lover or two, less 
because she liked them-not that she actually disliked them-than because she 
wanted to prove to herself that she was capable of provoking desire and 
inflaming a man to the point of love. The only one of the two-the second-who 
had been wealthy had made her a present of a very lovely pearl with a slight 
pink tint which she wore on her left hand, but she had refused to live with 
him and since he had refused to marry her, she had left him, with no great 
regrets, merely relieved that she was not pregnant (she had thought she was, 
for several days had lived in a state of dread at the idea). No, to live 
with a lover was to lose face, to forsake one's chances for the future, it 
was to do what her mother had done with Natalie's father and that was out of 
the question. 

With O, however, it was quite another matter. A polite fiction made it 
possible to pretend that Jacqueline was simply moving in with a girl friend, 
with whom she was going to share all costs. O would be serving a dual 
purpose, both playing the role of the lover who supports, or helps to 
support, the girl he loves and also the theoretically opposite role of 
providing a moral guarantee. Rene's presence was not official enough, 
really, to compromise the fiction. But who can say whether, behind 
Jacqueline's decision, that very presence might not have been the real 
motivation for her acceptance? The fact remained that it was left up to O 
and to O alone, to present the matter to Jacqueline's mother. Never had O 
been more keenly aware of playing the role of traitor, of spy, never had she 
felt so keenly she was the envoy of some criminal organization as when she 
found herself in the presence of that woman, who thanked her for befriending 
her daughter. And at the same time, deep in her heart O was repudiating her 
mission and the reasons which had brought her there. Yes, Jacqueline would 
move in with her, but never, never would O acquiesce so completely to Sir 
Stephen as to deliver her into his hands. And yet! ... For no sooner had she 
moved into O's apartment, where she was assigned, at Rene's request, the 
bedroom he sometimes pretended to occupy (pretended, given that he always 
slept in O's big bed), than O, contrary to all expectations, was amazed to 
find herself obsessed with the burning desire to have Jacqueline at any 
price, even if attaining her goal meant handing her over to Sir Stephen. 
After all, she rationalized to herself, Jacqueline's beauty is quite 
sufficient protection for her and besides, why should I get involved in it 
anyway? And what if she were to be reduced to what I have been reduced to, 
is that really so terrible?-scarcely admitting and yet overwhelmed to 
imagine, how sweet it would be to see Jacqueline naked and defenseless 
beside her and like her. The week Jacqueline moved in, her mother having 
given her full consent, Rene proved to be exceedingly zealous, inviting them 
every other day to dinner and taking them to the movies which, curiously 
enough, he chose from among the detective pictures playing, tales of drug 
traffic and white slavery. He would sit down between them, gently hold hands 
with them both and not utter a word. But whenever there was a scene of 
violence, O would see him studying Jacqueline's face for the slightest trace 
of emotion. All you could see on it was a hint of disgust, revealed by the 
slight downward pout at the corners of her mouth. 

Afterward he would drive them home in his convertible, with the top down and 
in the open car with the windows rolled down, the speed and the night wind 
flattened Jacqueline's generous head of blond hair against her cheeks and 
narrow forehead and even blew it into her eyes. She would toss her head to 
smooth her hair back into place and would run her hand through it the way 
boys do. 

Once she had accepted the fact that she was living with O and that O was 
Rent's mistress, she consequently seemed to find Rene's little familiarities 
quite natural. It did not bother her in the least to have Rene come into her 
room under the pretense of looking for some piece of paper he had left there 
and O knew that it was a pretense, for she had personally emptied the 
drawers of the big Dutch writing desk, with its elaborate pattern of inlay 
and its leather-lined leaf, which was always open, a desk so utterly unlike 
Rene. Why did he have it? Who had he gotten it from? Its weighty elegance, 
its light-colored woods were the only touch of wealth in the somewhat dark 
room which faced north and overlooked the courtyard and the steel gray of 
its walls and the cold, highly waxed surface of the floor provided a sharp 
contrast with the cheerful rooms which faced the river. Well, there could be 
a virtue in that: Jacqueline would not be happy there. It would make it all 
the easier for her to agree-to share the two front rooms with O, to sleep 
with O, as on the first day she had agreed to share the bathroom and 
kitchen, the cosmetics, the perfumes, the meals. In this, O was mistaken. 
Jacqueline was profoundly and passionately attached to anything that 
belonged to her-to her pink pearl, for instance-and completely indifferent 
to anything that was not hers. Had she lived in a palace, it would have 
interested her only if someone had told her: the palace is yours and then 
proved it by giving her a notarized deed. She could not have cared less 
whether the gray room was pleasant or not and it was not to get away from it 
that she climbed into O's bed. Nor was it to show her gratitude to O, for 
she in fact did not feel it, though O ascribed the feeling to her and was 
delighted to abuse it, or think she was abusing it. Jacqueline enjoyed 
pleasure and found it both expedient and pleasant to receive it from a 
woman, in whose hands she was running no risks whatever. 

Five days after she had unpacked her suitcases, whose contents O had helped 
her sort out and put away, when for the third time Rene had brought them 
home about ten o'clock after having dined with them and had then left (as he 
had both other times), she simply appeared, naked and still wet from her 
bath, in O's doorway and said to O: 

"You're sure he's not coming back?" and without even waiting for her answer, 
she slipped into the big bed. She allowed herself to be kissed and caressed, 
her eyes closed, not responding by a single caress; at first she moaned 
faintly, hardly more than a whimper, then louder, still louder, until 
finally she cried out. She fell asleep sprawled across the bed, her knees 
apart but her legs flat again on the bed, the upper part of her body 
slightly turned on one side, her hands open, her body bathed in the bright 
light of the pink lamp. Between her breasts a trace of sweat glistened. O 
covered her and turned out the light. When, two hours later, she took her 
again, in the dark, Jacqueline did not resist, but murmured: 

"Don't wear me out completely. I have to get up early tomorrow." 

It was at this same time that Jacqueline, in addition to her intermittent 
assignments as a model, began to engage in a more absorbing but equally 
unpredictable career: she was signed up to play bit parts in the movies. It 
was hard to tell whether she was proud of this or not, whether or not she 
considered this the first step in a career which might lead to her becoming 
famous. In the morning she would drag herself out of bed more in anger than 
with any show of enthusiasm, would take her shower, quickly make herself up, 
for breakfast would accept only the large cup of black coffee that O barely 
had time to make for her and would let O kiss the tips of her fingers, 
responding With no more than a mechanical smile and an expression full of 
malice: O was soft and warm in her white vicuna dressing gown, her hair 
combed, her face washed, looking for all the world like someone who plans on 
going back to bed. And yet such was not the case. O had not yet found the 
courage to explain why to Jacqueline. The truth of the matter was that every 
day, when Jacqueline left for the film studio at Boulogne where her picture 
was being shot, at the same time as the children left for school and the 
white-collar workers for their offices, O, who in the past had indeed whiled 
away the morning in her apartment, also got dressed. 

"I'm sending you my car," Sir Stephen had said, "to drive Jacqueline to 
Boulogne, then it will come back to pick you up." 

Thus O found herself headed for Sir Stephen's place every morning when the 
sun along the way was still striking the eastern facades; the other walls 
were still cool in the shade, but in the gardens the shadows were already 
growing shorter. 

At the rue de Poitiers, the housework was still not finished. Norah, the 
mulatto maid, would take O into the small bedroom where, the first evening, 
Sir Stephen had left her' alone to sleep and cry, wait till O had put her 
gloves, her bag and her clothes on the bed and then she would take them and 
put them away, in O's presence, in a closet to which she alone had the key. 
Then, having given O the patent-leather high-heeled mules which made a sharp 
clicking sound as she walked, Norah would precede her, opening the doors as 
they went, till they reached Sir Stephen's study, when she would stand aside 
to let O pass. 

O never got used to these preparations and stripping in front of this 
patient old woman, who never said a word to her and scarcely looked at her, 
seemed to her as dangerous and formidable as being naked at Roissy in the 
presence of the valets there. On felt slippers, the old lady slipped 
silently by like a nun. As she followed her, O could not take her eyes off 
the twin points of her Madras kerchief and every time she opened a door, off 
her thin, swarthy hand on the porcelain handle, a hand that seemed as hard 
as wood. 

At the same time, by a feeling diametrically opposed to the terror she 
inspired in her-a contradiction O was unable to explain-O experienced a kind 
of pride that this servant of Sir Stephen (and just what was her relation to 
Sir Stephen and why had he entrusted her with this task as costume and 
make-up assistant for which she seemed so poorly suited?) was a witness to 
the fact that she too- like so many others, perhaps, whom she had guided in 
the same way and why should she think otherwise?-was worthy of being used by 
Sir Stephen. For perhaps Sir Stephen did love her, without a doubt he did 
and O sensed that the time was not far off when he would no longer be 
content to let her suspect it but would declare it to her-but to the very 
degree that his love and desire for her were increasing, he was becoming 
more completely, more minutely and more deliberately exacting with her. Thus 
retained by his side for whole mornings, during which he sometimes scarcely 
touched her, wanting only to be caressed by her, she did whatever he wanted 
of her with a sentiment that must be qualified as gratitude, which was all 
the greater whenever his request took the form of a command. Each surrender 
was for her the pledge that another surrender would be demanded of her and 
she acquitted herself of each as though of a duty performed; it was odd that 
she should have been completely satisfied by it and yet she was. 

Sir Stephen's office, situated directly above the yellow and gray drawing 
room where he held sway in the evening, was smaller and had a lower ceiling. 
It contained neither settee nor sofa, only two Regency armchairs upholstered 
in a tapestry with a floral pattern. O sat in one occasionally, but Sir 
Stephen generally preferred to keep her near at hand, at arm's length and 
while he was busy with other things, to none the less have her seated on his 
desk, to his left. The desk was set at right angles to the wall, which 
allowed O to lean back against the shelves which contained some dictionaries 
and leather-bound phone books. The telephone was snug against her left thigh 
and every time the phone rang she jumped. It was she who picked up the 
receiver and answered, saying: "May I ask who's calling?" then either 
repeating the name out loud and passing the receiver to Sir Stephen, or, if 
he signaled to her, making some excuse for him. Whenever he had a visitor, 
old Norah would announce him, Sir Stephen would have him wait long enough 
for Norah to conduct O back to the room where she had undressed and where, 
after Sir Stephen's visitor had left she would come to fetch her again when 
Sir Stephen rang for her. 

Since Norah entered and left the study several times each morning, either to 
bring Sir Stephen his coffee or to bring in the mail, to open or draw the 
blinds or to empty the ash trays and since she alone had the right to enter 
and had been expressly instructed never to knock and since, finally, she 
always waited in silence whenever she had something to say, until Sir 
Stephen spoke to her to ask her what it was she wanted, it so happened that 
on one occasion when Norah came into the room O was bent over the desk with 
her rear -exposed, her head and arms against the leather top, waiting for 
Sir Stephen to impale her. She raised her head. If Norah had not glanced at 
her and she invariably never did, that would have been the only movement O 
would have made. But this time it was obvious that Norah was trying to catch 
O's eye. Those black, beady eyes fastened on her own-and it was impossible 
for O to tell whether they bespoke indifference or not-those eyes set in a 
deeply furrowed, impassive face so bothered O that she made a movement to 
try and get away from Sir Stephen. He gathered what it was all about and 
with one hand pinned her waist to the table, while prying her open with the 
other. She who was constantly striving to cooperate and do her best was now, 
quite involuntarily, tense and contracted and Sir Stephen was obliged to 
force his way. Even when he had done so, she felt that the ring of her 
buttocks was tightening around him and he had trouble forcing himself all 
the way into her. He withdrew only when he was certain he could come and go 
with ease. Then, as he was on the point of taking her again, he told Norah 
to wait and said that she could help O get dressed when he had finished with 
her. And yet, before he dismissed her, he kissed O tenderly on the mouth. It 
was that kiss which, several days later, gave her the courage to tell him 
that Norah frightened her. 

"I should hope so," he retorted. "And when you wear my mark and my irons, as 
I trust you soon will-if you will consent to it-you'll have much more reason 
to be afraid of her." 

"Why?" O asked, "and what mark and what irons? I'm already wearing this ring 
..." 

"That's completely up to Anne-Marie, to whom in fact I've promised to show 
you. We're going to pay her a visit after lunch. I trust you don't mind? 
She's a friend of mine and you may have noted that, till now, I've refrained 
from ever introducing you to my friends. When Anne-Marie is finished with 
you, I'll give you genuine reasons for being afraid of Norah." 

O did not dare to pursue the matter any further. This Anne-Marie whom they 
had threatened her with intrigued her more than Norah. Sir Stephen had 
already mentioned her when they had lunched together at Saint-Cloud. And it 
was quite true that O knew none of Sir Stephen's friends, nor any of his 
acquaintances. In short, she was living in Paris locked in her secret as 
though she had been locked in a brothel; the only persons who had the key to 
her secret, Rene and Sir Stephen, at the same time had the only key to her 
body. She could not help thinking that the expression "open oneself to 
someone," which meant to give oneself, for her had only one meaning, a 
literal, physical and in fact absolute meaning, for she was in fact opening 
every part of her body which was capable of being opened. It also seemed to 
her that this was her raison d'etre and that Sir Stephen, like Rene, 
intended it should be, since whenever he spoke of his friends as he had done 
at Saint-Cloud, it was to tell her that those to whom he might introduce her 
would, needless to say, be free to dispose of her however they wished, if 
indeed they did. But in trying to visualize Anne-Marie and imagine what it 
might be that Sir Stephen expected from Anne-Marie as far as she, O, was 
concerned, O was completely at sea and not even her experience at Roissy was 
of any help to her. Sir Stephen had also mentioned that he wanted to see her 
caress another woman; could that be it? (But he had specified that he was 
referring to Jacqueline ...) No, it wasn't that. "To show you," he had just 
said. Indeed. But after she left Anne-Marie, O knew no more than before. 

Anne-Marie lived not far from the Observatoire in Paris, in an apartment 
flanked by a kind of large studio, on the top floor of a new building 
overlooking the treetops. She was a slender woman, the same age more or less 
as Sir Stephen and her black hair was streaked with gray. Her eyes were such 
a deep blue they looked black. She offered O and Sir Stephen some coffee, a 
very strong, bitter coffee which she served steaming hot in tiny cups and 
which reassured O. When she had finished her coffee and got up from her 
chair to put down her empty cup on a coffee table, Anne-Marie seized her by 
the wrist and turning to Sir Stephen, said: 

"May I?" 

"Please do," Sir Stephen said. 

Then Anne-Marie, who till then had neither spoken to nor smiled at O, even 
to greet her or to acknowledge Sir Stephen's introduction, said to her 
softly, with a smile so tender one would have thought she were giving her a 
present: 

"Come, my child and let me see your belly and backside. But better yet, why 
don't you take off all your clothes." 

While O obeyed, she lighted a cigarette. Sir Stephen had not taken his eyes 
off O. They left her standing there for perhaps five minutes. There was no 
mirror in the room, but O caught a vague reflection of herself in the black 
lacquer surface of a screen. 

"Take off your stockings too," Anne-Marie said suddenly. "You see," she went 
on, "you shouldn't wear garters, you'll ruin your thighs." And with the tip 
of her finger she pointed to the spot just above O's knees where O rolled 
down her stockings around a wide elastic garter. There was in fact a faint 
mark on her leg. 

"Who told you to do that?" 

Before O had a chance to reply, Sir Stephen said: 

"The boy who gave her to me, you know him, Rene." And he added: "But I'm 
sure he'll come around to your opinion." 

"I'm glad to hear it," said Anne-Marie. "I'm going to give you some long, 
dark stockings, O and a corset to hold them up. But it will be a whalebone 
corset, one that will be snug at the waist." 

When Anne-Marie had rung and a young, blond, silent girl had brought in some 
very sheer, black stockings and a tight-fitting corset of black nylon 
taffeta, reinforced and sustained by wide, close-set stays which curved in 
at the lower belly and above the hips. O, who was still standing, shifting 
her weight from one foot to the other, slipped on the stockings, which came 
to the top of her thighs. The young blonde helped her into the corset, which 
had a row of buckles along one of the busks on one side near the back. Like 
the bodices at Roissy, this one could be laced tip as tightly or loosely as 
desired, the laces being at the back. O fastened her stockings to the four 
garter-belt snaps in front and on the sides, then the girl set about lacing 
her up as tight as she could. O felt her waist and belly being pressed 
inward by the pressure of the stays, that in front descended almost to the 
pubis, which they left free, as they did her hips. The corset was shorter 
behind and left her rear completely free. 

"She'll be much improved," Anne-Marie said, speaking to Sir Stephen, "when 
her waist is a fraction of its present size. And what's more, if you're too 
pressed for time to have her undress, you'll see that the corset is no 
inconvenience. Now then, O, step over this way." 

The girl left, O went over to Anne-Marie, who was sitting in a low chair, a 
small easy chair upholstered in bright red velvet. Anne-Marie ran her hand 
lightly over her buttocks and then, toppling her over an ottoman similar to 
the red velvet chair and ordering her not to move, seized both her nether 
lips. 

This is how they lift the fish at the market, O was thinking, by the gills 
and how they pry open the mouths of horses. She also recalled that the valet 
Pierre, during her first evening at Roissy, had done the same to her after 
having fastened her in chains. After all, she was no longer mistress of her 
own fate and that part of her of which she was least in control was most 
assuredly that half of her body which could, so to speak, be put to use 
independently of the rest. Why, each time that she realized this, was 
she-surprised was not really the right word-once again persuaded, why was 
she paralyzed each time by the same feeling of profound distress, a 
sentiment which tended to deliver her not so much into the hands of the 
person she was with as into the hands of him who had turned her over to 
alien hands, a sentiment which drew her closer to Rene when others were 
possessing her and which, here, was tending to draw her closer to whom? To 
Rene or to Sir Stephen? She no longer knew ... But that was because she did 
not want to know, for it was clear that she had belonged to Sir Stephen now 
for ... how long had it been? ... 

Anne-Marie had her stand up and put her clothes back on. 

"You can bring her to me whenever you like," she said to Sir Stephen. "I'll 
be at Samois (Samois ... O had expected: Roissy. But it did not mean Roissy; 
then what did it mean?) in two days time. That will be fine." (What would be 
fine?) 

"In ten days, if that suits you," Sir Stephen said, "at the beginning of 
July." 

In the car which was driving her back home, Sir Stephen having remained 
behind at Anne-Marie's, she remembered the statue she had seen as a child in 
the Luxembourg Gardens: a woman whose waist had been similarly constricted 
and seemed so slim between, her full breasts and plump behind-she was 
leaning over limpid waters, a spring which, like her, was carefully 
sculptured in marble, looking at her reflection-so slim and frail that she 
had been afraid the marble waist would snap. But if that was what Sir 
Stephen wanted ... 

As for Jacqueline, she could handle her easily enough merely by telling her 
the corset was one of Rent's whims. Which brought O back to a train of 
thought she had been trying to avoid whenever it occurred to her, one which 
surprised her above all not to find more painful: why, since Jacqueline had 
moved in with her, Bad he made an effort not so much to leave her alone with 
Jacqueline, which she could understand, but to avoid being alone with O 
anymore? July was fast approaching and he would be going away and would not 
be coming to visit her at this Anne-Marie's where Sir Stephen was sending 
her; must she therefore resign herself to the fact that the only times she 
would see him would be those evenings when he was in the mood to invite 
Jacqueline and her, or-and she didn't know which of the two possibilities 
upset her most (since between them, at this point, there was something 
basically false, due to the fact that their relationship was so 
circumscribed)-on those occasional mornings when she was at Sir Stephen's 
and Norah ushered Rene" in, after first having announced his arrival? Sir 
Stephen always received him, invariably Rene" kissed O, caressed the tips of 
her breasts, coordinated his plans with Sir Stephen for the following 
day-plans which never included O-and left. Had he given her to Sir Stephen 
so completely that he had ceased to love her? The thought threw O into such 
a state of panic that, mechanically, she got out of Sir Stephen's car in 
front of her house, instead of telling the chauffeur to wait and after it 
had pulled away she had to dash off in search of a taxi. Taxis are few and 
far between on the quai de Bethune. O had to run all the way to the 
boulevard Saint-Germain and still she had to wait She was all out of breath 
and in a sweat, because her corset made it hard for her to breathe, when a 
taxi finally slowed down at the corner of the rue Cardinal-Lemoine. She 
signaled to it, gave the driver the address of Rene's office, got in without 
knowing whether Rene would be there, and if he was, whether he would see 
her; it was the first time she had gone to his office. 

She was not surprised by the impressive building on a side street just off 
the Champs-Elysees, or by the American-style offices, but what did 
disconcert her was Rene's attitude, although he did receive her immediately. 
Not that he was aggressive or full of reproaches. She would have preferred 
reproaches, for he had never given her permission to come and disturb him at 
his office and it was possible that she was creating a considerable 
disturbance for him. He dismissed his secretary, told her that he did not 
want to see anyone and asked her to hold all calls. Then he asked O what was 
the matter. 

"I was afraid you didn't love me any longer," O said. 

He laughed. "All of a sudden, just like that?" 

"Yes, in the car coming back from ... " 

"Coming back from where?" 

O remained silent. 

Rene laughed again: 

"But I know where you were, silly. Coming back from Anne-Marie's. And in ten 
days you're going to Samois. Sir Stephen just talked to me on the phone." 

Rene was seated in the only comfortable chair in the office, which was 
facing the table and O had buried herself in his arms. 

"They can do whatever they want with me, I don't care," she murmured. "But 
tell me you still love me." 

"Of course I love you, darling," Rene said, "but I want you to obey me and 
I'm afraid you're not doing a very good job of it. Did you tell Jacqueline 
that you belonged to Sir Stephen, did you talk to her about Roissy?" 

O assured him that she had not Jacqueline acquiesced to her caresses, but 
the day she should learn that O ... 

Rene stopped her from completing her sentence, lifted her up and laid her 
down in the chair where he had just been sitting and bunched up her skirt. 

"Ah ha, so you have your corset" he said. "It's true that you'll be much 
more attractive when you have a smaller waistline." 

Then he took her and it seemed to O that it had been so long since he had 
that, subconsciously, she realized she had begun to doubt whether he really 
desired her any longer and in his act she saw a proof of love. 

"You know," he said afterward, "you're foolish not to talk to Jacqueline. We 
absolutely need her at Roissy and the simplest way of getting her there 
would be through you. Besides, when you come back from Anne-Marie's there 
won't be any way of concealing your true condition any longer." 

O wanted to know why. 

"You'll see," Rene went on. "You still have five days and only five days, 
because Sir Stephen intends to start whipping you again daily, five days 
before he sends you to Anne-Marie's and there will be no way for you to hide 
the marks. How will you ever explain them to Jacqueline?" 

O did not reply. What Rene did not know was that Jacqueline was completely 
egotistical as far as O was concerned, being interested in her solely 
because of O's manifest and passionate, interest in her and she never looked 
at O. If O were covered with welts from the floggings, all she would have to 
do would be to take care not to bathe in Jacqueline's presence and to wear a 
nightgown. Jacqueline would never notice a thing. She had never noticed that 
O did not wear panties and there was no danger she would notice anything 
else: the fact was that O did not interest her. 

"Listen to me," Rene went on, "there's one thing anyway I want you to tell 
her and tell her right away and that is that I'm in love with her." 

Is that true?" O said. 

"I want her," Rene said, "and since you can't-or won't-do anything about it, 
m take charge of the matter myself and do what has to be done." 

'You'll never get her to agree to go to Roissy," O said. 

"I won't? In that case," Rene retorted, "well force her to." 

That night, after dark, when Jacqueline was in bed and O had pulled the 
covers back to gaze at her in the light of the lamp, after having said to 
her: "Rene's in love with you, you know"-for she had delivered the message 
and delivered it without delay-O, who a month before had been horrified at 
the idea of seeing this delicate wisp of a body scored by the lash, these 
narrow loins quartered, the pure mouth screaming and the fair down on her 
cheeks streaked with tears, O now repeated to herself Rene's final words and 
was happy. 

With Jacqueline gone and not due back until the beginning of August, if they 
had finished shooting the film she was making, there was nothing further to 
keep O in Paris. July was around the corner, all the gardens in Paris were 
bursting with crimson geraniums, at noon all the shutters in town were 
closed and Rene was complaining that he would have to make a trip to 
Scotland. For a moment O was hoping that he would take her along. But apart 
from the fact that he never took her anywhere to see his family, she knew 
that he would surrender her to Sir Stephen, if he were to ask for her. 

Sir Stephen announced that he would come for her the same day that Rene was 
flying to London. She was on vacation. 

"We're going down to Anne-Marie's," he said, "she's expecting you. Don't 
bother packing a suitcase, you won't need anything." 

Their destination was not the apartment near the Observatoire where O had 
first met Anne-Marie, but a low-lying two-story house at the end of a large 
garden, on the edge of the Fontainebleau Forest. Since that first day, O had 
been wearing the whalebone corset that Anne-Marie had deemed so essential: 
each day she had tightened it a little more, until now her waist was 
scarcely larger than the circle formed by her ten fingers; Anne-Marie ought 
to be pleased. 

When they arrived it was two o'clock in the afternoon, the whole house was 
asleep and the dog barked faintly when they rang the bell: a big, shaggy, 
sheepdog that sniffed at O's knees beneath her skirt. Anne-Marie was sitting 
under a copper beech tree on the edge of the lawn which, in one corner of 
the garden, faced the windows of her bedroom. She did not get up. 

"Here's O," Sir Stephen said. "You know what has to be done with her. When 
will she be ready?" 

Anne-Marie glanced at O. "You mean you haven't told her? All right, I'll 
begin immediately. You should probably allow ten days after it's over. I 
imagine you'll want to put the rings and monogram on yourself? Come back in 
two weeks. The whole business should be finished two weeks after that." 

O started to ask a question. 

"Just a minute, O," Anne-Marie said, "go into the front bedroom over there, 
get undressed but keep your sandals on and come back." 

The room, a large white bedroom with heavy purple Jouy print drapes, was 
empty. O put her bag, her gloves and her clothes on a small chair near a 
closet door. There was no mirror. She went back outside and dazzled by the 
bright sunlight, walked slowly back over to the shade of the beech tree. Sir 
Stephen was still standing in front of Anne-Marie, the dog at his feet. 
Anne-Marie's black hair, streaked with gray, shone as though she had used 
some kind of cream on it, her blue eyes seemed black. She was dressed in 
white, with a patent-leather belt around her waist and she was wearing 
patent-leather sandals which revealed the bright red nail polish on the 
toenails of her bare feet, the same color polish she was wearing on her 
fingernails. 

"O," she said, "kneel down in front of Sir Stephen." 

O obliged, her arms crossed behind her back, the tips of her breasts 
quivering. The dog tensed, as though he were about to spring at her. 

"Down, Turk," Anne-Marie ordered. Then: "Do you consent, O, to bear the 
rings and the monogram with which Sir Stephen desires you to be marked, 
without knowing how they will be placed upon you?" 

"I do," O said. 

"All right then, I'm going to walk Sir Stephen to his car. Stay here." 

As Anne-Marie got up from her chaise longue, Sir Stephen bent down and took 
O's breasts in his hands. He kissed her on the mouth and murmured: 

"Are you mine, O, are you really mine?" then turned and left her, to follow 
Anne-Marie. The gate banged shut, Anne-Marie was coming back. O, her legs 
folded beneath her, was sitting on her heels and had her arms on her knees, 
like an Egyptian statue. 

There were three other girls living in the house, all of whom had a bedroom 
on the second floor. O was given a small bedroom on the ground floor, 
adjoining Anne-Marie's. Anne-Marie called up to them to come down into the 
garden. Like O, all three of them were naked. The only persons in this 
gynaeceum-which was carefully concealed by the high walls and by closed 
shutters over the windows which overlooked a narrow dirt road-the only 
persons who wore clothes were Anne-Marie and the three servants: a cook and 
two maids, all of whom were older than Anne-Marie, three severe, dour women 
in their black alpaca skirts and stiffly starched aprons. 

"Her name is O," said Anne-Marie, who had sat down again. "Bring her over to 
me so I can get a better look at her. Two of the girls helped O to her feet: 
they were both brunettes, their hair as dark as their fleece below and the 
nipples of their breasts were large and dark, almost purple. The other girl 
was a short, plump redhead and the chalky skin of her bosom was crisscrossed 
by a terrifying network of green veins. The two girls pushed O till she was 
right .next to Anne-Marie, who pointed to the three black stripes that 
showed on the front of her thighs and were repeated on her buttocks. 

"Who whipped you?" she asked. "Sir Stephen?" 

"Yes "O said, 

"When? and with what?" 

"Three days ago, with a riding crop." 

"Starting tomorrow and for a month thereafter, you will not be whipped. But 
today you will to mark your arrival, as soon as I've had a chance to examine 
you. Has Sir Stephen ever whipped you on the inside of your thighs, with 
your legs spread wide? No? It's true, men don't know how to. Well, we'll 
soon see. Show me your waist. Yes, it's much better!" 

Anne-Marie pressed O's waist to make it even more wasplike. Then she sent 
the redhead to fetch another corset and had them put it on her. It was also 
made of black nylon, but was so stiffly whale-boned and so narrow that it 
looked for all the world like an extremely wide belt It had no garter 
straps. One of the girls laced it up as tight as she could, with Anne-Marie 
lending her encouragement as she pulled on the laces as hard as she could. 

"This is dreadful," O said. "I don't know whether I can bear it." 

"That's the whole point," Anne-Marie said. "You're much much lovelier than 
you were, but the problem was you didn't lace it tight enough. You're going 
to wear it this way every day. But tell me now, how did Sir Stephen, prefer 
using you? I need to know." 

She had seized O's womb with her whole hand and O could not reply. Two of 
the girls were seated on the lawn, the third, one of the brunettes, was 
seated on the foot of Anne-Marie's chaise longue. 

"Turn her around for me, girls, so I can see her back," Anne-Marie said. 

She was turned around and bent over and the hands of both girls vented her. 

"Of course," Anne-Marie went on, "there was no need for you to tell me. 
You'll have to be marked on the rear. Stand up. We're going to put on your 
bracelets. Colette, go get the box, well draw lots to see who will whip you. 
Bring the tokens, Colette, then we'll go to the music room." 

Colette was the taller of the two dark-haired girls, the other's name was 
Claire; the short redhead was named Yvonne. O had not noticed till now that 
they were all wearing, as at Roissy, a leather collar and leather bracelets 
on their wrists. They were also wearing similar bracelets around their 
ankles. 

When Yvonne had chosen some bracelets that fit O and put them on her, 
Anne-Marie handed O four tokens and asked her to give one to each of the 
girls, without looking at the numbers on them. O handed out the tokens. The 
three girls each looked at theirs but said nothing, waiting for Anne-Marie 
to speak. 

"I have number two," Anne-Marie said. '"Who has number one?" 

Colette had number one. 

"All right, take O away, she's all yours." 

Colette seized O's arms and joined her hands behind her back; she fastened 
the bracelets together and pushed O ahead of her. On the threshold of a 
French door that opened into a small wing which formed an L with the front 
of the house, Yvonne, who was leading the way, removed her sandals. The 
light entering through the French door revealed a room the far end of which 
formed a kind of raised rotunda; the ceiling, in the shape of a shallow 
cupola, was supported by two narrow columns set about six feet apart This 
dais was about four steps high and in the area between the columns, 
projected further Into the room in a gentle arc. The floor of the rotunda, 
like that of the rest of the room, was covered with a red felt carpet. The 
walls were white, the curtains on the windows red and the sofas set in a 
semicircle facing the rotunda were upholstered in the same red felt-material 
as the carpet on the floor. In the rectangular portion of the room there was 
a fireplace which was wider than it was deep and opposite the fireplace a 
large console-type combination record player and radio, with shelves of 
records on both sides. This was why it was called the music room, which 
communicated directly with Anne-Marie's bedroom via a door near the 
fireplace. The identical door on the other side of the fireplace opened into 
a closet. Aside from the record player and the sofas, the room had no 
furniture. 

While Colette had O sit down on the edge of the platform, which in this 
center portion between the columns made a vertical drop to the floor-the 
steps having been placed to the left and right of the columns-the two other 
girls, after first having closed the Venetian blinds a trifle, shut the 
French door. O was surprised to note that it was a double door and 
Anne-Marie, who was laughing, said: 

"That's so no one can hear you scream. And the walls are lined with cork. 
Don't worry, no one can hear the slightest thing that goes on in here. Now 
lie down." 

She took her by both shoulders and laid her back, then pulled her slightly 
forward. O's hands were clutching the edge of the platform-Yvonne having 
attached them to a ring set in the platform-and her buttocks were thus 
suspended in mid-air. Anne-Marie made her raise her legs toward her chest, 
then O suddenly felt her legs, still doubled-up above her, being pulled taut 
in the same direction: straps had been fastened to her ankle bracelets and 
thence to the columns on either side, while she lay thus between them on 
this raised dais exposed in such a way that the only part of her which was 
visible was the double deft of her womb and her buttocks violently 
quartered. Anne-Marie caressed the inside of her thighs. 

"It's the most tender spot of the whole body," she said, "be careful not to 
harm it. Not too hard now, Colette." 

Colette was standing over her, astride her at the level of her waist and in 
the bridge formed by her dark legs O could see the tassels of the whip she 
was holding in her hand. As the first blows burned into her loins, O moaned. 
Colette alternated from left to right, paused, then started again. O 
struggled with all her might, she thought the straps would tear her limb 
from limb. She did not want to grovel, she did not want to beg for mercy. 
And yet that was precisely what Anne-Marie intended wringing from her lips. 

"Faster " she said to Colette, "and harder." 

O braced herself, but it was no use. A minute later she could bear it no 
more, she screamed and burst into tears, while Anne-Marie caressed her face. 

"Just a second longer," she said, "and it will be over. Only five more 
minutes. She can scream for five minutes. It's twenty-five past, Colette. 
Stop when it's half past, when I tell you to." 

But O was screaming: 

"No, no, for God's sake don't!" screaming that she couldn't bear it, no, she 
couldn't bear the torture another second. And yet she endured it to the 
bitter end and after Colette had left the little stage, Anne-Marie smiled at 
her. 

"Thank me," she said to O and O thanked her. 

She knew very well why Anne-Marie had wanted, above all else, to have her 
whipped. That the female of the species was as cruel as and more implacable 
than, the male, O had never doubted for a minute. But O suspected that 
Anne-Marie was less interested in making a spectacle of her power than she 
was in establishing between O and herself a sense of complicity. O had never 
really understood, but she had finally come to accept as an undeniable and 
important verity, this constant and contradictory jumble of her emotions: 
she liked the idea of torture, but when she was being tortured herself she 
would have betrayed the whole world to escape it and yet when it was over 
she was happy to have gone through it, happier still if it had been 
especially cruel and prolonged. Anne-Marie had been correct in her 
assumptions both as to O's acquiescence and as to her revolt and knew that 
her pleas for mercy were indeed genuine. There was still a third reason for 
what she had done, which she explained to O. She was bent on proving to 
every girl who came into her house and who was fated to live in a totally 
feminine universe, that her condition as a woman should not be minimized or 
denigrated by the fact that she was in contact only with other women, but 
that, on the contrary, it should be heightened and intensified. That was why 
she required that the girls be constantly naked; the way in which O was 
flogged, as well as the position in which she was bound, had no other 
purpose. Today it was O who would remain for the rest of the afternoon-for 
three more hours-exposed on the dais, her legs raised and spread. Tomorrow 
it would be Claire, or Colette, or Yvonne, whom O would contemplate in turn. 
It was a technique much too slow and meticulous (as was the way the whip was 
wielded) to be used at Roissy. But O would see how efficient it was. Apart 
from the rings and the letters she would wear when she left, she would be 
returned to Sir Stephen more open and more profoundly enslaved, than she had 
ever before thought was possible. 

The following morning, after breakfast, Anne-Marie told O and Yvonne to 
follow her into her bedroom. From her writing desk she took a green leather 
coffer which she set on the bed and proceeded to open. Both girls squatted 
on their heels. 

"Hasn't Yvonne said anything to you about this?" Anne-Marie asked O. 

O shook her head. What was there for Yvonne to tell her? 

"And I know Sir Stephen didn't either. No matter. Anyway, here are the rings 
he wants you to wear." 

The rings were of stainless steel, unburnished, the same dull finish as the 
gold-plated iron ring. They were oblong in shape, similar to the links of a 
heavy chain, the rounded metal being approximately as thick as the diameter 
of an oversized coloring pencil. Anne-Marie showed O that each ring was 
composed of two U-shaped halves, one of which fitted into the other. 

"This is only the test model," she said, "which can be removed after it's 
been inserted. The permanent model, you see, has a spring inside and when 
you press on it it locks into the female slot of the other half of the ring 
and cannot be removed, except by filing." 

Each ring was as long as two joints of the little finger and wide enough for 
the same little finger to slip through it. To each ring was suspended, like 
another ring, or as though to the supporting loop of an earring, a ring 
which was meant to hang parallel to the plane of the ear and form its 
extension, a round disk made of the same metal, whose diameter was the same 
size as the ring was long. On one of its faces, a triskelion in gold inlay; 
on the opposite face, nothing. 

"On the blank side will be your name, your title and Sir Stephen's family 
and given names," Anne-Marie said, "with, below it, a design composed of a 
crossed whip and riding crop. Yvonne is wearing a disk just like it on her 
necklace, but yours will be worn on your loins." 

"But ..." O ventured. 

"I know," Anne-Marie replied, "that's why I brought Yvonne along. Show 
yours, Yvonne." 

The red-haired girl rose to her feet and lay back on the bed. Anne-Marie 
spread her thighs and showed O that one of the nether lobes had been neatly 
pierced, half way down and close to the base. The iron ring would just fit 
into it. 

"In a moment I'll pierce you, O," Anne-Marie said. "It's nothing really. 
What takes the longest is placing the clamps so as to be able to suture the 
outer and inner layers, attach the epidermis to the inner membrane. It's 
much easier to bear than the whip." 

"You mean to say you won't put me to sleep?" O cried, trembling. 

"Of course not," Anne-Marie replied. "You'll merely be tied a little more 
tightly than you were yesterday. That's really quite sufficient. Now come 
along." 

A week later Anne-Marie removed the clamps and slipped on the test ring. It 
was lighter than it looked, for it was hollow, but still O could feel its 
weight The hard metal, which was visibly piercing the flesh, looked like an 
instrument of torture. What would it be like when the weight of the second 
ring was added to it? This barbaric instrument would be immediately and 
glaringly apparent to the most casual glance. 

 "Of course it will," Anne-Marie said, when O pointed this out to her. "But 
aren't you by now fully aware of what Sir Stephen wants? Anyone, at Roissy 
or anywhere else, Sir Stephen or anyone else, even you in front of the 
mirror, anyone who lifts your skirts will immediately see his rings on your 
loins and if you turn around, his monogram on your buttocks. You may 
possibly file the rings off one day, but the brand on your backside will 
never come off." 

"I thought it was possible to have tattoos removed," Colette said. (It was 
she who had tattoed, on Yvonne's white skin just above the triangle of her 
belly, the initials of Yvonne's master in ornate blue letters, like the 
letters you find on embroidery.) 

"O will not be tattoed," replied Anne-Marie. 

O looked at Anne-Marie. Colette and Yvonne were stunned and said nothing. 
Anne-Marie was fumbling for her words. 

"Go ahead and say it," O said. 

"My poor dear girl, I just couldn't work up the courage to tell you: you're 
to be branded. Sir Stephen sent me the branding irons two days ago." 

"Branded?" Yvonne cried, "with a red-hot branding iron?" 

From the first day, O had shared in the life of the house. Idleness, 
absolute and deliberate idleness was the order of the day, interspersed with 
dull distractions. The girls were at liberty to walk in the garden, to read, 
draw, play cards, play solitaire. They could sleep in their rooms or 
sunbathe on the lawn. Sometimes two of them would chat, or they would talk 
together in pairs for hours on end and sometimes they would sit at 
Anne-Marie's feet without uttering a word. Mealtimes were always the same, 
dinner was by candlelight, tea was served in the garden and there was 
something absurd about the matter-of-fact way in which the two servants 
served these naked girls seated around a festive table. 

In the evening, Anne-Marie would designate one of them to sleep with her, 
sometimes the same one several nights in succession. She caressed her chosen 
partner and was by her caressed, generally toward dawn and then she would 
immediately fall asleep, after having sent her partner back to her own room. 
The purple drapes, only half closed, tinted the dawning day mauve and Yvonne 
used to say that Anne-Marie was as beautiful and haughty in receiving 
pleasure as she was unstinting in her demands. None of them had ever seen 
her naked. She would pull up or open slightly her white nylon nightgown, but 
would not take it off. Neither the pleasure she may have tasted the night 
before nor her choice of partner the previous evening had the least 
influence on her decision the following afternoon, which was always 
determined by a drawing. At three in the afternoon, beneath the copper 
beech, where the garden chairs were grouped about a round, white-marble 
table, Anne-Marie would bring out the token box. Each girl would take a 
token. Whoever drew the lowest number was then taken to the music room and 
arranged on the dais as O had been that first day. She then had to point to 
(save for O, who was exempted until her departure) Anne-Marie's right or 
left hand, in each of which she was holding a white or black ball. If she 
chose black, she was flogged; white, she was not. Anne-Marie never resorted 
to chicanery, even if chance condemned or spared the same girl several days 
in a row. Thus the torture of little Yvonne, who sobbed and cried out for 
her lover, was repeated four days running. Her thighs, like her breasts 
crisscrossed with a green network of veins, spread to reveal a pink flesh 
which was pierced by the thick iron ring, which had finally been inserted 
and the spectacle was all the more striking because Yvonne was completely 
shaved. 

"But why?" O wanted to know, "and why the ring if you are already wearing a 
disk on your collar?" 

"He says I'm more naked when I'm shaved. The ring, I think the ring is to 
fasten me with." 

Yvonne's green eyes and her tiny triangular face reminded O of Jacqueline 
every time she looked at her. What if Jacqueline were to go to Roissy? 
Sooner or later, Jacqueline would end up here, would here be strapped on her 
back on this platform. 

"I won't," O would say, "I don't want to and I won't lift a finger to get 
her there. As it is, I've already said too much. Jacqueline's not the sort 
to be flogged and marked." 

But how admirably suited to blows and irons was little Yvonne, how lovely it 
was to hear her moans and sighs, how lovely too to witness her body soaked 
with perspiration and what a pleasure to wrest the moans and the sweat from 
her. For on two occasions Anne-Marie had handed O the thonged whip-both 
times the victim had been Yvonne-and told her to use it. The first time, for 
the first minute, she had hesitated and at Yvonne's first scream O had 
recoiled and cringed, but as soon as she had started in again and Yvonne's 
cries had echoed anew, she had been overwhelmed with a terrible feeling of 
pleasure, a feeling so intense that she had caught herself laughing in spite 
of herself and she had found it almost impossible to restrain herself from 
striking Yvonne as hard as she could. Afterward she had remained next to 
Yvonne throughout the entire period of time she was kept tied up, embracing 
her from time to time. In some ways, she probably resembled Yvonne. At least 
one was led. to suspect as much by the way Anne-Marie felt about them both. 
Was it O's silence, her meekness that endeared her to Anne-Marie? Scarcely 
had O's wounds healed than Anne-Marie remarked: 

"How I regret not to be able to whip you! ... When you come back ... But 
let's say no more about it. In any event, I'm going to open you every day." 

And, daily, when the girl who was in the music room had been untied, O would 
replace her until the bell rang for dinner. And Anne-Marie was right: it was 
true that during those two hours all she could think of was the fact that 
she was opened and of the ring, hanging heavily from her (after one had been 
placed there) which, after they had inserted the second ring, weighed even 
more. She could think of nothing save her enslaved condition and of the 
marks that went with it. 

One evening Claire had come in with Colette from the garden, come over to O 
and examined both sides of the rings. 

"When you went to Roissy," she said, "was it Anne-Marie who brought you 
there?" 

"No," O said. 

"It-was Anne-Marie who brought me, two years ago. I'm going back there the 
day after tomorrow." 

"But don't you belong to anyone?" O said. 

"Claire belongs to me," said Anne-Marie, appearing from nowhere. "Your 
master's arriving tomorrow, O. Tonight you'll sleep with me." 

The short summer night waxed slowly brighter until, toward four o'clock, 
daylight drowned the last stars. O, who was sleeping with her legs together, 
was awakened by Anne-Marie's hands probing between her thighs. But all 
Anne-Marie wanted was to awaken O, to have O caress her. Her eyes were 
shining in the half light and her black hair, with the streaks of gray 
interspersed, was pushed up behind her on the pillow: only slightly curly 
and cut quite short, it made her look like some mighty nobleman in exile, 
like some brave libertine. With her lips, O brushed the hard tips of her 
breasts and her hand ran lightly over the valley of her belly. Anne-Marie 
was quick to yield-but not to O. The pleasure to which she opened her eyes 
wide, staring at the growing daylight, was an anonymous, impersonal pleasure 
of which O was merely the instrument. It made no difference whatever to 
Anne-Marie that O admired her face, smooth and glowing with renewed youth, 
her lovely panting lips, nor did she care whether O heard her moan when her 
lips and teeth seized the crest of flesh hidden in the furrow of her belly. 
She merely seized O by the hair to press her more closely to her and only 
let her go in order to say to her: 

"Again, do it again." 

O had loved Jacqueline in the same way, had held her completely abandoned in 
her arms. She had possessed her; or at least so she thought. But the 
similarity of gestures meant nothing. O did not possess Anne-Marie. No one 
possessed Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie demanded caresses without worrying about 
what the person providing them might feel and she surrendered herself with 
an arrogant liberty. Yet she was all kindness and gentleness with O, kissed 
her on the mouth and kissed her breasts and held her close against her for 
an hour before sending her back to her own room. She had removed her irons. 

"These are your final hours here," she said, "you can sleep without the 
irons. The ones we'll put on you in a little while you'll never be able to 
take off." 

She had run her hand softly and at great length, over O's rear, then had 
taken her into the room where she, Anne-Marie, dressed, the only room in the 
house where there was a three-sided mirror. She had opened the mirror so 
that O could see herself. 

"This is the last time you'll see yourself intact," she said. "Here, on this 
smooth, rounded area is where Sir Stephen's initials will be branded, on 
either side of the cleft in your behind. The day before you leave I'll bring 
you back here for another look at yourself. You won't recognize yourself. 
But Sir Stephen is right. Now go and get some sleep, O." 

But O was too worried and upset to sleep and when at ten the next morning 
Yvonne came to fetch her, O was trembling so that she had to help her bathe, 
arrange her hair and put on her lipstick. She had heard the garden gate 
open; Sir Stephen was there. 

"Come along now, O," Yvonne said, "he's waiting for you." 

The sun was already high in the sky, not a breath of air was stirring in the 
leaves of the beech tree, which looked as though it were made out of copper. 
The dog, overcome by the heat, was lying at the foot of the tree and since 
the sun had not yet disappeared behind the main mass of foliage, its rays 
shot through- the end of the only branch which, at this hour, cast a shadow 
on the table: the marble top was resplendent with bright, warm spots of 
light. 

Sir Stephen was standing, motionless, beside the table, Anne-Marie seated 
beside him. 

"Here she is," said Anne-Marie, when Yvonne had Brought O before them, "the 
rings can be put on whenever you like, she's been pierced." 

Without replying, Sir Stephen took O in his arms, kissed her on the mouth 
and lifting her completely off her feet, lay her down on the table and bent 
over her. Then he kissed her again, caressed her eyebrows and her hair and 
straightening up, said to Anne-Marie: 

"Right now, if it's all right with you." 

Anne-Marie took the leather coffer which she had brought out with her and 
set down on a chair and handed Sir Stephen the rings, which were unhooked 
and on which were inscribed the names of O and Sir Stephen. 

"Any time," Sir Stephen said. 

Yvonne lifted O's knees and O felt the cold metal as Anne-Marie slipped it 
into place. As she was slipping the second half of the ring into the first, 
she was careful to see that the side inlaid with gold was against her thigh 
and the side which bore the inscription facing inward. But the spring was so 
tight that the prongs would not go in all the way. They had to send Yvonne 
to fetch the hammer. Then they made O sit up and lean over, with her legs 
spread, on the edge of the marble slab, which served as an anvil first for 
one then the other of the two links of the chain, while they hit the other 
end with a hammer to drive the prongs home. Sir Stephen looked on in 
silence. When it was over he thanked Anne-Marie and helped O to her feet. It 
was then she realized that these new irons were much heavier than the ones 
she had Been wearing temporarily for the past few days. But these were 
permanent. 

"And now your monogram, right?" Anne-Marie said to Sir Stephen. 

Sir Stephen nodded assent and held O by the waist, for she was stumbling and 
looked as though she might fall. She was not wearing her black corset, but 
it had so molded her into the desired shape that she looked as though she 
might break, so slim was her waistline now and as a result, her hips and 
breasts seemed fuller. 

In the music room, into which Sir Stephen carried rather than led O, Colette 
and Claire were seated at the foot of the stage. When the others came in, 
they both got to their feet. On the stage was a big, round single-burner 
stove. Anne-Marie took the straps from the closet and had them tie O tightly 
around the waist and knees, her belly hard against one of the columns. They 
also bound her hands and feet. Consumed by fear and terror, O felt one of 
Anne-Marie's hands on her buttocks, indicating the exact spot for the irons, 
she heard the hiss of a flame and in total silence, heard the window being 
closed. She could have turned her head and looked, but she did not have the 
strength to. One single, frightful stab of pain coursed through her, made 
her go rigid in her bonds and wrenched a scream from her lips and she never 
knew who it was who had, with both branding irons at once, seared the flesh 
of her buttocks, nor whose voice had counted slowly up to five, nor whose 
hand had given the signal to withdraw the irons. 

When they unfastened her, she collapsed into Anne-Marie's arms and had time, 
before everything turned black around her and she completely lost 
consciousness, to catch a glimpse, between two waves of darkness, of Sir 
Stephen's ghastly pale face. 

Ten days before the end of July, Sir Stephen drove O back to Paris. The 
irons attached to the left lobe of her belly's cleft, proclaiming in bold 
letters that she was Sir Stephens personal property, came about a third of 
the way down her thigh and at every step, swung back and forth between her 
legs like the clapper of a bell, the inscribed disk being heavier and longer 
than the ring to which it was attached. The marks made by the branding iron, 
about three inches in height and half that in width, had been burned into 
the flesh as though by a gouging tool and were almost half an inch deep: the 
lightest stroke of the finger revealed them. From these irons and these 
marks, O derived a feeling of inordinate pride. Had Jacqueline been there, 
instead of trying to conceal from her the fact that she bore them, as she 
had tried to hide the traces of the welts raised by the riding crop which 
Sir Stephen had wielded during those last days before her departure, she 
would have gone running in search of Jacqueline, to show them to her. But 
Jacqueline was not due back for another week. Rene wasn't there. During that 
week, O, at Sir Stephen's behest, had several summer dresses made and a 
number of evening gowns of a very light material. He allowed her only two 
models, but let her order variations on both: one with a zipper all the way 
down the front (O already had several like it), the other a full skirt, easy 
to lift, always with a corselet above, which came up to below the breasts 
and was worn with a high-necked bolero. All one had to do was remove the 
bolero and the shoulders and breasts were bare, or simply to open it if one 
desired to see the breasts. Bathing suits, of course, were out of the 
question; the nether irons would hang below the suit. Sir Stephen had told 
her that this summer she would have to swim naked whenever she went summing. 
Beach slacks were also out However, Anne-Marie, who was responsible for the 
two basic models of dresses, knowing where Sir Stephen's preference lay in 
using O, had proposed a type of slacks which would, be supported in front by 
the blouse and on both sides, have long zippers, thus allowing the back flap 
to be lowered without taking off the slacks. But Sir Stephen refused. It was 
true that he used O, when he did not have recourse to her mouth, almost 
invariably as he would have a boy. But O had had ample opportunity to notice 
that when she was near him, even when he did not particularly desire her, he 
loved to take hold of her womb, mechanically as it were, take hold of and 
tug at her fleece with his hand, to pry her open and burrow at length 
within. The pleasure O derived from holding Jacqueline in much the same way, 
moist and burning between her locked fingers, was ample evidence and a 
guarantee of Sir Stephen's pleasure. She understood why he did not want any 
extraneous obstacles set in the path of that pleasure. 

Hatless, wearing practically no make-up, her hair completely free, O looked 
like a well-brought-up little girl, dressed as she was in her twilled stripe 
or polka dot, navy blue-and-white or gray-and-white pleated sun-skirts and 
the fitted bolero buttoned at the neck, or in her more conservative dresses 
of black nylon. Everywhere Sir Stephen escorted her she was taken for his 
daughter, or his niece and this mistake was abetted by the fact that he, in 
addressing her, employed the tu form, whereas she employed the nous. Alone 
together in Paris, strolling through the streets to window shop, or walking 
along the quays, where the paving stones were dusty because the weather had 
been so dry, they evinced no surprise at seeing the passers-by smile at 
them, the way people smile at people who are happy. 

Once in a while Sir Stephen would push her into the recess of a 
porte-cochere, or beneath the archway of a building, which was always 
slightly dark and from which there rose the musty odor of ancient cellars 
and he would kiss her and tell her he loved her. O would hook her heels over 
the sill of the porte-cochere out of which the regular pedestrian door had 
been cut. They caught a glimpse of a courtyard in the rear, with lines of 
laundry drying in the windows. Leaning on one of the balconies, a blond girl 
would be staring fixedly at them. A cat would slip between their legs. Thus 
did they stroll through, the Gobelins district, by Saint-Marcel, along the 
rue Mouffetard, to the area known as the Temple and to the Bastille. 

Once Sir Stephen suddenly steered O into a wretched brothel-like hotel, 
where the desk clerk first wanted them to fill out the forms, but then said 
not to bother if it was only for an hour. The wallpaper in the room was 
blue, with enormous golden peonies, the window looked out onto a pit whence 
rose the odor of garbage cans. However weak the light bulb at the head of 
the bed, you could still see streaks of face powder and forgotten hairpins 
on the mantelpiece. On the ceiling above the bed was a large mirror. 

Once, but only once, Sir Stephen invited O to lunch with two of his 
compatriots who were passing through Paris. He came for her an hour before 
she was ready and instead of having her driven to his place, he came to the 
quai de Bethune. 

O had finished bathing, but she had not done her hair or put on her make-up 
and was not dressed. To her surprise, she saw that Sir Stephen was carrying 
a golf bag, though she saw no clubs in it. But she soon got over her 
surprise: Sir Stephen told her to open the bag. Inside were several leather 
riding crops, two fairly thick ones of red leather, two that were long and 
thin of black leather, a scourge with long-lashes of green leather, each of 
which Was folded back at the end to form a loop, a dog's whip made of a 
thick, single lash whose handle was of braided leather and last but not 
least, leather bracelets of the sort used at Roissy, plus some rope. O laid 
them out side by side on the unmade bed. No matter how accustomed she became 
to seeing them, no matter what resolutions she made about them, she could 
not keep from trembling. Sir Stephen took her in his arms. 

"Which do you prefer, O?" he asked her. 

But she could hardly speak and already could feel the sweat running down her 
arms. 

"Which do you prefer?" he repeated. "All right," he said, confronted by her 
silence, "first you're going to help me." 

He asked her for some nails and having found a way to arrange them in a 
decorative manner, whips and riding crops crossed, he showed O a panel of 
wainscoting between her mirror and the fireplace, opposite her bed,' which 
would be ideal for them. He hammered some nails into the wood. There were 
rings on the ends of the handles of the whips and riding crops, by which 
they could be suspended from the nails, a system which allowed each whip to 
be easily taken down and returned to its place on the wall. Thus, together 
with the bracelets and the rope, O would have, opposite her bed, the 
complete array of her instruments of torture. It was a handsome panoply, as 
harmonious as the wheel and spikes in the paintings of Saint Catherine the 
Martyr, as the nails and hammer, the crown of thorns, the spear and scourges 
portrayed in the paintings of the Crucifixion. When Jacqueline came back ... 
but all this involved Jacqueline, involved her deeply. She would have to 
reply to Sir Stephen's question: O could Dot, he chose the dog whip himself. 

In a tiny private dining room of the La Perouse restaurant, along the quays 
of the Left Bank, a room on the third floor whose dark walls were brightened 
by Watteau-like figures in pastel colors who resembled actors of the puppet 
theater, O was ensconced alone on the sofa, with one of Sir Stephen's 
friends in an armchair to her right, another to her left and Sir Stephen 
across from her. She remembered already having seen one of the men at 
Roissy, but she could not recall having been taken by him. The other was a 
tall, red-haired boy with gray eyes, who could not have been more than 
twenty-five. In two words, Sir Stephen told them why he had invited O and 
what she was. Listening to him, O was once again astonished at the 
coarseness of his language. But then, how did she expect to be referred to, 
if not as a whore, a girl who, in the presence of three men (not to mention 
the restaurant waiters who kept trooping in and out, since luncheon was 
still being served) would open her bodice to bare her breasts, the tips of 
which had been reddened with lipstick, as they could see, as they could also 
see from the purple furrows across her milk-white skin that she had been 
flogged? 

The meal went on for a long time and the two Englishmen drank a great deal. 
Over coffee, when the liqueurs had been served, Sir Stephen pushed the table 
back against the opposite wall and after having lifted her skirt to show his 
friends how O was branded and in irons, left her to them. 

The man she had met at Roissy wasted no time with her: without leaving his 
armchair, without even touching her with his fingertips, he ordered her to 
kneel down in front of him, take him and caress his sex until he discharged 
in her mouth. After which, he made her straighten out his clothing and then 
he left. 

But the red-haired lad, who had been completely over-whelmed by O's 
submissiveness and meek surrender, by her irons and the welts which he had 
glimpsed on her body, took her by the hand instead of throwing himself upon 
her as she had expected and descended the stairs, paying not the slightest 
heed to the sly smiles of the waiters and after hailing a taxi, took her 
back to his hotel room. He did not let her go till nightfall,, after having 
frantically plowed her fore and aft, both, of which he bruised and belabored 
unmercifully, he being of an uncommon size and rigidity and what is more, 
being totally intoxicated by the sudden freedom granted him to penetrate a 
woman doubly and be embraced by her in the way he had seen her ordered to a 
short while before (something he had never before dared ask of anyone). 

The following day, when O arrived at Sir Stephen's at two o'clock in answer 
to his summons, she found him looking older and his face careworn. 

"Eric has fallen head over heels in love with you, O," he told her. "This 
morning he called on me and begged me to grant you your freedom. He told me 
he wants to marry you. He wants to save you. You see how I treat you if 
you're mine, O and if you are mine you have no right to refuse my commands; 
but you also know that you are always free to choose not to be mine. I told 
him so. He's coming back here at three." 

O burst out laughing. "Isn't it a little late?" she said. "You're both quite 
mad. If Eric had not come by this morning, what would you have done with me 
this afternoon? We would have gone for a walk, nothing more? Then let's go 
for a walk. Or perhaps you would not have summoned me this afternoon? In 
that case I'll leave ... " 

"No," Sir Stephen broke in, "I would have called you, but not to go for a 
walk. I wanted ... " 

"Go on, say it." 

"Come, it will be simpler to show you." 

He got up and opened a door in the wall opposite the fireplace, a door 
identical to the one into his office. 

O had always thought that the door led into a closet which was no longer 
used. She saw a tiny bedroom, newly painted and hung with dark red silk. 
Half of the room was occupied by a rounded stage flanked by two columns, 
identical to the stage in the music room at Samois. 

"The walls and ceiling are lined with cork, are they not?" O said. "And the 
door is padded and you've had a double window installed?" 

Sir Stephen nodded. 

"But since when has all this been done?" O said. 

"Since you've been back." 

"Then why? ... " 

"Why did I wait until today? Because I first wanted to hand you over to 
other men. Now I shall punish you for it. I've never punished you, O." 

"But I belong to you," O said. "Punish me. When Erie comes ... " 

An hour later, when he was shown a grotesquely bound and spread-eagled O 
strapped to the two columns, the boy blanched, mumbled something and 
disappeared. O thought she would never see him again. She ran into him again 
at Roissy, at the end of September and he had her consigned to him for three 
days in a row, during which he savagely abused and mistreated her. 

 IV The Owl 

What O failed completely to understand now was why she had ever been 
hesitant to speak to Jacqueline about what Rene rightly called her true 
condition. Anne-Marie had warned her that she would be changed when she left 
Samois, but O had never imagined the change would be so great. With 
Jacqueline back, more lovely and radiant than ever, it seemed natural to her 
to be no more reticent about revealing herself when she bathed or dressed 
than she was when she was alone. And yet Jacqueline was so disinterested in 
others, in anything that did not pertain directly to herself, that it was 
not until the second day after Jacqueline arrived back and by chance came 
into the bathroom just as O was stepping out of the tub, that O jingled her 
irons against the porcelain to draw her attention to the odd noise. 
Jacqueline turned her head and saw both the disk hanging between her legs 
and the black stripes crisscrossing her thighs and breasts. 

"What in the world's the matter?" she said. 

"It's Sir Stephen," O replied. And she added, as though it were something to 
be taken completely for granted: "Rene gave me to him and he's had me 
pierced with his rings. Look." And as she dried herself with the bath towel 
she came over to Jacqueline, who was so staggered she had slumped onto the 
lacquered bathroom stool, close enough so that Jacqueline could take the 
disk in her hand and read the inscription; then, slipping down her bathrobe 
she turned around and pointed to the initials S and H engraved in her 
buttocks and said: 

"He also had me branded with his monogram. As for the rest, that's where I 
was flogged with a riding crop. He generally whips me himself, but he also 
has a Negro maid whip me." 

Dumbfounded, Jacqueline gazed at O. O burst out laughing and made as though 
to kiss her. Terror-stricken, Jacqueline pushed her away and fled into her 
own room. O leisurely finished drying herself, put on her perfume and combed 
her hair. She put on her corset, her stockings, her mules and when she 
opened the bathroom door she encountered Jacqueline's gaze in the mirror, 
before which she was combing her hair, without having the vaguest notion 
what she was doing. 

"Lace up my corset, will you?" she said. 'You really do look astonished. 
Rene's in love with you, didn't he say anything to you about it?" 

"I don't understand," Jacqueline said. And she lost no time revealing what 
surprised her the most. "You look as though you were proud of it, I don't 
understand." 

"You will, after Rene takes you to Roissy. By the way, have you already 
slept with him?" 

Jacqueline's face turned a bright crimson and she was shaking her head in 
denial with such little conviction that once again O burst out laughing. 

"You're lying, darling, don't be an ass. You have every right in the world 
to sleep with him. And I might add that that's no reason to reject me. Come, 
let me caress you and I'll tell you all about Roissy." 

Had Jacqueline been afraid that O's jealousy would explode in her face and 
then yield to her out of relief when it did not, or was it curiosity, did 
she want to hear the promised explanations, or was it merely because she 
loved the patience, the slowness, the passion of O's caresses? In any event, 
yield she did. 

"Tell me about it," she later said to O. 

"All right," O said. "But first kiss the tips of my breasts. It's time you 
got used to it, if you're ever to be of any use to Rene." 

Jacqueline did as she was bade, so well in fact that she wrested a moan from 
O. 

"Tell me about it," she said. 

O's tale, however faithful and clear it may have been and notwithstanding 
the material proof she herself constituted, seemed completely mad to 
Jacqueline. 

"You mean you're going back in September?" she said. 

"After we've come back from the Midi," O said. "I'll take you, or Rene 
will." 

"To see what it's like, I wouldn't mind that," Jacqueline went on, 'Taut 
only to see what it's like." 

"I'm sure that can be arranged," said O, though she was convinced of the 
contrary. But, she kept telling herself, if she could only persuade 
Jacqueline to enter the gates at Roissy, Sir Stephen would be grateful to 
her-and once she was in, there would be enough valets, chains and whips to 
teach Jacqueline to obey. 

She already knew that the summer house that Sir Stephen had rented near 
Cannes on the Riviera, where she was scheduled to spend the month of August 
with Rene, Jacqueline and him (and with Jacqueline's younger sister, whom 
Jacqueline had asked if she could bring along, not because she cared 
especially to have her but because her mother had been hounding her to 
obtain O's permission), she knew that her room, to which she was certain she 
could entice Jacqueline, who would be unable to refuse when Rene was away, 
was separated from Sir Stephen's bedroom by a wall that looked as though it 
was full but actually was not; the wall was decorated with a trompe l'oeil 
latticework which enabled Sir Stephen to raise a blind on his side and thus 
to see and hear as well as if he had been standing beside the bed. 
Jacqueline would be surrendered to Sir Stephen's gaze while O was caressing 
her and by the time she found out it would be too late. O was pleased to 
think that she would deliver Jacqueline by an act of betrayal, because she 
had felt insulted at seeing Jacqueline's contempt for her condition as a 
flogged and branded slave, a condition of which O herself was proud. 

O had never been to the south of France before. The clear- blue sky, the 
almost mirror-like sea, the motionless pines beneath the burning sun: 
everything seemed mineral and hostile to her. "No real trees," she remarked 
sadly to herself as she gazed at the fragrant thickets full of shrubs and 
bushes, where all the stones and even the lichens, were warm to the touch. 
"The sea doesn't smell like the sea," she thought. She blamed the sea for 
washing up nothing more than an occasional piece of wretched seaweed which 
looked like dung, she blamed it for being too blue and for always lapping at 
the same bit of shore. But in the garden of Sir Stephen's villa, which was 
an old farmhouse that had been restored, they were far from the sea. To left 
and right, high walls protected them from the neighbors; the servants' wing 
faced the entrance court-" yard, while the side of the house overlooking the 
garden faced the east; O's bedroom was on this side and opened directly onto 
a second-story terrace. The tops of the tall black cypress trees were level 
with the overlapping hollow tiles which served as a parapet for the terrace, 
which was protected from the noon sun by a reed latticework. The floor of 
the terrace was of red tile, the same as the tiles in her bedroom. Aside 
from the wall which separated O's bedroom from Sir Stephen's-and this was 
the wall of a large alcove bounded by an archway and separated from the rest 
of the room by a kind of railing similar to the railings of stairways, with 
banisters of hand-carved wood -all the other walls were whitewashed. The 
thick white rug on the tile floor was made of cotton, the curtains were of 
yellow-and-white linen. There were two armchairs upholstered in the same 
material and some triple-layered Oriental cushions. The only furniture was a 
heavy and very handsome Regency bureau made of walnut and a very long, 
narrow peasant table in light-colored wood which was waxed till it shone 
like a mirror. O hung her clothes in a closet. For a dressing table, she 
used the top of the bureau. 

Jacqueline's little sister Natalie had been given a room near O's and in the 
morning when she knew that O was taking a sunbath on the terrace, she came 
out and lay down beside her. She had snow-white skin, was a shade plump, but 
her features were none the less delicate and like her sister, she had 
slanting eyes, but hers were black and shining, which made her look Chinese. 
Her black hair was cut in straight bangs across her forehead, just above her 
eyebrows and in the back was also cut straight, at the nape of the neck. She 
had firm, tremulous little breasts and her adolescent hips were only 
beginning to fill out She too had chanced upon O and taken her quite by 
surprise, one day when she had dashed out onto the terrace expecting to End 
her sister but found O instead, lying there alone on her stomach on the 
Oriental pillows. But what had shocked Jacqueline filled Natalie with envy 
and desire. She asked her sister about it. Jacqueline's replies, which were 
intended to shock and revolt young Natalie by repeating to her what O had 
related, in no wise altered Natalie's feelings. If anything, it accomplished 
the contrary. She had fallen in love with O. For more than a week she 
managed to keep it to herself, then late one Sunday afternoon she managed to 
be alone with O. 

The weather had been cooler than normal. Rene, who had spent part of the 
morning swimming, was asleep on the sofa of a cool room on the ground floor. 
Nettled at seeing that he should prefer to take a nap, Jacqueline had gone 
upstairs and joined O in her alcove. The sea and sua had already made her 
more golden than before: her hair, her eyebrows, her eyelashes, her nether 
fleece, her armpits, all seemed to be powdered with silver and since she was 
not wearing any make-up, her mouth was the same color pink as the pink flesh 
between her thighs. 

To make sure that Sir Stephen could see Jacqueline in detail-and O thought 
to herself that if she were Jacqueline she would have guessed, or noticed, 
his invisible presence-O took pains to pull back her legs and keep them 
spread in the light of the bedside lamp which she had turned on. The 
shutters were closed, the room almost dark, despite the thin rays of light 
that spilled in where the wood was not snug. For more than an hour 
Jacqueline moaned to O's caresses and finally, her breasts aroused, her arms 
thrown back behind her head while her hands 'circled the wooden bars of the 
headboard of O's Italian-style bed, she began to cry out when O, parting the 
lobes hemmed with pale hair, slowly began to bite the crest of flesh at the 
point between her thighs where the dainty, supple lips joined. O felt her 
rigid and burning beneath her tongue and wrested cry after cry from her 
lips, with no respite, until she suddenly relaxed, the springs broken and 
she lay there moist with pleasure. Then O sent her back to her room, where 
she fell asleep. 

Jacqueline was awake and ready, though, when Rene came for her at five 
o'clock to go sailing, with Natalie, in a small sailboat, as they had grown 
accustomed to doing. A slight wind usually came up at the end of the 
afternoon. 

"Where's Natalie?" Rene said. 

Natalie was not in her room, nor was she anywhere in the house. They went 
out to the garden and called her. Rene went as far as the thicket of scrub 
oak at the end of the garden; no one answered. 

"Maybe she's already down at the inlet," Rene said, "or in the boat." 

They left without calling her any more. 

It was at that point that O, who was lying on the Oriental pillows on her 
terrace, glanced through the tile banisters and saw Natalie running toward 
the house. She got up, put on her dressing gown-it was still so warm, even 
this late in the afternoon, that she was naked-and was tying her belt when 
Natalie erupted into the room like one of the Furies and threw herself at O. 

"She's gone," she shouted, "she's finally gone. I heard her, O, I heard you 
both, I was listening behind the door. You kiss her, you caress her. Why 
don't you caress me, why don't you kiss me? Is it because I'm dark, because 
I'm not pretty? She doesn't love you, O, but I do, I love you!" And she 
broke down and began to sob. 

"All right, fine," O said to herself. 

She eased the child into an armchair, took a large handkerchief from her 
bureau (it was one of Sir Stephen's) and when Natalie's sobs had subsided a 
little, wiped her tears away. Natalie begged her forgiveness, kissing O's 
hands. 

"Even if you don't want to kiss me, O, keep me with you. Keep me with you 
always. If you had a dog, you'd keep him and take care of him. And even if 
you don't want to kiss me but would enjoy beating me, you can beat me. But 
don't send me away." 

"Keep still, Natalie, you don't know what you're saying," O murmured, almost 
in a whisper. 

The child, slipping down and hugging O's knees, also replied in a 
near-whisper: 

"Oh, yes I do. I saw you the other morning on the terrace. I saw the 
initials, I saw the long black-and-blue marks. And Jacqueline has told me 
..." 

"Told you what?" 

"Where you've been, O and what they did to you there." 

"Did she talk to you about Roissy?" 

"She also told me that you had been, that you are ... " 

"That I was what?" 

"That you wear iron rings." 

"That's right," O said, "and what else?" 

"That Sir Stephen whips you every day." 

"That's correct," O repeated, "and he'll be here any second. So run along, 
Natalie." 

Natalie, without shifting position, raised her head to O and O's eyes 
encountered her adoring gaze. 

"Teach me, O, please teach me," she started in again, "I want to be like 
you. I'll do anything you tell me. Promise me you'll take me with you when 
you go back to that place Jacqueline told me about." 

"You're too young," O said. 

"No, I'm not too young, I'm fifteen going on sixteen," she cried out 
angrily. "I'm not too young. Ask Sir Stephen," she said, for he had just 
entered the room. 

Natalie was granted permission to remain with O and extracted the promise 
that she would be taken to Roissy. But Sir Stephen forbade O to teach her 
the least caress, not even a kiss on the lips, and also gave strict 
instructions that O was not to allow Natalie to kiss her. He had every 
intention of having her reach Roissy completely untouched by hands or lips. 
By way of compensation, what he did demand, since Natalie was loath to leave 
O, was that she not leave her for a single moment, that she witness O 
caressing both Jacqueline and himself, that she be present when O yielded to 
him and when he whipped her, or when she was flogged by old Norah. The 
kisses with which O smothered her sister, O's mouth glued to hers, made 
Natalie quiver with jealousy and hate. But, cowering on the carpet in the 
alcove, at the foot of O's bed, like little Dinarzade at the foot of 
Scheherazade's bed, she watched each time that O, tied to the wooden 
balustrade, writhed and squirmed beneath the riding crop, saw O on her knees 
humbly receiving Sir Stephen's massive,, upright sex in her mouth, saw her, 
prostrate, spread her own buttocks with both hands to offer him the after 
passage-she witnessed all these things with no other feelings but those of 
admiration, envy and impatience. 

It was about this same time that a change took place in Jacqueline: perhaps 
O had counted too heavily both on Jacqueline's indifference and her 
sensuality, perhaps Jacqueline herself naively felt that surrendering 
herself to O was dangerous for her relations with Rene; but whatever the 
reason, she suddenly ceased coming to O. At the same time, she seemed to be 
keeping herself aloof from Rene, with whom, however, she was spending almost 
every day and every night. She had never acted as though she were in love 
with him. She studied him coldly and when she smiled at him, her eyes 
remained cold. Even assuming that she was as completely abandoned with him 
as she was with O, which was quite likely, O could not help thinking that 
this surrender was superficial. Whereas Rene was head over heels in love 
with her, paralyzed by a love such as he had never known before, a 
worrisome, uncertain love, one he was far from sure was requited, a love 
that acts not, for fear of offending. He lived, he slept in the same house 
as Sir Stephen, the same house as O, he lunched, he dined, he went on walks 
with Sir Stephen, with O, he conversed with them both: he didn't see them, 
he didn't hear what they said. He saw, he heard, he talked through them, 
beyond them, and as in a dream when one tries to catch a departing train or 
clings desperately to the parapet of a collapsing bridge, he was forever 
trying to understand the raison d'etre, the truth which must have been 
lurking somewhere inside Jacqueline, under that golden skin, like the 
mechanism inside a crying doll. 

"Well," thought O, "the day I was so afraid would arrive is here, the day 
when I'd merely be a shadow in Rene's past. And I'm not even sad; the only 
thing I feel for him is pity and even knowing he doesn't desire me any 
longer, I can see him every day without any trace of bitterness, without the 
least regret, without even feeling hurt. And yet only a few weeks ago I 
dashed all the way across town to his office, to beg him to tell me he still 
loved me. Was that all my love was, all it meant? So fight, so easily gone 
and forgotten? Is solace that simple? And solace is not even the right word: 
I'm happy. Do you mean to say it was enough for him to have given me to Sir 
Stephen for me to be detached from him, for me to find a new love so easily 
in the arms of another?" 

But then, what was Rene compared to Sir Stephen? Ropes of straw, anchors of 
cork, paper chains: these were the real symbols of the bonds with which he 
had held her and which he had been so quick to sever. But what a delight and 
comfort, this iron ring which pierces the flesh and weighs one down forever, 
this mark eternal, how peaceful and reassuring the hand of a master who lays 
you on a bed of rock, the love of a master who knows how to take what he 
loves ruthlessly, without pity. And O said to herself that, in the final 
analysis, with Rene she had been an apprentice to love, she had loved him 
only to learn how to give herself, enslaved and surfeited, to Sir Stephen. 
But to see Rene, who had been so free with her-and she had loved his free 
ways-walking as though he were hobbled, like someone whose legs were 
ensnarled in the water and reeds of a pond whose surface seems calm but 
which, deeper down, swirls with subterranean currents, to see him thus, 
filled O with hate for Jacqueline. Did Rene dimly perceive her feelings? Did 
O carelessly reveal how she felt? In any case, O committed an error. 

One afternoon she and Jacqueline had gone to Cannes together to the 
hairdresser, alone, then to the Reserve Gate for an ice cream on the 
terrace. Jacqueline was superb in her tight-fitting black slacks and sheer 
black sweater, eclipsing even the brilliance of the children around her she 
was so bronzed and sleek, so hard and bright in the burning sup, so insolent 
and inaccessible. She told O she had made an appointment there with the 
director whose picture she had been playing in in Paris, to arrange for 
taking some exteriors, probably in the mountains above Saint-Paul-de-Vence. 
And there he was, forthright and determined. He didn't need to open his 
mouth, it was obvious he was in love with Jacqueline. AH one had to do was 
see the way he looked at her. What was so surprising about that? Nothing; 
but what was surprising was Jacqueline. Half reclining in one of those 
adjustable beach chairs, Jacqueline listened to him as he talked of dates to 
be set, appointments to be made, of the problems of raising enough money to 
finish the half-completed picture. He used the tu form in addressing 
Jacqueline, who replied with a mere nod or shake of her head, keeping her 
eyes half-closed. O was seated across from Jacqueline, with him between 
them. It took no great act of perception to notice that Jacqueline, whose 
eyes were still lowered, was watching, from beneath the protection of those 
motionless eyelids, the young man's desire, the way she always did when she 
thought no one was looking. But strangest of all was how upset she seemed, 
her hands quiet at her side, her face serious and expressionless, without 
the trace of a smile, something she had never displayed in Rent's presence. 
A fleeting, almost imperceptible smile on her lips as O leaned forward to 
set her glass of ice water on the table and their eyes met, was all O needed 
to realize that Jacqueline was aware that O knew the game was up. It didn't 
bother her, though; it was rather O who blushed. 

"Are you too warm?" Jacqueline said. "Well be leaving in five minutes. Red 
is becoming to you, by the way." 

Then she smiled again, turning her gaze to her interlocutor, a smile so 
utterly tender that it seemed impossible he would not hasten to embrace her. 
But he did not. He was too young to know that motionlessness and silence can 
be the lair of immodesty. He allowed Jacqueline to get up, shook hands with 
her and said good-by. She would phone him. He also said good-by to the 
shadow that O represented for him and stood on the sidewalk watching the 
black Buick disappear down the avenue between the sun-drenched houses and 
the dark, almost purple sea. The palm trees looked as though they had been 
cut out of metal, the strollers like poorly fashioned wax models, animated 
by some absurd mechanism. 

"You really like him all (bat much?" O said to Jacqueline as the car left 
the city and moved along the upper coast road. 

"Is that any business of yours?" Jacqueline responded. 

"It's Rene's business," she retorted. 

"What is Rene's business and Sir Stephen's, and if I understand it 
correctly, a number of other people's, is the fact you're badly seated. 
You're going to wrinkle your dress." 

O failed to move. 

"And I also thought," Jacqueline added, "that you weren't supposed to cross 
your legs." 

But O was no longer listening. What did she care about Jacqueline's threats? 
If Jacqueline threatened to inform on her for that peccadillo, what did she 
think would keep her from denouncing Jacqueline in turn to Rene? Not that O 
lacked the desire to. But Rene would not be able to bear the news that 
Jacqueline was lying to him, or that she had plans of her own which did not 
include him. How could she make Jacqueline believe that if she were to keep 
still, it would be to avoid seeing Rene lose face, turning pale over someone 
other than herself and perhaps revealing himself to be too weak to punish 
her? How could she convince her that her silence, even more, would be the 
result of her fear at seeing Rene's wrath turned against her, the bearer of 
ill tidings, the informer? How could she tell Jacqueline that she would not 
say a word, without giving the impression she was making a mutual 
non-betrayal pact with her? For Jacqueline' had the idea that O was 
terrified, terrified to death at what would happen to her if she, 
Jacqueline, talked. 

From that point on, until they got out of the car in the courtyard of the 
old farm, they did not exchange another word. Without glancing at O, 
Jacqueline picked a white geranium growing beside the house. O was following 
closely enough behind to catch a whiff of the strong, delicate odor of the 
leaf crumpled between her hands. Did she believe she would thus be able to 
mask the odor of her own sweat, which was making darkening circles beneath 
the arms of her sweater and causing the black material to cling to her 
armpits. 

In the big whitewashed room with the red-tile floor, Rene was alone. 

"You're late," he said when they came in. "Sir Stephen's waiting for you in 
the next room," he added, nodding to O. "He needs you for something. He's 
not in a very good mood." 

Jacqueline burst out laughing and O looked at her and turned red. 

"You could have saved it for another time," said Rene, who misinterpreted 
both Jacqueline's laugh and O's concern. 

"That's not the reason," Jacqueline said, "but I might say, Rene, your 
obedient beauty isn't so obedient when you're not around. Look at her dress, 
you see how wrinkled it is?" 

O was standing in the middle of the room, facing Rene. He told her to turn 
around; she was rooted to the spot. 

"She also crosses her legs," Jacqueline added, "but that you won't be able 
to see, of course. As you won't be able to see the way she accosts the 
boys." 

"That's not true," O shouted, "you're the one!" and she leaped at 
Jacqueline. 

Rene grabbed her just as she was about to hit Jacqueline and she went on 
struggling in his arms merely for the sake of feeling weaker than he, of 
being at his mercy, when, lifting her head, she saw Sir Stephen standing in 
the doorway looking at her. 

Jacqueline had thrown herself down on the sofa, her tiny face hardened with 
anger and fear and O could feel that Rene, though he had his hands full 
trying to subdue her, had eyes only for Jacqueline. She ceased resisting and 
crestfallen at the idea of having been found wanting in the presence of Sir 
Stephen, she repeated, this time almost in a whisper: 

"It's not true, I swear it's not true." 

Without uttering a word, without so much as a glance at Jacqueline, Sir 
Stephen made a sign to Rene to let O go and to O to go into the other room. 
But on the other side of the door O, who was immediately wedged against the 
wall, her belly and breasts seized, her lips forced apart by Sir Stephen's 
insistent tongue, moaned with happiness and deliverance. The points of her 
breasts stiffened beneath his hand's caress and with his other hand Sir 
Stephen probed her loins so roughly she thought she would faint. Would she 
ever dare tell him that no pleasure, no joy, no figment of her imagination 
could ever compete with the happiness she felt at the way he used her with 
such utter freedom, at the notion that he could do anything with her, that 
there was no limit, no restriction in the manner with which, on her body, he 
might search for pleasure. Her absolute certainty that when he touched her, 
whether it was to fondle or flog her, when he ordered her to do something it 
was solely because he wanted to, her certainty that all he cared about was 
his own desire, so overwhelmed and gratified O that each time she saw a new 
proof of it and often even when it merely occurred to her in thought, a cape 
of fire, a burning breastplate extending from the shoulders to the knees, 
descended upon her. As she was there, pinned against the wall, her eyes 
closed, her lips murmuring "I love you" when she could find the breath to 
say them, Sir Stephen's hands, though they were as cool as the waters of a 
bubbling spring on the fire coursing through her from head to toe, made her 
burn even hotter. Gently he released her, dropping her skirt down over her 
moist thighs, closing her bolero over her quivering breasts. 

"Come, O," he said, "I need you." 

Then, opening her eyes, O noticed that they were not alone. The big, bare, 
whitewashed room, identical in all respects to the living room, also opened, 
through a French door, onto the garden. Seated in a wicker chair on the 
terrace, which lay between the house and garden, an enormous man, a giant of 
a creature with a cigarette between his lips, his head shaved and his vast 
belly swelling beneath his open shirt and cloth trousers, was gazing at O. 
He rose and moved toward Sir Stephen, who was shoving O ahead of him. It was 
then that O noticed, dangling at the end of his watch chain, the Roissy 
insignia that the man was sporting. Still, Sir Stephen politely introduced 
him to O, simply as "Commander," with no name attached and much to O's 
surprise she saw that he was kissing her hand, the first time it had 
happened since she had been involved with Roissy members (with the exception 
of Sir Stephen). 

All three of them came back into the room, leaving the door open. Sir 
Stephen walked over to one end of the fireplace and rang. On the Chinese 
table beside the sofa, O saw a bottle of whisky, some soda water and 
glasses. So he was not ringing for something to drink. At the same time she 
noticed a large cardboard box on the floor beside the fireplace. The man 
from Roissy had sat down on a wicker chair, Sir Stephen was half-seated on 
the edge of the round table, with one leg dangling. O, who had been motioned 
over to the sofa, had meekly raised her skirt and could feel the prickly 
cotton of the roughly woven Provencal upholstery. 

It was Norah who came in. Sir Stephen ordered her to undress O and remove 
her clothing from the room. O allowed her to take off her bolero, her dress, 
her whalebone belt which constricted her waist and her sandals. As soon as 
she had stripped O completely, Norah left and O, automatically reverting to 
the rules of Roissy and certain that all Sir Stephen wanted from her was 
perfect submissiveness, remained standing in the middle of the room, her 
eyes lowered, so that she sensed rather than saw Natalie slip in through the 
open window, dressed in black like her sister, barefoot and silent. Sir 
Stephen had doubtless explained who she was and why she was there; to his 
visitor he merely mentioned her name, to which the visitor did not respond 
and asked her to make them a drink. As soon as she had handed them some 
whisky, soda water and ice cubes (and, in the silence, the clink of the ice 
cubes against the sides of the glasses made a harrowing racket), the 
Commander got up from his wicker chair, in which he I had been sitting while 
O was being undressed and with his glass in his hand, walked over to O. O 
thought that, with his free hand, he was going to take her breast or seize 
her belly. But he did not touch her, confining himself to scrutinizing her 
closely, from her parted lips to her parted knees. He circled her, studying 
her breasts, her thighs, her hindquarters, inspecting her in detail but 
offering no comment and this careful scrutiny and the presence of this 
gigantic body so close to her so overwhelmed O that she wasn't sure whether 
she wanted to run away or, on the contrary, have him throw her down and 
crush her. So upset was she that she lost control and raised her eyes toward 
Sir Stephen, searching for help. He understood, smiled, came over to her, 
and taking both her hands, pulled them behind her back and held them in one 
of his. She leaned back against him, her eyes closed and it was in a dream, 
or at least in the dusk of a near-sleep born of exhaustion, the way she had 
heard as a child, still half under the influence of ether, the nurses 
talking about her, thinking she was still asleep, of her hair, her pallor, 
her flat belly where only the faint early signs of pubescence were showing, 
it was in a dream that she heard the stranger complimenting Sir Stephen on 
her, paying special due to the pleasant contrast between her ample bosom and 
the narrow waist, the irons which he found longer, thicker and more, visible 
than usual. At the same time, she learned that Sir Stephen had in all 
probability consented to lend her to him the following week, since he was 
thanking Sir Stephen for something. At which point Sir Stephen, taking her 
by the nape of the neck, gently told her to wake up and with Natalie, to go 
upstairs and wait in her room. 

Had she good reason to be so upset and to be so annoyed at Natalie who, 
elated at the prospect of seeing O opened by someone other than Sir Stephen, 
was doing a kind of wild Indian dance around her and shouting: 

"Do you think he'll go into your mouth too, O? You should have seen the way 
he was looking at your mouth! Oh, how lucky you are to be desired like that! 
I'm sure that he'll whip you: he came back three times to those marks where 
you can see you've been whipped. At least you won't be thinking about 
Jacqueline then!" 

"I'm not always thinking about Jacqueline, you silly fool," O replied. 

"No! I'm not silly and I'm not a fool. I know very well you miss her," the 
child said. 

It was true, but not completely. What O missed was not, properly speaking, 
Jacqueline, but the use of a girl's body, with no restrictions attached. If 
Natalie had not been declared off-limits to her, she would have taken 
Natalie and the only reason she had not violated the restriction was her 
certainty that Natalie would be given to her at Roissy in a few weeks' time 
and that, some time previously, Natalie would be handed over in her 
presence, by her and thanks to her. She was burning to demolish the wall of 
air, of space, of-to use the only correct term-void between Natalie and her 
and yet at the same time she was enjoying the wait imposed upon her. She 
said so to Natalie, who only shook her head and refused to believe her. 

"If Jacqueline were here and were willing," she said, "you'd caress her." 

"Of course I would," O said with a laugh. 

"There, you see," the child broke in. 

How could she make her understand-and was it even worth the effort?-that it 
wasn't so much that she was in love with Jacqueline, nor for that matter 
with Natalie or any other girl in particular, but that she was only in love 
with girls as such, girls in general-the way one can be in love with one's 
own image-but in her case she always thought the other girls were more 
lovely and desirable than she found herself to be. The pleasure she derived 
from seeing a girl pant beneath her caresses, seeing her eyes close and the 
tips of her breasts stiffen beneath her lips and teeth, the pleasure she got 
from exploring her fore and aft with her hand-and from feeling her tighten 
around her fingers, then sigh and moan-was more than she could bear; and if 
this pleasure was so intense, it was only because it made her constantly 
aware of the pleasure which she in turn gave when she tightened around 
whoever was holding her, whenever she sighed or moaned, with this 
difference, that she could not conceive of being given thus to a girl, the 
way this girl was given to her, but only to a man. Moreover, it seemed to 
her that the girls she caressed belonged by right to the man to whom she 
belonged and that she was only present by proxy. Had Sir Stephen come into 
her room during one of those previous afternoons when Jacqueline had been 
wont to nap with her and found O caressing her, she would have spread her 
charge's thighs and held them apart with both hands, without the slightest 
remorse and in fact with the greatest of pleasure, if it had pleased Sir 
Stephen to possess her, rather than peering at her through the trellised 
wall as he had done. She was apt at hunting, a naturally trained bird of 
prey who would beat the game and always bring it back to the hunter. And 
speaking of the devil ... 

It was at this point, just as she was thinking again with beating heart of 
Jacqueline's lips, so pink and dainty beneath, her downy fur, of the even 
more delicate and pinker ring between her buttocks, which she had only dared 
force on three occasions, that she heard Sir Stephen moving about in his 
room. She knew that he could see her, although she could not see him and 
once again she felt that she was fortunate indeed to be constantly exposed 
this way, constantly imprisoned by these all-encompassing eyes. Young 
Natalie was seated on the white rug in the middle of the room, like a fly in 
a bowl of milk; while O, standing in front of the massive bureau which also 
served as her dressing table and able to see herself from head to waist in a 
slightly greenish antique mirror which was streaked like the wrinkles in a 
pond, looked for all the world like one of those late nineteenth-century 
prints in which the women are wandering naked through their chambers in a 
subdued light, even though it is mid-summer. 

When Sir Stephen pushed open the door, she turned around so abruptly that 
one of the irons between her legs struck one of the bronze knobs of the 
bureau upon which she was leaning and jingled. 

"Natalie," Sir Stephen said, "run downstairs and get the white cardboard box 
in the front living room." 

When Natalie came back, she set die box down on the bed, opened it and one 
by one removed the objects inside, unwrapping the paper in which they were 
packed and handing them to Sir Stephen. They were masks, a combination 
headpiece and mask; it was obvious they had been made to cover the entire 
head, with the exception of the mouth and chin-and of course the slits for 
eyes. Sparrow-hawk, falcon, owl, fox, lion, bull: nothing but animal masks, 
but scaled to the size of the human head, made of real fur and feathers, the 
eye crowned with lashes when the actual animal had lashes (as the lion) and 
with the pelts or feathers descending to the shoulders of the person wearing 
them. To make the mask fit snugly along the upper lips (there was an orifice 
for each nostril) and along both cheeks, all one had to do was adjust a 
fairly loose strap concealed inside this cope-like affair which hung down 
the back. A frame made of molded, hardened cardboard located between the 
outside facing and the inner lining of skin, kept the shape of the mask 
rigid. In front of the full-length mirror, O tried on each of the masks. The 
most striking and the one she thought transformed her most and was also most 
natural, was one of the owl masks (there were two), no doubt because it was 
composed of tan and tawny feathers whose color blended beautifully with her 
tan; the cope of feathers almost completely concealed her shoulders, 
descending half way down her back and in front, to the nascent curve of her 
breasts. Sir Stephen had her rub the lipstick from her lips, then said to 
her as she took off the mask: 

"All right, you'll be an owl for the Commander. But O and I hope you forgive 
me, you'll be taken on a leash. Natalie, go look in the top drawer of my 
desk, you'll find a chain and a pair of pliers." 

Natalie came back with the chain and pliers, which Sis Stephen used to force 
open the last link, fastened it to the second ring that O was wearing in her 
loins, then forced it closed again. The chain, similar to those used for 
dogs-in fact that was what it was-was between four and five feet long, with 
a leather strap on one end. After O had again donned the mask, Sir Stephen 
told Natalie to take the end of the chain and walk around the room, ahead of 
O. Three times Natalie paraded around the room, trailing O behind her by the 
rings, O being naked and masked. 

"Well, I must say," Sir Stephen remarked, "the Commander was right, all the 
hair will have to be removed. But that can wait till tomorrow. Meanwhile, 
keep your chain on." 

That evening and for the first time in the company of Jacqueline and 
Natalie, of Rene and Sir Stephen, O dined naked, her chain pulled up between 
her legs and across her buttocks and wrapped around her waist. Norah was 
alone serving and O avoided her gaze. Two hours before, Sir Stephen had 
summoned her. 

What shocked and upset the girl at the beauty parlor the following day, more 
than the irons and the black and blue marks on her lower back, were the 
brand new lacerations. O had gone there to have the offending hair removed, 
and it did no good to explain to her that this wax-type depilatory, a method 
in which the wax is applied and allowed to harden, then suddenly removed, 
taking the hair with it-was no more painful than being struck with the 
riding crop. No matter how many tunes she repeated or made an attempt to 
explain, if not what her fate was, at least that she was happy, there was no 
way of reassuring her or allaying her feeling of disgust and terror. The 
only visible result of O's efforts to soothe her was that, instead of being 
looked upon with pity, as she had been at first, she was beheld with horror. 
It made no difference how kind and profuse were her thanks when she left the 
little alcove where she had been spread-eagled as though for love, nor did 
it matter how generous a tip she gave as she left, when it was all over, she 
had the feeling that she was being evicted rather than leaving of her own 
free will. What did she care? It was obvious to her that there was something 
shocking about the contrast between the fur on her belly and the feathers on 
her mask, as it was obvious that this air of an Egyptian statue which this 
mask lent her and which her broad shoulders, narrow waist and long legs only 
served to emphasize, to demand that her flesh be perfectly smooth. Only the 
effigies of primitive goddesses portrayed so proudly and openly the cleft of 
the belly between whose outer lips appeared the more delicate line of the 
lower lips. And had any ever been seen sporting rings in their nether lips? 
O recalled the plump, red-haired girl at Anne-Marie's who had said that all 
her master ever used the belly ring for was to attach her to the foot of the 
bed and she had also said that the reason he wanted her shaved was because 
only in that way was she completely naked. O was worried about displeasing 
Sir Stephen, who so enjoyed pulling her over to him by the fleece, but she 
was mistaken: Sir Stephen found her more moving that way and after she had 
donned her mask, having removed all trace of lipstick above and below, the 
upper and nether lips then being so uncommonly pale, that he caressed her 
almost timidly, the way one does with an animal one wants to tame. 

He had told her nothing about the place to which he was taking her, nor 
indicated the time they would have to leave, nor had he said who the 
Commander's guests would be. But he came and spent the rest of the afternoon 
sleeping beside her and in the evening had dinner brought up to the room, 
for the two of them. 

They left an hour before midnight, in the Buick, O swathed in a great brown 
mountaineer's cape and wearing wooden clogs on her feet Natalie, in a black 
sweater and slacks, was holding her chain, the leather strap of which was 
attached to the leather bracelet Natalie was wearing on her right wrist Sir 
Stephen was driving. The moon was almost full and illuminated the road with 
large snow-like spots, also illuminating the trees and houses of the 
villages through which they passed, leaving everything else as black as 
India ink. Here and there, groups of people were still clustered, even at 
this hour, on the thresholds of street-side doors and they could feel the 
people's curiosity aroused by the passage of that closed car (Sir Stephen 
had not lowered the top). Some dogs were barking. On the side of the road 
bathed in moonlight, the olive trees looked like silver clouds floating six 
feet above the ground and the cypresses like black feathers. There was 
nothing real about this country, which night had turned into make-believe, 
nothing except the smell of sage and lavender. The road continued to climb, 
but the same warm layer of air still lay heavy over the earth. O slipped her 
cape down off her shoulders. She couldn't be seen, there was not a soul left 
in sight. 

Ten minutes later, having skirted a forest of green oak on the crest of a 
hill, Sir Stephen slowed down before a long wall into which was cut a 
porte-cochere, which opened at the approach of the car. He parked in some 
forecourt as they were closing the gate behind him, then got out and helped 
Natalie and O out, first having ordered O to leave her cape and clogs in the 
car. 

The door he pushed open revealed a cloister with Renaissance arcades on 
three sides, the fourth side being an extension of the flagstone court of 
the cloister proper. A dozen couples were dancing on the terrace and in the 
courtyard, a few women with very low-cut dresses and some men in white 
dinner jackets were seated at small tables lighted by candlelight; the 
record player was in the left-hand gallery and a buffet table had been set 
up in the gallery to the right. 

The moon provided as much light as the candles, though and when it fell full 
upon O, who was being pulled forward by her black little shadow, Natalie, 
those who noticed her stopped dancing and the men got to their feet. The boy 
near the record player, sensing that something was happening, turned around 
and taken completely aback, stopped the record. O had come to a halt; Sir 
Stephen, motionless two steps behind her, was also waiting. 

The Commander dispersed those who had gathered around O and had already 
called for torches to examine her more closely. 

"Who is she," they were saying, "who does she belong to?" 

"You, if you like," he replied and he led O and Natalie over to a corner of 
the terrace where a stone bench covered with cushions was set against a low 
wall. 

When O was seated, her back against the wall, her hands lying on her knees, 
with Natalie on the ground to the left of her feet, still holding onto the 
chain, he turned around to them. O's eyes searched for Sir Stephen and at 
first could not find him. Then she sensed his presence, reclining on a 
chaise longue at the other corner of the terrace. He was able to see her, 
she was reassured. The music had begun again, the dancers were dancing 
again. As they danced, one or two couples moved over in her direction, as 
though by accident at first; then one of the couples dropped the pretense 
and with the woman leading the way, marched boldly over. O stared at them 
with eyes that, beneath her plumage, were darkened with bister, eyes opened 
wide like the eyes of the nocturnal bird she was impersonating and the 
illusion was so extraordinary that no one thought of questioning her, which 
would have been the most natural thing to do, as though she were a real owl, 
deaf to human language and dumb. 

From midnight till dawn, which began to lighten the eastern sky at about 
five, as the moon waned and descended toward the west; people came up to her 
several times and some even touched her, they formed a circle around her 
several times and several times they parted her knees and lifted the chain, 
bringing with them one of those two-branched candlesticks of Provencal 
earthenware-and she could feel the flames from the candles warming the 
inside of her thighs-to see how she was attached. 

There was even one drunken American who, laughing, grabbed her, but when he 
realized that he had seized a fistful of flesh and the chain which pierced 
her, he suddenly sobered up and O saw his face fill with the same 
-expression of horror and contempt that she had seen on the face of the girl 
who had given her a depilatory; he turned and fled. 

There was another girl very young, a girl with bare shoulders and a choker 
of pearls around her neck, wearing one of those white dresses young girls 
wear to their first ball, two tea-scented roses at her waist and a pair of 
golden slippers on her feet and a boy made her sit down next to O, on her 
right. Then he took her hand and made her caress O's breasts, which quivered 
to the touch of the cool, light fingers and touch her belly and the chain 
and the hole through which it passed, the young girl silently, did as she 
was bid and when the boy said he planned to do the same thing to her, she 
did not seem shocked. But even though they thus made use of O and even 
though they used her in this way as a model, or the subject of a 
demonstration, not once did anyone ever speak to her directly. Was she then 
of stone or wax, or rather some creature from another world and did they 
think it point less to speak to her? Or didn't they dare? 

It was only after daybreak, after all the dancers had left; that Sir Stephen 
and the Commander, awakening Natalie who was asleep at O's feet; helped O to 
her feet; led her to the middle of the courtyard, unfastened her chain and 
removed her mask and laying her back upon a table, possessed her one after 
the other. 

 In a final chapter, which has been suppressed, O returned to Roissy, where 
she was abandoned by Sir Stephen. 

There exists a second ending in the Story of O, according to which O, seeing 
that Sir Stephen was about to leave her, said she would prefer to die. Sir 
Stephen gave her his consent. 


 THE END
