In the early afternoon of the following day Mr. Stephen’s chauffeur brought O. home. She awoke at ten o’clock, and an old mulatto servant brought her a cup of coffee, prepared her bath, and brought her clothes, but not her leather coat, gloves, and purse. She came downstairs to find them on the sofa in the sitting-room, which was empty, the blinds having been opened. Looking out of the window opposite the sofa, she could see a green but very small garden that looked like an aquarium, with only ivy, holly and a few shrubs.
As she was putting on her coat, the mulatto servant told her that Mr. Stephen had gone out, and handed her an envelope with only her initials on it, and two lines on the white paper inside: “René called, he’ll see you in the studio at six o’clock.” The signature was only one letter: S.
The following line was added as a side note: “That whip is for your next visit.”
O glanced around, and on the table, between the two chairs where Monsieur Stephen and René had sat last night, there was a long, thin horsewhip sitting beside a bottle of yellow roses.
The servant waited by the door while O put the letter in his purse and left the house.
So René had called Mr. Stephen but not her.O got home, undressed, and ate lunch in her bathrobe. She had plenty of time to reapply her makeup and comb her hair and get dressed for the studio, where she was supposed to be at work at three o’clock.
The phone never rang, René didn’t call her. Why? What had Mr. Stephen said to him? What would they say about her? She recalled the words they had used in her presence, the sporadic comments they had made about the virtues of her body, the so-called “virtues” that had been standardized only by their demands.
Perhaps it was because she was not yet familiar with this class of words in English, but all those for which she could find a French equivalent sounded to her absolutely vulgar and full of contempt. Indeed, she had been possessed as often as a whore in a brothel by many men, so why should they treat her differently?
“I love you, I love you, René,” she repeated the words over and over again, calling to him tenderly in her cold, empty room, “I love you, do everything you want to do to me, but don’t leave me, for God’s sake, don’t leave me.”
Who can pity those who are in a state of expectation? They could be easily recognized: by their soothing gestures; by their feigned attentions, which were indeed attentions, but which were really concerned with something beyond the reach of their eyes, and by their absentmindedness. What a long three hours in the studio, with a plump, short redhead O didn’t recognize modeling her hats, and O looking distracted all the time, every second of it filled with anxiety as she hoped the time would pass quickly.
Over her shirt and red silk petticoat she wore a tartan skirt and a short tight jacket, the bright red color of her shirt peeking out from under the open jacket, making her cheeks, which were already very pale, look even paler. The smaller model said to her that she looked like a dumpy siren, “For whom?”
O couldn’t help but ask himself.
If it had been two years ago, before she had met and fallen in love with René, she would have sworn, “For Mr. Stephen,” and added, “He will know it sooner or later.” But her love for René, and René’s love for her, had disarmed her, and not only was there no new evidence of her power, but she had been stripped of the power she had once possessed.
She used to be cold and fickle, and she liked to show her contempt for boys who loved her, either by words or body language, and gave them nothing. Sometimes she would make amends by giving herself up on a whim, just once and for no reason at all. This often incited them to a greater and more fervent passion, which she never accepted.
She was sure that they were in love with her: one of them had tried to commit suicide, and when he came out of the hospital, she went to his place, stripped naked in front of him, and lay on his couch, but forbade him to towel her. He, who had grown pale with pain and passion, stared at her in silence for two hours, but always following his own promise, dared not go beyond that. She did not want to see him again at all, not because she despised the desire that had been aroused in her, which she understood, or thought herself capable of understanding; but because she had experienced the same desire in girls, in young strangers whom she had chanced to make acquaintance with (or perhaps merely thought herself to have done so).
Some of them, after her conquests, she takes them to hidden hotels with long, narrow corridors and wallpapered walls, while others are so horrified by her behavior that they never pay her any attention again. But what she sees as desire or mistakes for desire is really nothing more than a desire to conquer others. However, both her tough exterior and the fact that she had had several lovers, if you could call them lovers, as well as her hardness of heart and her courage, were all lost at once when she met René. In a week she had learned both fear and fidelity; the bitter taste of grief and the sweet taste of happiness.
René pounced on her like a pirate on his captive, and she reveled in her own capture.
She felt the bindings on her wrists, her ankles, every part of her body, and the deepest recesses of her mind and body, bindings more imperceptible than a strand of hair but stronger than the ropes the Lilliputians had used to bind Gulliver, bindings whose nerves tightened and loosened with the knit of her lover’s brow. And henceforth she had no more freedom?
Yes! Thank God she’s no longer a free spirit. But she was light, she was a fairy in the clouds, she was a fish in the water, utterly lost in happiness. She’s lost because of a strand of love, a rope in René’s hands that is her only link to real life.
Things had come to such a pass: when René’s grip on her was loosened, or when she thought he was, when his attention to her no longer seemed keen, when he made her feel cold or did not come to see her for some time, when he did not reply to her letters, when he made her think that he did not want to see her any more, that he was about to cease to love her, then she suffocated as if she had been struck by a thunderbolt. The grass turned black, the day ceased to be day and the night ceased to be night, and both day and night became instruments of torture in hell, tormenting her with ever-changing light and darkness.
The cool water made her feel sick, she felt as if she were a statue that had been reduced to ashes bitter, useless, cursed like the salt statues of Gomorrah. She felt guilty, those who love God but are abandoned by him in the darkness of the night are guilty because they have been abandoned by him and they sink into the sea of memories to find out where their sins lie. She looks back at her own experiences to find her own sins, and what she finds is merely some goodwill or a little self-indulgence of little significance, not much of which really comes from the heart.
Occasionally, for example, desire had been aroused for men other than René, who had been able to arouse her interest only in ways similar to René’s. The fact that she belonged to René would have given her pleasure and caused her happiness to spill out of the glass like fine wine. Until now, it was René’s complete and utter obedience that had caused her weak, unassertive, and frivolous behavior, but what kind of behavior were they? All she had to blame were her thoughts and her attempts to escape. René, however, was convinced of her guilt, and was unconsciously punishing her for a sin of which he was unaware (for it existed only in her heart), but which Mr. Stephen at once detected in her debauchery.
O was happy to be whipped and prostituted according to René’s wishes, not only because her implacable obedience enabled her to provide her lover with a proof that she belonged to him; but also because the pains and humiliations caused by the whipping, the rapes inflicted on her by those who possessed her in a way that forced her to pleasure, the acts of those who indulged themselves in their own pleasures without the slightest attention to her feelings, seemed to her to be the very redemption of her sins. behavior that seemed to her to be the very redemption of her sins. To her, those embraces were filthy; the touch of those hands on her breasts was an intolerable insult; those tongues and pricks were like slimy beasts rubbing around her lips, which she had done her best to keep tightly closed, and around her orifices, front and back.
It had made her stiff with nausea, it had made her do her best to withstand the lashes that were intended to bring her to her knees, but at last she had succumbed to them, and had been forced to give herself up. Still, what if Mr. Stephen was right? What if she did enjoy her defilement? If that was the case, the lower she was, the more compassionate René’s willingness to use her as an instrument of his pleasure seemed.
As a child, O. had once read a sentence from the Bible in red letters on the white wall of a room in Wales, where she had lived for two months. It was a motto that Protestants used to keep in their rooms.
It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
No, O said to himself, that’s not true, the terrible thing is to be abandoned by the living God. Whenever René delayed an appointment date or was late for an appointment, as he was today six o’clock had passed and it was half past six O was gripped by the twin sensations of madness and despair, but it was completely empty. Madness out of nothing, despair out of nothing, none of it is real.
René would come, he would, nothing had changed, he loved her, he had just been held up by a staff meeting or delayed by some extra work. He just hadn’t had time to inform her. After this moment of despair had passed, O awoke from his suffocation. However, each such terrible blow left a vague premonition in the depths of her heart, a warning of impending disaster: sometimes René didn’t care to let her know the reason for his tardiness, sometimes it was just for a round of golf or a hand of bridge, sometimes it was for someone else, because he wanted to let O know that: though he loved her, he was free; though he valued her, he was fickle, and very fickle. Very fickle.
How I wish that the day that makes everything go up in smoke would never come, that maddening day would never come, that suffocating day would never come! Oh, let the miracle continue, let me continue to enjoy this favor, René, do not leave me! Every day O did not look and did not want to look beyond tomorrow; every week O did not want to look beyond the next, and every night with René lasted for her as long as eternity.
At seven o’clock René finally arrived. He was so happy to see her again that he kissed her in front of the electrician who was fixing the floodlights, and in front of the short, redheaded model who happened to be coming out of the dressing room, and in front of Jacqueline, whom no one had expected, and who had only followed the other model by chance.
“What a moving sight,” Jaclyn said to O. “I happened to be passing by here, and I wanted to manage the last portrait you wanted you to take of me, but I guess I came at a bad time. I’ll be leaving soon.”
“Stay, mademoiselle,” René called to her, not releasing O’s waist, and he said again, “Please don’t go!”
O introduces them to each other: Jacqueline, René; René, Jacqueline.
The redheaded model went angrily back to her dressing room, where the electrician was pretending to be busy with his work. o looked at Jacqueline, and at the same time felt René’s gaze on the same spot. Jacqueline was wearing a ski outfit, the kind that movie stars who never ski love to wear, her black dress outlining two tiny parted breasts, her tight ski pants likewise outlining her long, slender legs of a girl who loves to do winter sports. Everything about her looked like snow: her gray sealskin jacket glistened white; her hair and the silver-gray eye-paste on her eyes looked like snow in the sun.
The color of her lipstick was deep red and almost purple, and when she smiled and raised her eyes to look at O, O said to himself that no one could resist his own desire, which was to go and sip the two pools of turquoise under those silver eyes, to take off her sweater, and then to put his hands on those plump little breasts. You see: René had not quite returned to her, and just because he had come, she had recovered her appreciation of others and of herself, her interest in life itself.
The three of them left together. On the Royal Road, the goose feather snow that had been drifting for two hours was now turning into swirling tiny white flies that stung raw on their faces, and the melting rock salt on the sidewalk was melting the snow as it zinged under their feet.O felt the cold air rising up the coils of her legs and wrapping itself tightly around her bare thighs.
O is very clear about the type of young woman she loves. This did not mean that she wanted to give the impression that she was competing with men, nor was it because she wanted to compensate for the imperceptible humility of female nature with some masculine qualities. Indeed, at the age of twenty she had courted one of the most beautiful of her many girlfriends, and had enjoyed taking her hat off herself, watching her as she walked by, and reaching out to assist her as she stepped out of a cab.
For the same reason she could never tolerate being accompanied to tea in a confectioner’s store instead of paying for it herself. She kissed her hand, and walked down the street, when no one was about, and kissed her on the lips, too, when she saw an opportunity. But she deliberately acted out her feelings, mostly as a demonstration against the rumors, in which there was more childishness than real affection.
On the other hand, she had a real and deep fascination with the wonderful sensation of her sweet, carefully painted lips yielding to her own; with the beautiful, half-open, half-closed eyes that glowed with fine china or pearls at 5:00 p.m. when the curtains were drawn and the lamp on the mantle was lit on the half-lighted couch; with the voice that murmured urgently, “Again… Oh, please do it again…”; and the smell of seawater on her fingers.
She found going on a quest enjoyable as well. It was not for the pursuit itself, however delightful and magical the pursuit itself might be, but for that perfect feeling of freedom experienced in the act of such a hunt. She, and she alone, laid down those rules that guided the whole course of events (something she had never done with men, or rather something she had done with men only in the most insidious way).
Each time, she was the one who brought up a subject, she was the one who set the date, and she initiated the kissing without being happy for anyone else to kiss her first. Since she was the suitor, she never allowed the girl who received her caresses to caress her as well. Although she wants to see her partner naked as soon as possible, she is always quick to find excuses for not taking off her clothes. Her usual excuses include saying that she is afraid of the cold, or that it happens to be the wrong day of the month for her to undress.
In addition, she always succeeded in uncovering some beauty in some woman. She remembered that just outside of Lech, she had tried to seduce an ugly, reluctant and extremely bad-tempered little girl. The only reason she loved her was because of her blonde hair. They were cut to uneven lengths and covered her skin like a forest of light and dark. It looked lustreless, but it was soft and smooth and fell straight down from her head.
But the little girl refused her seduction. If ever the light of pleasure would illuminate the repulsive face of the little girl, it would never be because of O. O loved passionately the faces that looked extraordinarily young and rounded in the light of love, which made it impossible to see their age, and though it would not make them young, it would make their lips look plump as if they had been coated with lipstick, and make their eyes more colorful and clearer.
In the midst of this change, O’s admiration for them outweighed her own pride, for the most moving scene had not been caused by her; in Rossi, she had experienced a similar uncomfortable feeling, that of the incredible change in the face when she saw a girl possessed by a stranger. The naked and tamed flesh had conquered her, giving her the feeling that even if her female companion had merely agreed to show her nakedness in a locked room, that had given her a gift that she could never repay in the same way.
Holiday sunshine and nudity on the beach made no impression on her not only because it was in public, but also because she was to some extent guarded against public places and unenclosed environments. She had always sought the beauty of other women with a relentless passion, more than she cared for her own, and whenever she occasionally caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she always saw them in her fantasies at the same time.
The very forces which she observes in her female companions as attracting her are the very forces which she herself has seduced in men. She finds to her delight that what she seeks in women (who never, or by no means, demand the same of her) is precisely what men eagerly and anxiously seek in her.
So she is complicit in both men and women, and from her relationship with them she gets her share of the pastry and eats it too. Sometimes it was not an easy game to play, and O thus fell in love with Jacqueline, whom she loved neither more nor less than she loved the others, and for whom O thought the use of the word “fall in love” (which she always used frequently) was appropriate and unquestionable. But why should she conceal her love for her this time?
As the aspens budded along the pier, the days grew longer and the lovers had a few moments to sit in the garden after work. It was then that O thought he had the courage to face Jacqueline at last. In the winter, Jacqueline, wrapped in her beautiful leather coat, seemed to her too spirited, too glamorous, too untouchable, too unapproachable. Jacqueline herself knew this. And spring brought her back inside unusual clothing, flat shoes and sweaters. With that short Dutch haircut, she was finally back to a kind of young, delicate schoolgirl look.
As a student at University Prep, O used to grab female classmates by the wrist and without a word pull them into the empty locker room and push them over the top of their hanging tunics. The tunics slid off the hangers and O laughed out loud. They always wore a cotton uniform shirt with their initials embroidered in red thread on their breast pockets.
Just three years later, three kilometers away from O’s school, Jacklynn was at another college preparatory school, wearing the same shirt. One day while modeling some kind of fashion, Jaclyn sighed very occasionally and said, “Seriously, I wonder how much happier they would have been if they had had nice clothes like this at school. Or how much better it would have been if they had been allowed to wear only their work clothes and nothing underneath.
“What do you mean you’re not wearing anything?” O asked her.
“No dresses, of course,” replied Jaclyn.
O blushed as soon as she heard it, because up to this point she was still having trouble getting used to the idea of not wearing anything under her dress, so any pun sounded like sarcasm to her. She kept telling herself that one was always naked under clothes, but that didn’t do much for her. No, she still felt as naked as the woman from Verona.
She saves her city by going out and handing herself over to the leader of the besieging army: she wears nothing under her coat, which can be torn off with a single movement. She also felt like the Italian, whose nakedness meant salvation. But what is she trying to save?
As Jacqueline was confident of herself, she had nothing to save; she had nothing to prove to herself, but only a mirror to look in, and as she gazed at her humbly, she thought that if a man were to offer her a flower, it could only be a magnolia, whose thick, shapeless petals turn to blisters as they wither, or a camellia, whose wax-white petals sometimes give off a touch of pink, or a camellia, whose wax-white petals sometimes give off a touch of pink. sometimes give off a touch of pink.
When winter faded, the layer of pale color that had coated Jaclyn’s skin disappeared like melting snow, and only camellias could change so dramatically. But O was lest she should make a fool of herself with these too-dramatic flowers. One day she brought her a bouquet of orchids and hyacinths, and they smelled like tuberose: strong, pungent, lingering, with a fragrance that camellias should have but do not.
Jaclyn buried her little Mongolian nose and pink lips in that warm, thick flower. She stopped wearing red lipstick these last two weeks and switched to pink.
“Is it for me?” She wore a look of delight that women often have when receiving a gift.
Then she thanked O and asked her if René was coming to pick her up. Yes, he’ll come, O said. He will come, she repeated to herself. It was for him alone that Jacqueline lifted her big, cold, watery eyes a little. Those eyes never looked directly at anyone as she stood there silently posing without moving a muscle.
She didn’t need anyone to teach her how to stay silent, how to hang her hands at the sides of her body, how to tilt her head back slightly. o looked forward to the day when she could grab a strand of blonde hair at the back of her neck, tilt her tame head back fully, and then at least run her fingers gently over her brow. But she knew that was exactly what René wanted to do as well.
She knew perfectly well why she, who had always been so bold and fearless, had now become so shy; why she had longed for Jacqueline for more than two long months without a single word or a single act giving away this desire, and had endeavored to explain her timidity in a way that would have been difficult to convince even herself. The obstacle did not lie in Jacklyn, but in the depths of O’s soul, and its roots were far deeper in her heart than any feeling had ever been before.
That was because René had given her back her freedom, and she loathed that freedom, which she felt was far worse than any chains. Her freedom separated her from René, and she was perfectly capable of seizing Jacqueline at any time, without a word, and pressing her hands against the wall, like a butterfly pierced by a steel needle, and Jacqueline would be so held down that she would be unable to move, or perhaps even to laugh.O liked the beasts of prey which were either used as baits, or which ran forward to the hunter’s orders, and enticed the hunter to come and seize them.
At this moment, however, it was no one else but herself who was leaning against the wall, pale and shivering, pinned there by her own silence, bound there by her own silence, happy to remain silent. She was waiting for something more than what she had already been promised, because she had been promised. She was waiting for an order which would come to her not from René but from Mr. Stephen.
Several months have passed since René gave her to Mr. Stephen, and O notes with horror that Mr. Stephen is becoming more and more important in her lover’s eyes. Moreover, she felt that she had perhaps been mistaken in this matter from the very beginning: that the growing importance of M. Stéphane in her imagination might be a mere illusion, and that it was not M. Stéphane’s importance that was changing, but rather her own awareness of this fait accompli and her own recognition of this feeling.
She soon noticed that the evenings René chose to spend with her were always after she had gone to M. Stephen’s (M. Stephen only spent the entire evening with her when René left Paris), and she also noticed that on the only night René stayed at M. Stephen’s house he never toweled her, except to help her keep in a position that was more conveniently usable for M. Stephen when she occasionally struggled.
He rarely stayed overnight unless Mr. Stephen expressed a need for him to stay, which he never did.
And whenever he stayed over, he was always as well dressed as when he first brought O here. He was silent, smoked one cigarette after another, kept adding wood to the fireplace, and poured drinks for Mr. Stephen which he never drank himself.
O felt that he looked at her as a tamer looks at the beast he has tamed, and that he is concerned that it performs so thoroughly tamed as to grace his face; he looked at her more like a prince’s guard or a robber baron’s lieutenant, keeping a close watch on a whore he has brought in off the street.
In fact, he is playing the role of a servant or assistant, which is also evidenced by the fact that he pays far more attention to Mr. Stephen’s face than he does to O’s. In his gaze, O feels that he is left with only a carnal sense of meaning: by dedicating this sensual pleasure to Mr. Stephen, René expresses to him his respect and admiration, and is even grateful to him for the pleasure that the latter is able to derive from the things that he has given to him. him with gratitude for the pleasure the latter could derive from what he had given him.
If Mr. Stephen had preferred a boy, everything might have been made much easier, and O had not the slightest doubt that René would have complied with even the most outrageous demands made by Mr. Stephen, even if he had not been willing to do so.
However, Mr. Stephen only likes women.
O believed that through the medium of her body, through this flesh which was shared by both of them, they had gained access to something more mysterious and more subtle, a more passionate form of divine intercourse, a notion which, though very puzzling, she could hardly deny its existence and its powerful force. Moreover, why should this boundary be represented in an abstract way? In Rosie, O had had the experience of belonging to both René and other men in the same place at the same time. Why does René have to restrain himself from not only wanting to possess her in the presence of Mr. Stephen, but also from giving her orders? (All he had done was to convey Mr. Stephen’s orders.) Before she gave her final answer, she asked René what it was all about.
“Out of respect.” René replied.
“But I belong to you.” O said.
“You belong to Mr. Stephen first.”
Things were indeed like that, at least in the sense that René had given her to his friend. That devotion was absolute, and in all matters concerning her, Monsieur Stephen’s most minute desires were always to take precedence over René’s decisions, even over her own.
If René had decided to take O to dinner and then to the theater, and Mr. Stephen happened to call an hour before he came to pick her up, René would still have come to the studio as he had promised, but only to bring her to Mr. Stephen’s door and leave her there. Once, and only once, O asked René to be able to get Mr. Stephen to change the time, because she particularly wanted to be with René that day at a party to which they had both been invited, and René refused.
“My sweet little angel,” he said, “so you still don’t understand that you no longer belong to me, that I am no longer the master responsible for your care?”
He not only refused her request, but he told Mr. Stephen that she had made it, and in her presence he demanded that Mr. Stephen should punish her for it, and so severely that she should never dare to entertain such thoughts of evading her duty.
“That is certain,” replied Mr. Stephen.
This conversation took place while in the tiny oval room with its parquet floor, whose only piece of furniture was a table inlaid with real mother-of-pearl, and which was sandwiched between the two sitting-rooms, yellow and gray in color.
René, having betrayed O and received an affirmative answer from Mr. Stephen, immediately rose to take his leave. He shook his hand, gave O a slight smile, and walked away. Through the window, O watched him cross the courtyard; he didn’t look back, and she heard the door slam shut, followed by the sound of starting the car.
In a glance, O saw her own image in a small mirror embedded in the wall: she had grown pale with fear and despair. Then she walked mechanically towards Mr. Stephen, who opened the sitting-room door for her and stood waiting for her to pass. She glanced at him: he was as pale as she was. A thought struck her like lightning: she was absolutely sure that he was in love with her. But it was a fleeting thought that vanished as quickly as it had come. Though she did not believe it, and blamed herself for thinking it, she was comforted by it.
That’s when she saw him make an extremely simple gesture and immediately began to obediently remove her clothes. Then, for the first time in such a long time since she had known him, O gave herself completely to him. During these days, he called her to come to his house two or three times a week and took his time enjoying her. Sometimes he made her wait naked for an hour without coming to towel her. Sometimes, listening to her pleas without responding. She did beg him, and he always did the same things to her in the same order, as if he were following some kind of fixed ritual.
So she gradually learned when she should caress him with her mouth, when she should get on her knees, bury her face in the silk-covered couch, and offer him only her buttocks, which he could now manage to take possession of quite smoothly and without hurting her.
Though her heart trembled with fear perhaps it was because of that fear that her heart opened completely to him for the first time, and though she was chagrined at René’s betrayal, it was perhaps because of that that she gave herself completely and utterly to Mr. Stephen. It was the first time, too, that she gazed with tame eyes of infinite tenderness into the pale burning gaze of Mr. Stephen. At that moment he suddenly began to speak to her in French, using the familiar word “you.”
“I’m going to put a gag dumpling on you, O, because I’m going to whip you until you bleed. Will you allow me to do that?”
“I’m yours.” O said.
She stood in the middle of the living room, her raised arms locked together by Rosie’s bracelet, attached to a chain that hung down from the iron ring on the ceiling where the chandelier had previously hung, a position that caused her breasts to thrust forward. Mr. Stephen fondled her breasts, kissed them, and then kissed her on the lips, ten times in one breath (he had never kissed her before).
Then he put a gag dumpling on her, which had a wet canvas flavor in her mouth and pressed her tongue toward her throat. The gag dumpling was worn extremely far back so that her teeth could barely bite into it. He grabbed a handful of her hair, dangling by the chain, and her bare feet stumbled.
“Forgive me, O,” he murmured. (He’d never asked her forgiveness for anything before.) Then he let go and started whipping her.
René had attended the party, to which they had both been invited, alone, and when he had returned to O’s lodgings after midnight, he had found her lying in bed, shivering and wrapped up in her long nylon nightgown. It was Mr. Stephen who had brought her home, and he had carried her to bed himself and kissed her once more. She told René all about it, and she told René that she would never go against Mr. Stephen’s will again.
When she told him all this, she was fully aware that, from these words, René would draw the conclusion that: the matter of being whipped was not only essential to her, but even pleasurable (this was correct, but it was not the only reason), and there was one other thing of which she was fairly certain, and that was that, for René, her being whipped was also essential.
However, even the thought of whipping her in his imagination struck him with such horror and fear that he was never able to do it himself, but watching her struggle and listening to her cries was a great pleasure to him.
Once, in his presence, Mr. Stephen used the riding crop on her. René himself had pushed O toward the table and held her there so that she could not move a muscle, and her skirt had slipped down, and it was he who had lifted it up again. Perhaps even more enthralling to him was the fact that when he was not at her heels, when he was out walking or working, O wriggled and moaned and cried under the lash, continually praying for his mercy but not getting it He was deeply conscious that these pains and humiliations were in accordance with the servant of her beloved lover who had whipped her. In Mr. Stephen he had at last found the stern master for whom he himself had difficulty.
The fact that the man he admired most in the world would be so enamored of her that he would go to great lengths to tame her only heightened René’s ardor, which O had seen in full view. All those lips that had tasted her lips, all those hands that had grasped her breasts and her pussy, all those pricks that had penetrated her body, all provided incontrovertible, living proof that she had indeed sold herself for him, and that she had possessed something worthy of being sold; and all of this, so to speak, sanctified her.
But all these evidences could not compare in René’s eyes with those offered by Mr. Stephen. Every time René embraced her, he scrutinized the marks that God had left on her, and O knew that if he had betrayed her by denouncing her a few hours before, it had only been to add some fresh and more brutal marks to her body. She also knew that although the cause that had brought about those marks would eventually disappear, Mr. Stephen would never change his mind, and that things were going to be far worse than that (but he was doing just what he wanted to do for her).
René gazed for a long time at her slim body, covered with thick purple whip marks, with a look on his face that was highly impressed and completely overcome by it. The lash marks ran like so many ropes across her shoulders, spine, hips, stomach and breasts, sometimes stacked on top of each other, sometimes crisscrossed, and here and there a hint of blood slowly seeping out of her skin.
“Oh, how I love you,” he murmured.
With trembling hands he undressed, turned off the light, and lay down beside O. She moaned in the darkness as he made love to her through and through.