Story of O

Book Overview

Story of O was published in Paris in 1954 under a pseudonym no one could place. For forty years it was thought to be the work of a man, possibly Jean Paulhan — the NRF editor, Gallimard éminence grise, Resistance hero, and author of its preface, Happiness in Slavery. Paulhan had claimed in conversation that women were constitutionally incapable of writing Sadean literature. His longtime mistress, an editor at Gallimard and founding member of the NRF’s postwar editorial board, took the claim as a dare. She wrote the book in bed at night, in pencil, in school notebooks, as a private gift to him. In 1994, at the age of eighty-six, she permitted The New Yorker to name her: Dominique Aury, née Anne Desclos. Paulhan was by then dead thirty-six years. The pseudonym “Pauline Réage” had outlived them both.

The book won the Prix des Deux Magots in 1955, was banned by the French government in 1956, was unbanned in 1959, sold into every serious European language, and became — with Bataille’s Story of the Eye and Mandiargues’s The Margin — one of the three French postwar novels by which the Sadean inheritance was successfully carried forward into literature. Paulhan’s preface compared it, not entirely ironically, to a religious tract: a novel in which a woman’s willing dissolution of self is treated with the seriousness a medieval theologian would have reserved for a martyr’s passion. Susan Sontag’s 1967 essay The Pornographic Imagination is the most careful English-language defense of the book as literature rather than stimulation, and is still the essay most worth reading alongside it.

What distinguishes Story of O from pornography — and this is the thing the book stakes everything on — is its prose. Réage writes about sexual submission of an extremity that would be unbearable in almost any other register with the exact, measured, slightly archaic French of a jurist describing a contract or a priest describing a sacrament. She never warms the surface. Her narrator is half-absent; the voice occasionally breaks frame to admit “I don’t know,” “I have no idea how long,” “all I know is,” and these breaks are the book’s signature — they mark the text not as O’s diary but as a story about O, a liturgy composed at a respectful distance. The eroticism is cold, the violence is ceremonial, the grammar is exact, and the images — a leather collar, a riding crop laid on a table like a floral arrangement, an iron ring banded with gold, the Celtic solar wheel, a chain across a stone staircase, the smell of sage and lavender on the road to a masked ball — arrive slowly and do not go away.

The book is organized in four parts, each longer than the last as O’s condition deepens. Part I (The Lovers of Roissy) is her initiation, in the voice of a manual. Part II (Sir Stephen) transfers her from the lover Rene to Rene’s half-brother Sir Stephen, and moves the action from the ceremonial chateau to Sir Stephen’s Parisian apartment, where O’s submission is tested in civilian clothing. Part III (Anne-Marie and the Rings) takes her to Samois, a house run entirely by women, where she is pierced with metal rings inscribed with Sir Stephen’s monogram and branded, permanently, with his initials. Part IV (The Owl) is the culmination: O is given a fifteen-year-old charge, is discovered by and then willingly displays herself to a masked party, and is — in two alternate closing paragraphs set aside from the narrative — either returned to Roissy, or permitted by Sir Stephen to die.

The book is worth reading, if it is to be read, with a reader’s patience for French postwar prose and a critic’s willingness to hold one’s moral reflexes in suspension for the duration. The summary that follows is built to respect both the book and the reader: every Part is walked through in a flowing essay; Réage’s own sentences, in Sabine d’Estrée’s canonical translation, are quoted at length as blockquotes — because Réage’s own sentences are what made this book canonical, and paraphrase would be a betrayal of the form.

The Four Parts

I. The Lovers of Roissy. O’s lover Rene takes her by taxi to a chateau in the village of Roissy, where she is stripped, collared, dressed in a whaleboned sea-green satin bodice and red mules, formally presented to four robed men, whipped at a pillar, and inducted into a ceremonial order whose rules are spoken to her in the voice of a doctrine. Two weeks of training. She leaves wearing an iron ring banded with gold, the solar wheel of the Celts inlaid in its signet.

II. Sir Stephen. Back in Paris, in an apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis whose red-tiled floors make her heart beat faster because they look exactly like the hallways at Roissy, O is handed from Rene to his older English half-brother, Sir Stephen H. Sir Stephen installs a graver, more exacting discipline. O begins to love him. She meets, and is directed to pursue, a young fashion model named Jacqueline. Sir Stephen tells O that before she returns to Roissy in the summer she will accept a second, permanent mark.

III. Anne-Marie and the Rings. O delivers Jacqueline toward Roissy and is then delivered, herself, by Sir Stephen to a villa at Samois on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest. There, under the supervision of a grey-streaked woman named Anne-Marie, a regime of female masters prepares O for the irreversible. Her labia are pierced for two heavy steel rings to which hangs a disk engraved with Sir Stephen’s monogram; her buttocks are branded with his initials using hot irons. She leaves marked for life.

IV. The Owl. Jacqueline’s fifteen-year-old sister Natalie falls in love with O and is placed in her charge, untouched, as an observer. At a summer house near Cannes, in the presence of a shaven-headed Commander who wears the Roissy insignia on his watch chain, O is masked as an owl, led naked on a dog chain by Natalie to a costume ball in a Renaissance cloister, displayed from midnight to dawn without speaking, used by Sir Stephen and the Commander at first light — and then the book ends twice, in two paragraphs set apart from the narrative: in the first, she returns to Roissy and is abandoned; in the second, seeing that Sir Stephen is about to leave her, she prefers to die, and he gives his consent.

Part I: The Lovers of Roissy — Arrival

The Taxi

The book begins without ceremony. O’s lover walks with her in a park she does not know, and when a car appears at an intersection where taxis do not normally wait, he tells her to get in. 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.” He pulls down the shades. She assumes he wants to be caressed. He wants something else.

“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.”

What begins as a small intimate ritual slides, instruction by instruction, into something else. He tells her to undo the garter belt and take off her panties, and he puts both into her bag. He tells her she should not sit on her slip or skirt.

“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.”

She rides the rest of the way gloved and naked from waist to knee, unable to guess what the stripping is for. At the curb, beneath plane trees on a lovely avenue, he unbuttons her blouse only to cut the straps of her brassiere with a penknife and remove it, buttoning the blouse back up over her bare breasts. Then he tells her plainly where they are.

“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.”

The narrator mentions, almost clerically, that there is “another version of the same beginning” — one in which Rene and an unknown friend deliver her together, hands bound, stockings rolled, blindfolded — as if the arrival were a small myth with textual variants.

Inside the Chateau

Inside, O is handed to two women in the costume of eighteenth-century chambermaids, both collared and braceleted themselves. They strip her, bathe her, dress her hair in a salon chair for well over an hour — naked, knees held apart, face-to-face with her own reflection in a floor-to-ceiling mirror — then paint her with the minute precision of a ceremony.

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.

A man in a long purple robe enters, masked in black gauze, the robe open from the waist down to leave the sex deliberately exposed. A whip hangs in his belt. He measures her neck and wrists and has the women fit her with a leather collar and bracelets whose automatic clasps lock like padlocks, opened only with a small key. She dines alone, naked, from a cabin where dishes come through a hatch.

Then she is taken — cape fastened to the ring of her collar, hands clipped behind her — through drawing rooms into a library where four men in robes are having coffee. A lamp is shone in her face so she cannot see them. She is blindfolded, led forward, inspected, turned. Hands lift her cape, part her, penetrate her; she cries out, and someone laughs. “Turn her around, so we can see the breasts and the belly.” She is made to kneel, then propped bust-forward over an ottoman so that each of the four men takes her in turn.

“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.”

When the blindfold is finally removed, she sees the four of them calmly arranged — two standing and smoking, one seated with a riding crop on his knees, her lover leaning over her, fondling her breast. She has not been able to tell him apart from the others. They explain that at night she will never know who has done what to her; she will see the faces of those who use her only by day, and when she is whipped, she will see herself being whipped while they wear masks. They show her the implements calmly, in sequence — a long bamboo riding crop sheathed in leather, the leather whip of six knotted thongs, a third of stiff water-soaked cords — and describe, with the same courtesy, the hook in the pillar and the way her bracelets and a steel chain will hold her there. They describe, too, the logic of the method:

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.

They whip her at the pillar until her pride gives way and she begs. When the chain proves too slack and she turns on herself, they add a rope at her waist so the blows land where they are aimed. Her lover asks that only the leather whip be used on her this time — it marks less, and so the flogging can be drawn out. During a pause, one of the men takes advantage of the bound position to enter her, remarking that “the passage would have to be rendered more easily accessible”; they agree that it will be.

Afterwards, dressed in the house livery — a whalebone bodice, stiffened linen petticoat, long sea-green satin skirt, red mules — she is seated by the fire while one of the four delivers the rules of the chateau. It is the closest thing in these pages to a thesis.

“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… 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.”

He goes further — the robes expose the sex “not for the sake of convenience… but for the sake of insolence”; the whip will be used only between dusk and dawn; the chain and the nightly flogging are meant less to make her suffer than “to teach you that you are totally dedicated to something outside yourself.” At the end of her stay she will wear an iron ring on her third finger, by which strangers who bear the same mark will know her, and know that beneath her skirt she is always naked, “and that this nakedness is for them.”

Before she is led to her cell, Rene calls her to him at the console. He caresses her hair, smooths her eyebrows with his fingertip, tells her in a loud voice that he loves her. She answers “I love you” and is terrified to find that it is true. Then he has her kneel among the folds of her green dress and take him in her mouth in front of the others, who comment on her gestures while tears run down her face. “It was this same mouth which, half gagging on the hardened flesh which filled it, murmured again: ‘I love you.’”

The First Night

Andre and Jeanne lead her down the red-tiled hallway of what they call the red wing and hand her to a thick-set, ruddy valet named Pierre — “dressed like the valet in some operetta,” master key in his vest, a leather-thonged whip in his belt. Her cell is two rooms: an antechamber and a small bedroom with a low mattressed platform covered in black fur, red walls, a black rug, a tall window onto a park, and, set into the wall above the bed, a thick steel ring from which a padlocked chain descends. In the mirrored bathroom, Jeanne warns her, half-kindly, that she is lucky — because her lover brought her, they will be a lot harder on her.

Pierre clips her bracelets together at the level of her throat, hooks them to the ring of her collar so her joined hands rest beside her neck as if in prayer, lays her on the bed, and draws the chain tight. He lifts her legs briefly to examine her, says nothing, turns out the light. In the dark, unable even to touch her own knees, she tries to account for the mixture of dread and sweetness she finds in herself.

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.

What most troubles her, when she measures it, is not the whipping but not knowing which of the four men had taken her from behind, and whether one of them had been Rene. The word “whip” loops in her head and she falls asleep.

Just before dawn, Pierre returns. He unhooks the chain and re-hooks it tighter so she stands facing the wall on the bed, then flogs her five times in quick succession with the black riding crop — four strokes above and below the first, so the marks read clearly — and when she does not obey his polite request to turn, he turns her himself and brings the crop down across the front of her thighs “as hard as he could.” The whole thing lasts five minutes. He leaves her swaying at the end of her chain, crying in the dark, as a pale mist-bound dawn comes up over the asters and a poplar outside her window. A gardener’s wheelbarrow squeaks over the gravel; if he cared to look, he would see her chained and naked and marked from the crop. She wonders where her lover is sleeping, and whether he knows what has been done to her, and whether he was the one who chose it, but decides she does not wish to die, and that if this is what keeps his love she only hopes he is pleased that she has endured it.

In the morning, a grey-haired man in a leather jacket and riding boots — she does not recognise him — comes to unchain her. He runs his hand between her thighs before freeing her wrists; she meets his eyes, forgetting the rule, and he laughs and tells her there will be a punishment for that after dinner. Jeanne and Andre explain the day ahead: she will sleep until noon, then bathe, lace her bodice, and serve coffee and tend the fire in the library that afternoon. After the first twenty-four hours, the women are not to speak to her.

Then Rene comes in, dressed in striped pajamas and the familiar blue wool dressing gown with padded silk lapels they had picked out together a year before — his slippers worn through, she thinks she must buy him another pair. He has brought a stranger with him. He makes her pick up a dropped croissant, then kisses her, runs his palms and then his lips along her welts, and tells his companion it is only fair that he take O first if he wants her. The stranger sits on the edge of the bed and parts her with his mouth; Rene holds her up from behind, caressing one breast, pinning her wrists. She has always fled this caress in shame — “she deemed it sacrilege for her lover to be on his knees, feeling that she should be on hers” — and now, held in place, she cannot flee it. She moans as she has never moaned for Rene. When the stranger finally enters her in one stroke, she cries out as if from a whip; Rene bites her mouth. The stranger comes, falls back, gets up, is shown to the door.

For a moment O believes herself discarded — she has moaned and cried out for a stranger in a way she never has for her lover, and feels “debased and guilty” and waits to be left. But the door closes again from the inside. Rene comes back, lies down beside her beneath the cover, enters her, and holding her in that embrace says 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 has burned through the mist and filled the room. Only the midday bell wakes them.

Part I: The Lovers of Roissy — Training

The doctrine

Rene wakes beside her in the mahogany bed and speaks to her the way a theologian might speak to a novice — not to persuade, but to instruct. He holds her by the collar, two fingers slipped between the leather and her neck, and tells her that from now on she will be shared by him and by those of his choosing, and by strangers connected to the society of the chateau. The logic is strict. She belongs to him. That is why he can give her. And because she belongs to him, anyone who takes her takes her on his behalf.

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.

She listens, ready to answer that she is already his slave and happy in her bonds. He cuts her off before she can say it, because easy assent is not what he wants. He wants the other kind — the consent wrung out of a resistance she has not yet discovered she possesses.

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.

Then, for proof, he has Jeanne lift her yellow skirt, and in front of O he places his hand where he has so often placed it on her, and watches O’s face for the exact shape of the damage. She collapses against the wall between the doors. A moment later he takes her in his arms, kisses her, and tells her twice, softly, that he loves her. The hand stroking her neck still smells of Jeanne. He does not leave until her eyes are clear again. The first lesson is complete: love and giving-away are not opposites in this grammar, they are the same verb.

The library, the dress, the shaft

For two weeks the chateau keeps her. The bodice is laced so tight her breasts are pushed up and out, the nipples naked at the top of the green satin like fruit on a shelf; the full skirt can be raised at anyone’s pleasure. She discovers that the armor is, oddly, comfortable — it holds her upright and reminds her at every step which parts of her are armored and which are available. In the antechamber she watches Jeanne go pale, drop her hand, and sink to her knees on the black marble when a valet overhears her whisper the word enclosure, and O never learns what happened next; the door simply closes behind her. She notices the grammar of the place: masters cannot be approached, valets can be bribed, silence is absolute but constantly tested, and girls caught speaking are thrown to the floor and whipped in broad daylight. The rule she cannot keep is the rule about faces. Her curiosity about faces keeps earning her the whip.

And yet the silence, which ought to smother her, does the opposite.

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.

Afternoons she serves coffee in the library, where the autumn sun lights a bouquet of sulphur-colored chrysanthemums that smells of earth and dead leaves. Two men come in; one is the thin blond stripling from the previous night, whose name is James. James rules that she is too narrow — she has to be widened — and Rene agrees, with the deference of a man who considers James a better judge than himself. The coffer is brought in. For the next eight days, between dusk and the hour when she is chained to the wall for the night, O wears an ebonite shaft held in place by three little chains strung from a leather belt. Each day James chooses a thicker one. At dinner she eats naked with the other girls, the belt and chains visible, so that everyone can see what is being done to her body. By the end of the eight days no instrument is needed; she is, as Rene puts it, doubly open, and he tells her he will make certain she remains so.

The strangest thing is how she understands all of this. Not as defeat, not as injury, but as a form of elevation.

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.

The departure, the dungeon, the ring

Rene tells her he is leaving. He will be gone the last seven days; then he will come back and take her to Paris. Before he goes he asks — for the first time asking — if he may have her whipped. She agrees. Pierre chains her wrists to the chain at the head of the bed. Rene watches her struggle, listens to the moans thicken into cries, and sends Pierre away only when she begins to weep. She still has the strength to tell him she loves him. He kisses her drenched face and leaves.

The days after are hollowed out by his absence — she was henceforth nothing but vigil and night. On the second evening Pierre comes for her. He makes her squat over the Turkish toilet while he watches in the mirror, then bathes her, ties her hands behind her back, and tells her to wait. Outside it storms; a poplar tree shakes in the wind, and wet yellow leaves strike the windowpanes in the early dark. He returns with the velvet blindfold and a second, longer chain.

Blessed darkness like unto her own night, never had O greeted it with such joy, blessed chains that bore her away from herself.

He leads her down. Stone steps, twice a key in a lock, and halfway down he stops, forces her onto the cold steps, and takes her breasts in his mouth until he is finished. Then he goes on. The room at the bottom is vaulted, unplastered, low, lit by a single bulb in a niche beside some bread, water, and fruit. The chain at her collar clips to an eyebolt three feet up the wall. She can move two steps. The heat from the baseboard radiators cannot overcome the cellar smell of mud and old prisons. The light never goes off. Time dissolves. Men come in — sometimes one, sometimes several; a valet blindfolds her before each visit and unblindfolds her after, so she never sees them and cannot count them. Before each one she is made to kneel facing the wall, her collar clipped short to the bolt, and whipped; she presses her palms and face against the stone to keep from scraping them. She waits three months, or three days, or ten years.

Then, without warning, the chain is unfastened, a heavy cloth is wrapped around her, and she is lifted by the shoulders and knees. When she opens her eyes she is back in her cell, under the black fur, and Rene is sitting beside her, stroking her hair. You must get dressed now, we’re leaving.

Her suit, blouse, slip, stockings, gloves, scarf, and handbag are laid out at the foot of the bed. No garter belt. No panties. The man who explained everything on the first night comes in and unlocks the collar and bracelets she has worn for two weeks, and she hardly dares touch her own wrists. Then he opens a small wooden box of identical rings and asks her to choose the one that fits. They are iron, banded with gold inside, heavy, with a wide convex signet. The design is a three-spoked wheel inlaid in gold, each spoke spiraling back on itself — the solar wheel of the Celts. The second ring fits. The gold gleams furtively in the gray of the polished iron. She does not understand why iron, why gold, why this insignia, and there is no one to ask.

Rene takes her hand. The valet Pierre does not appear. They pass through the wrought-iron gate of the enclosure, now unguarded, the dogs gone. The curtains fall back. They cross an empty antechamber, step down from the stoop, and there is the car. Rene drives. A few hundred meters past the gate he stops and kisses her. They continue through a small, peaceful town.

O was able to read the name on the road sign: Roissy.

Part II: Sir Stephen — Handover

The apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis

O comes home to an apartment under the eaves, south-facing, overlooking the Seine. Low rooms, sloping ceilings, two balconies set into the roof. It would be an ordinary description of an ordinary flat — except for the floor.

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.

The chateau has followed her home. Rene has bought her a white nylon nightgown — pleated, almost transparent, tailored, he says, like the clothing of Egyptian statuettes — and unfolded it on the edge of the bed. Seated before the fire in it, she listens to him explain that she is not free. With one exception: she is free to stop loving him and leave. If she loves him, she is in no wise free. He tells her to listen with her knees unclasped and her arms unfolded, and she shifts onto her heels in the manner of Carmelites or of Japanese women, palms turned up beside her knees. The instruction is very simple. She is to be constantly and immediately accessible. Her knees must never cross. Her clothes must be chosen or invented so that the half-undressing he performed in the car to Roissy is never necessary again. She is to go through her drawers and surrender every girdle, every garter belt, every brassiere that fastens at the side, every sweater and dress that cannot be opened from the front. Even to the corset maker she is to go with nothing on underneath; if someone notices, that is her problem, and hers alone.

The next afternoon he phones and tells her to take off her robe and her nightgown, to remain naked, to prepare the suitcase. She carries the folded gown to the bathroom and passes a 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.

She returns to work in the fashion department of a photography agency, photographing models. The women around her, whose business is clothes, notice what others would miss: that she stands straighter, that her gestures are measured, that her sweaters sit directly on the skin, that her pleated skirts swirl too easily. A blond model named Jacqueline, high Slavic cheekbones, olive complexion, catches a flash of bare thigh above a rolled stocking and smiles strangely. Jacqueline looks at the iron ring. Over the next days O takes some fifty photographs of her — back-lit, veiled, in a heavy red brocade gala gown that in O’s mind’s eye gradually becomes the dress Jeanne wore at Roissy. She follows Jacqueline into the dressing room, watches her unclasp her gold bracelets on the black glass slab “where they made a momentary clanking sound like the sound of chains,” and meets the model’s gaze in the mirror until she feels herself slowly blushing. She says nothing. She keeps the proofs in a drawer.

The bar, the Buick, the drawing room

Two weeks of being outfitted and ready for use. Then one evening a note from Rene: be ready at eight, dressed entirely in black, made up and perfumed as at Roissy. She chooses a quilted faille jacket that hooks from neck to waist like a sixteenth-century doublet, a black pleated skirt, black silk stockings, suede sandals with raised soles. In the bathroom, alone, she rouges the tips of her breasts — a pink that darkens after application — and tries, and fails, to rouge the lips her fleece conceals. She perfumes herself three times, each coat drying before the next. At a quarter to eight she sits diagonally on the edge of the bed, eyes on the alarm clock, and waits for the bell.

The car drops her at a small Italian restaurant. Rene is at the bar, and beside him, a grizzled athlete in English tweeds. He is introduced only as Sir Stephen H. O is handed onto a stool between them; Rene warns her in a half-whisper not to muss her skirt, helps her slide the fabric out from under her so the cold leather presses directly against her, her right heel caught in a rung, the tip of her left foot touching the floor. The Englishman has bowed without a word. She feels him weighing her — knees, hands, lips — with the precise attention of someone examining an instrument. She removes her gloves. She knows he will speak when her hands are bare.

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.

Downstairs, in a whitewashed cellar painted with an ice-cream-colored map of Italy, they dine lightly and quickly. Almost no wine. Almonds and whipped cream for dessert. No coffee — Sir Stephen invites them back to his apartment.

The Buick crosses to the Left Bank. Sir Stephen reaches across and turns on the heater; warm air climbs her legs. His apartment is at the far end of a courtyard, one wing of an old private mansion, its rooms laid out in a straight line. The drawing room at the end is dark English mahogany, pale yellow and gray silk. He seats her on a large Damascus sofa. Rene goes for the coffee. Without warning Rene comes up behind her, seizes her by the throat and the hair, pulls her head back against the cushion and kisses her on the mouth so long that she gasps and her loins melt and burn. When she opens her eyes it is the gray, unflinching gaze of the Englishman that she meets.

Sir Stephen sits down opposite her and begins to speak. He explains that his father was once married to Rene’s mother, that she raised him, that he and Rene are not blood relatives but are in every way that matters brothers, ten years apart, with a freedom between them so absolute that what belongs to one belongs to the other. He knows she has been to Roissy. The ring she wears, in principle, gives any man who knows its meaning the right to do with her what he will — but that is a fleeting thing, and what he and Rene want from her is more serious. He will be, he says, only another form of her lover; she will still have only one master, a more formidable one because he will be there every day.

“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… I am fond of habits and rites.”

Consent

Rene offers to explain Sir Stephen’s preferences. Sir Stephen corrects him: demands. O realizes that the hardest thing is not consent — neither of them for a moment imagines she might refuse, nor does she — but speech. Her lips burn, her mouth is dry, her new-found hands are cold and moist. They will not accept blind obedience now; they want her to anticipate the order, to judge herself a slave and surrender herself as such. She has only ever told Rene “I love you” or “I’m yours.” Now she is being asked to agree, specifically and in detail, to what she has till now only tacitly consented to.

She stands. She unfastens the top hooks of her jacket until the cleavage is visible. “I’m yours,” she says to Rene. “I’ll be whatever you want me to be.”

“No,” he breaks in, “ours.”

She repeats after him, transposing into the first person, like a grammar lesson.

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.

She asks, in a murmur, whether she will be whipped. From time to time, Sir Stephen answers. Even if she promises, she says, she will not be able to bear it. All they ask, he replies, is that she submit, and that if she screams or moans she agree ahead of time that it will be in vain. Rene leans down and takes her shoulders and asks her for the third time. She says yes.

He helps her up, sits on the sofa, and makes her kneel facing it, her outstretched arms and head resting on the cushion. An image flashes across her mind from years before — a sixteenth-century print of a woman kneeling before an armchair with her skirts raised, a man beside her holding a bundle of switches, a dog and child playing in the corner. She remembers the title she had found disgusting: Family Punishment. Rene takes her wrists in a viselike grip, lifts her skirt so high that the muslin lining brushes her cheek, presents her to Sir Stephen, points out the two dimples at her flanks, the softness of the furrow between her thighs, orders her to open her knees wider. The two men speak coarsely over her body. The desire she had felt a moment earlier to be taken vanishes into shame so violent she begins to wish for the whip as a deliverance, for the pain and screams as a justification. But Sir Stephen’s hands pry her open, force the buttocks’ portal, retreat, return, caress her until she moans. She is vanquished, undone, humiliated that she has moaned.

Rene tells her to remain as she is — Sir Stephen will dismiss her when he sees fit — and leaves.

Alone with him

Sir Stephen walks Rene to the door. O stays on her knees, cheek on the gray and yellow silk, left thigh warmed by the three logs now blazing in the hearth, the antique clock above the chest of drawers ticking faintly under the sleepy rumble of Paris after midnight. She listens to how absurd her position is in this civilized, tasteful living room. And she thinks about the difference.

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?

Sir Stephen returns in a conservative gray homespun dressing gown that matches his hair. His hands are long and dry, his nails flat and short and very white. He offers her whisky and a cigarette. She refuses. He tells her to sit back down, to unhook her jacket without rising, to caress the tips of her breasts ever so lightly. He notes, dispassionately, that her rouge is too light. Her nipples stiffen and rise. She covers them with her palms. “Oh, no,” he says, and she withdraws her hands.

He sits on the arm of the sofa and does not touch her. He smokes, and a motion of his hand — she never knows whether voluntary — flicks still-warm ash down between her breasts. She can see beneath the soft material of his dressing gown that he wants her, and will not take her. At Roissy she had not cared whether the men who used her felt anything; their hands were Rene’s hands, their orders Rene’s orders. Not here. Here Rene has handed her over not to obtain anything further but to share, the way he and Sir Stephen had once shared a trip, a boat, a horse. What each will look for in her is the other’s mark. Earlier, when she was kneeling offered, Rene had explained to Sir Stephen why her rear passage had been prepared, and had added that, if Sir Stephen wished, he would grant him the sole use of it. Why, gladly, Sir Stephen had said — though, he remarked, he might rend her. O is yours, O will be pleased to be rent, Rene had replied, and leaned down and kissed her hands.

That Rene could imagine giving up any part of her leaves her stunned. She had not, she realizes, completely believed him when he said what he loved in her was the object he had made, her absolute availability. In Sir Stephen she detects a will of ice and iron, in whose judgment she counts, till now, for absolutely nothing — and this frightens her more than the valets’ belt at Roissy. His middle finger brushes the tips of her breasts and they obediently stiffen further, the way one checks whether a machine is functioning properly.

He tells her to take off her skirt. Her hands are so moist the hooks slip twice. Naked but for her stockings rolled flat above her knees and her high-heeled sandals, she is pushed to kneel against the sofa, her back pressed to it at the shoulders, her thighs slightly parted, her hands on her ankles, her throat arched back. He undoes his belt and straddles her. It is not her lips he wants. He kneels over her face, one knee on each side, and drives against the back of her throat, his buttocks sometimes resting on her breast, until she weeps. He does not bring it to a climax. He withdraws in silence and rises, 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,” she answers. She desires him, among others, he says; she lowers her eyes — even meeting his would be a confession. He slides her down onto the rug, her legs raised and doubled, and orders her, fiercely, to caress herself without closing her legs. Startled, she tries. Her hand recoils. “I can’t,” she says.

She has done it only in the obscurity of her own bed, alone, never to a climax. His gaze persists. She closes her eyes, and against her eyelids rises the image that has never left her, the image that still fills her with the same nausea and disgust she felt when she was fifteen: Marion slumped in a hotel armchair, one leg thrown over one arm of it and her head half over the other, caressing herself in O’s presence, and moaning.

Part II: Sir Stephen — The Mark and Jacqueline

The riding crop and the second master

The morning after the first night at the rue de Poitiers, O wakes in a small bed in a small room next to Sir Stephen’s. An elderly mulatto servant brings her coffee, prepares her bath, lays out her clothes. She finds a note on the living-room couch signed with an S: Rene has telephoned, he will pick her up at the studio at six. The postscript is a single sentence. “The riding crop is for your next visit.” On the table between the two chairs where the men sat the night before, beside a vase of yellow roses, lies the long slender leather crop. The servant is waiting at the door. O puts the letter in her bag and leaves.

The detail of the yellow roses is the key to how Sir Stephen works. He does not threaten, he furnishes. The crop is placed where a flower would be placed, announced the way one might announce a dinner reservation. Rene had phoned him, not her. The humiliation of being discussed between the two men, routed through them rather than addressed, is something O has already agreed to in principle, and now has to swallow in practice. She spends the afternoon at the studio in the peculiar absent-mindedness that Réage pins with one of the novel’s gentlest, coldest sentences — “Who pities those who wait? They are easily recognized: by their gentleness, by their falsely attentive looks.”

In the weeks that follow, Sir Stephen takes her two or three times a week, always at his apartment, always by appointment. He uses her in the same positions at the same moments, as in a ritual. He speaks almost no English to her now — the familiar tu begins to appear. He kisses her fingertips when he dismisses her, and nothing else, for a long time. Then one evening Rene, in Sir Stephen’s presence, asks that O be punished because she had dared ask to skip a Sir Stephen evening for a party. Rene shakes hands, smiles, and leaves. O watches the courtyard through the window, hears the car door, sees her own face white in a small wall mirror. Sir Stephen is as pale as she is. “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.”

He gags her with wet canvas. Before he strikes he says, “Excuse me, O” — he has never begged her pardon before — and then he whips her until he draws blood. She is chained by her Roissy bracelets to the ring in the ceiling where a chandelier used to hang. When Rene comes home to her apartment past midnight, he finds her trembling in white nylon, her shoulders and back and belly and breasts crossed with thick purple welts that sometimes overlap. He takes off his clothes in the dark with trembling hands. “Oh, how I love you,” he murmurs. The welts take almost a month to fade and leave whiter lines, like old scars. Réage is careful to note that Rene is horrified at the thought of striking O himself, and equally hungry to know she has been struck in his absence. In Sir Stephen, Rene has found the stern master he himself is unable to be.

Jacqueline, who looked like snow

Jacqueline walks into the studio on the heels of a short, plump red-haired model, the same evening Rene finally arrives at seven. She is fair, silvery, Dutch-bobbed, wrapped in a ski outfit nobody actually skis in.

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.

O notices immediately that Rene is watching her watch Jacqueline. For the first time in months her appetite for other bodies comes back to her, not as a rebellion against Rene but as a sign that, with him in the room, she is safe enough to feel it. She begins to pursue Jacqueline over the following weeks — brings her blue hyacinths, considers magnolias and camellias and rejects them as too melodramatic, walks with her along the quays when the buds burst on the poplars. Jacqueline takes the flowers the way women do who are used to receiving gifts, and then asks whether Rene is coming.

Here Réage opens the long meditation that is the heart of this block: O’s erotic history with women. She is twenty again, courting her prettiest girlfriend — doffing her beret, paying for tea in the pastry shop, kissing her hand and, if possible, her mouth, in the street. At the lycée she used to grab schoolgirls by the wrists and drag them into empty cloakrooms, pushing them back against the hanging coats until the coats fell from the hangers. She sets the rules. She initiates. The kisses come from her. She preferred not to be kissed first. She was in a hurry to see her girl friend naked and equally quick to find excuses not to undress herself — she was cold, it was the wrong time of the month. She loved “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.” But what she took to be desire, Réage tells us almost in passing, was mostly the thirst for conquest. Her toughness was a costume she learned to wear until Rene took it off her in the space of a week. After which she was light, lost in happiness, a fish in water, tied by invisible strands her lover could loosen or tighten with a glance.

And yet with Jacqueline she hesitates. Winter-Jacqueline in her furs had been too iridescent; spring-Jacqueline in flat shoes and sweaters is approachable and terrifies her more. The obstacle, she realizes, is not in Jacqueline at all.

Her freedom was worse than any chains. Her freedom was separating her from Rene.

She is no longer the hunter. She is the decoy the hunter has trained — bound not by rope but by the absence of an order. She waits, pale and trembling against a wall, impaled on her silence. What she is waiting for, she eventually understands, is not permission. It is an instruction. And the instruction, when it comes, does not come from Rene.

The mark, the photographs, the bait

One May morning, alone in her apartment, O hears a key in her lock. She flies to the door shouting Rene’s name. It is Sir Stephen, who has been given his own key without O’s being consulted. He phones Rene — Rene is held up at the office for an hour — and puts her naked on the low chair in front of the Restoration swing-mirror, one leg over the arm, the other curled, perfectly open in the bath of bright May light. Then he asks questions. Whether she has belonged to other men. Whether she caresses herself at night alone. Whether she has girl friends she desires. Jacqueline? He sends her to fetch the photographs.

Rene arrives out of breath. Sir Stephen, seated on the edge of the table with one hand on the photographs and the other inside O’s body, stops addressing her and speaks only to Rene. In front of her they resume what is plainly a long-running conversation about how best to use her. They agree: she is more moving when her body is marked, and she should therefore be whipped, irrespective of the pleasure her screams give them, as often as necessary so the traces remain constantly visible. O, sprawled on her back among the curling photographs with the sun on her face, listens as if Sir Stephen were speaking from inside her body. Her secret, she realizes, no longer depends on her silence alone.

At lunch on the terrace at Saint-Cloud, privet hedges and half-opened peonies below, he finishes what he has started. His gaze fastens on her mouth, then her breasts, then her eyes, and for the length of a held breath she sees it — the thing he will probably never forgive her for having seen. Then, in a steady voice, he tells her what has been decided. The iron and gold ring she cannot remove is the sign that she is a common slave; before her return to Roissy in the summer she will accept a second, definitive mark — one that will reveal her as his personal slave, Sir Stephen’s. The word irons, plural, which she had once taken as a figure of speech, had been a password all along. Asked now whose irons she wears, she answers: “Rene’s and yours.” “No,” Sir Stephen says. “Mine. Rene wants you to be answerable first of all to me.”

And there is a reprieve before the mark. She must first make Jacqueline submit to her. Two reasons. The first, he says, and the least important, is that he would like to watch her kiss and caress a woman. The second is Roissy. Jacqueline is to be recruited, and O is to be the bait. O sets down her coffee cup shaking so violently that the dregs spill on the tablecloth; in the brown stain she reads Jacqueline’s hair cut straight across her forehead like new-mown hay, her painted mouth open and screaming in front of the valet Pierre. No. Out of the question. Sir Stephen leaves money on the table, leads her to the car, turns off into a narrow lane in the Bois de Boulogne, and takes her in his arms. Part II ends there — with the order given, the mark promised, and O already, against every instinct, beginning to imagine how it could be done.

Part III: Anne-Marie and the Rings — Jacqueline and Samois

The seduction and the spying

Part III begins on a note of self-deception:

O had believed, or wanted to believe, in order to give herself a good excuse, that Jacqueline would be uncommonly shy.

She is not. Jacqueline closes the mirrored door of the dressing room not to keep O out but to draw her in; the modesty is a set piece, stage business. What O at first takes for strategy on her own part is in fact a strategy being played on her, and she is slow to realize that her “decision” to pursue Jacqueline has already been taken for her by an authority outside her own will. She enjoys the task anyway. Helping Jacqueline into a black turtleneck and a turquoise necklace, O catalogues every gesture — the parted lips, the lowered lashes fairer than the skin, the slow flush on the cheek, the smell of sage and sweat — with the deliberateness of someone preparing a report. She will relay all of it to Sir Stephen that same evening. The betrayal is methodical and tender.

Jacqueline, when she yields at all, yields in five-second bursts and then reassembles. The rest of the time she is coquettish, glossy, impossible to corner. The only tell is a faint, involuntary smile, “similar to the smile of a cat, as fleeting and as disturbing, and as uncertain, as a cat’s,” provoked by two things only: gifts, and clear evidence that she is desired by someone useful. René begins appearing alongside them at the Weber bar and the English bars near the Madeleine, regarding 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 slides off her; she does not even register it. O, oddly, is the one it disturbs.

The visit to Jacqueline’s apartment supplies the rest. Passy, a White Russian lodging house; a bed never made; a rod where a curtain used to hang, now holding only “two rings and a few shreds of cloth.” Jacqueline, clean and cold and scented with eau de Cologne, lives untouched inside her own squalor. What she cannot bear is her family — grandmother, mother, aunt, maid, four women in onyx and black silk weeping and smoking at four in the morning beneath the icons, calling after her “Choura, Choura, little dove,” in a language she would give half her life to forget. Jacqueline is her working name, chosen to bury Choura. René proposes she move in with O. Her mother consents. O, asked to make the case, feels for the first time like “the envoy of some criminal organization,” and tells herself she will never deliver Jacqueline to Sir Stephen — then, as soon as Jacqueline has unpacked into the north-facing room with the Dutch writing desk, finds herself obsessed with the desire to do exactly that.

Five days in, naked and wet from the bath, Jacqueline simply appears in O’s doorway and asks whether René is coming back. She slips into the big bed, lets herself be kissed, comes with a rising moan that turns into a cry, sleeps sprawled with her knees apart, and when O reaches for her again two hours later murmurs only: “Don’t wear me out completely, I have to get up early tomorrow.” She has begun playing bit parts in a film at Boulogne. Mornings, she is driven to the studio. Sir Stephen’s car then comes back for O.

Rue de Poitiers and the threat called Anne-Marie

O now spends her mornings at the rue de Poitiers. The ritual is fixed. Norah, the old mulatto maid in her Madras kerchief and felt slippers, meets her at the door, takes her gloves and clothes, locks them in a closet to which she alone has the key, hands O a pair of patent-leather mules, and walks her — on that sharp clicking sound — down the hall to Sir Stephen’s study. O never gets used to it. Undressing in front of the silent old woman “seemed to her as dangerous and formidable as being naked at Roissy in the presence of the valets there.” And yet, in exact counterweight to the fear, she feels a kind of pride that Norah is a witness to her being worthy of use.

Sir Stephen likes to keep her seated on the edge of his desk while he works, within arm’s reach, the telephone pressed against her left thigh. She answers it, passes him the receiver, makes excuses. One morning, bent over the leather top of the desk waiting to be taken, she meets Norah’s eye as the old woman enters with the mail, and involuntarily tightens. Sir Stephen has to force his way. Afterward he kisses O on the mouth, and it is that kiss that gives her courage, some days later, to admit that Norah frightens 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.”

O asks what mark, what irons, pointing to the ring she already wears. He deflects:

“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.”

Anne-Marie lives near the Observatoire, in an apartment flanked by a large studio on the top floor of a new building overlooking treetops. She is slender, roughly Sir Stephen’s age, her black hair streaked with gray, her eyes so deep a blue they look black. She serves a bitter coffee in tiny cups and, when O rises to put the cup down, takes her by the wrist.

“May I?”

“Please do,” Sir Stephen said.

Anne-Marie smiles — the first smile she has offered — and tells O, tenderly, as if giving her a present, to take off her clothes. She examines the faint elastic marks above O’s knees, disapproves of garters, and has a silent blonde girl fetch long black stockings and a whaleboned corset of black nylon taffeta, laced tight at the back, snug at the waist, open over the hips and buttocks. She seizes O by the nether lips — the same grip Pierre used on the first night at Roissy — and inspects her with the detachment of someone pricing a horse. O thinks: this is how they lift fish at the market.

Then, to Sir Stephen: “You can bring her to me whenever you like. I’ll be at Samois in two days’ time.” Samois, not Roissy. O notes the word without understanding it. Ten days, they agree, at the beginning of July.

Delivery at Samois

Driving back alone, O is gripped by the fear that René has given her away so completely he has stopped loving her. She gets out at the wrong door, runs along the quai de Béthune, flags a taxi at the rue Cardinal-Lemoine, and turns up unannounced at his office off the Champs-Élysées — the first time she has ever done so. He dismisses his secretary, holds his calls, and laughs when she tells him.

“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.”

He takes her in the office chair, lifting her skirt, pleased at the new narrow waist. Afterward he tells her two things. The first is that she has been a fool not to confide in Jacqueline — “when you come back from Anne-Marie’s there won’t be any way of concealing your true condition any longer.” Sir Stephen has ordered five days of daily whipping before she is sent; the marks will not hide. The second is blunter:

“I want her. And since you can’t — or won’t — do anything about it, I’ll take charge of the matter myself and do what has to be done.”

If Jacqueline will not come to Roissy willingly, he says, they will force her. That night O pulls back the sheet to look at Jacqueline asleep in the lamplight, relays René’s message, and — where a month ago she would have been horrified by the thought of this narrow body scored by the lash — is, she realizes, happy.

Jacqueline leaves for location shooting and is not due back until August. July arrives. The gardens are heavy with geraniums, the shutters close at noon. René announces a trip to Scotland and does not invite her. Sir Stephen comes for her on the same day.

“We’re going down to Anne-Marie’s. She’s expecting you. Don’t bother packing a suitcase, you won’t need anything.”

The house is a low two-story villa at the end of a long garden on the edge of the Fontainebleau Forest. They arrive at two in the afternoon, when the whole house is asleep. A large shaggy sheep-dog sniffs at O’s knees under her skirt. Anne-Marie is sitting under a copper beech on the edge of the lawn and does not get up. She is dressed in white, with a patent-leather belt around her waist and patent-leather sandals on her bare feet, the toenails the same bright red as her fingernails; her black hair streaked with gray looks creamed, her blue eyes almost black in the sun.

“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 starts to ask a question. Anne-Marie sends her into a large white bedroom with heavy purple Jouy drapes to undress, keeping only her sandals. There is no mirror. When she walks back out into the sun — dazzled — Sir Stephen is still standing in front of the chaise longue with the dog at his feet.

“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.

Anne-Marie walks Sir Stephen to his car. Before he goes he bends and takes O’s breasts in his hands, kisses her, and murmurs: “Are you mine, O, are you really mine?” The gate clangs shut. O, her legs folded beneath her, sits back on her heels with her arms on her knees, “like an Egyptian statue,” and waits for the woman who will prepare her to come back across the lawn.

Part III: Anne-Marie and the Rings — The Iron and the Brand

A house run by women, for a purpose

Samois, once you settle into it, is an odd sort of convent. The day is paced by idleness — reading, cards, naps on the lawn, tea under the beech tree, dinner by candlelight — and the two household servants move around naked girls at a festive table with practiced indifference. Anne-Marie designates one of them to share her bed each night, sometimes several in a row, and receives pleasure without ever removing her white nylon nightgown. Yvonne reports that she is beautiful and haughty in receiving pleasure as she was unstinting in her demands. Nobody has seen her naked.

The afternoons are governed by a lottery. At three, under the copper beech, Anne-Marie brings out a token box. The girl who draws the lowest number is taken into the music room and strapped to the dais; she then picks a hand — white ball, no whip; black ball, the whip. Chance is chance. Little Yvonne draws black four days running and nobody intervenes. Her shaved pink flesh, pierced by its thick iron ring, is displayed across the stage like a specimen on a slide. When O asks why the ring if Yvonne already wears a disk on her collar, the answer is small and practical: “He says I’m more naked when I’m shaved. The ring, I think the ring is to fasten me with.”

What Anne-Marie is after — and she tells O this plainly — is not a show of power but a pedagogy. She runs a totally feminine universe and she is determined that being confined to it should not diminish the girls but sharpen them. The nakedness is constant for that reason. The whipping is slow and meticulous, too slow for Roissy’s pace, but more thorough in its results. When O hands the thonged whip once and then again, both times to Yvonne, she discovers something she could not have predicted: after the first recoil, she had been overwhelmed with a terrible feeling of pleasure, a feeling so intense that she had caught herself laughing in spite of herself. Afterwards she lies next to Yvonne for the whole duration of her binding, embracing her. The cruelty of women, Anne-Marie understands and O now confirms, is neither less than men’s nor borrowed from them. It has its own weather.

The rings, and the thing that cannot be filed off

From the leather coffer on her bed, Anne-Marie takes out the rings Sir Stephen has chosen. Stainless steel, unburnished, two U-shaped halves that snap together. The test model can still be removed. The permanent model has a spring inside — press it home and it locks, cannot be removed, except by filing. To each ring hangs a disk the diameter of an earring, triskelion in gold inlay on one face; on the other, blank for now, will be engraved O’s name, her title, Sir Stephen’s family and given names, and a device of crossed whip and riding crop. Yvonne wears hers on a necklace. O will wear hers on her loins. The piercing itself Anne-Marie describes as a minor business — clamps to suture the outer and inner layers, attach the epidermis to the inner membrane, much easier to bear than the whip. No anaesthetic. O will merely be tied a little tighter than she was the day before.

A week later the clamps come off and the test ring is slipped on. It is lighter than it looks — hollow — and still O can feel its weight; the hard metal, which was visibly piercing the flesh, looked like an instrument of torture. Anne-Marie does not soften the point:

“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.”

O had not known about the branding. Colette offers that tattoos can be removed. Anne-Marie says O will not be tattooed. Her courage fails her for a moment; O tells her to say it.

“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.”

The night before, and a woman who cannot be possessed

Claire is going back to Roissy the day after tomorrow. She examines O’s rings and asks, almost casually, whether Anne-Marie brought her in too — yes, two years ago. “But don’t you belong to anyone?” O says. Anne-Marie walks up behind them. “Claire belongs to me,” she answers, and turns to O: “Your master’s arriving tomorrow. Tonight you’ll sleep with me.”

The short summer night thins into four-o’clock light, and Anne-Marie’s hands probe between O’s thighs — not to take O, but to have O wake her. She wants to be caressed. O works her mouth along the hard tips of her breasts, her hand over the valley of her belly. And here Réage draws the sharpest of her small, decisive distinctions. O had once held Jacqueline like this and thought she possessed her. The similarity of the gestures, it turns out, meant nothing.

“Anne-Marie demanded caresses without worrying about what the person providing them might feel, and she surrendered herself with an arrogant liberty.”

“No one possessed Anne-Marie.”

That is the sentence the whole Samois section has been building toward. There are, in this ecosystem, two kinds of women: those who can be possessed and those who cannot, and the house exists to sort one from the other and prepare the first for the second. Anne-Marie is all tenderness afterwards. She kisses O on the mouth, kisses her breasts, holds her for an hour, and removes her irons for the last time.

“These are your final hours here. 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 walks O into the only room in the house with a three-sided mirror, opens it, and positions her.

“This is the last time you’ll see yourself intact. 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.”

Morning under the beech tree

O does not sleep. At ten Yvonne comes to fetch her; O is trembling so badly Yvonne has to bathe her, arrange her hair, put on her lipstick. The garden gate has opened. The sun is already high, no air stirs in the leaves of the copper beech, the dog lies flat at the foot of the tree. Sir Stephen stands motionless beside the round marble table. Anne-Marie is seated.

“Here she is,” Anne-Marie says. “The rings can be put on whenever you like, she’s been pierced.”

Sir Stephen takes O in his arms, kisses her on the mouth, lifts her bodily onto the table and bends over her. He kisses her again, strokes her eyebrows and her hair, and says only: “Right now, if it’s all right with you.” Anne-Marie hands him the rings, already inscribed. Yvonne lifts O’s knees. The cold metal goes through. The second half has to be driven home with a hammer — the marble slab turned briefly into an anvil, the two links beaten against it while O leans spread-legged on the edge. Sir Stephen watches in silence and, when it is over, thanks Anne-Marie and helps O to her feet. The new irons are much heavier than the temporary ones.

Then Anne-Marie, matter-of-fact: “And now your monogram, right?”

In the music room the single-burner stove is already on the stage. The straps come out of the closet. They bind O tightly around waist and knees, her belly hard against one of the columns, and fasten her hands and feet. Then Réage writes the moment with the restraint it demands.

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 unfasten her, she collapses into Anne-Marie’s arms and catches, between two waves of blackness, a glimpse of Sir Stephen’s ghastly pale face. Then she is gone.

What the house at Samois has done, it has now done. O leaves with two permanent rings, a disk swinging like the clapper of a bell between her legs at every step, and two initials burned three inches high and nearly half an inch deep into either side of the cleft of her behind. The test is over. She is, visibly and irreversibly, the property of a man who was not in the room while the female masters prepared her for him.

Part IV: The Owl — Natalie and the Summer House

A condition made visible

Part IV opens on a woman who has stopped disguising herself.

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, at Samois, that the change would be deeper than she expected. Back in the apartment she shares with Jacqueline, O no longer hides. She steps out of the bath with the rings hanging between her legs and the crosshatch of riding-crop marks still fresh on her thighs and breasts; she jingles her irons against the porcelain tub to make sure Jacqueline looks. Jacqueline, who notices very little that is not her own reflection, finally notices. What she sees — the disk, the inscription, the S and H branded into the buttocks — stuns her. She slumps onto a lacquered bathroom stool. O, for her part, is matter-of-fact to the point of cheer. “It’s Sir Stephen. Rene gave me to him, and he’s had me pierced with his rings.”

Jacqueline’s horror is the interesting thing. “You look as though you were proud of it,” she says, “I don’t understand.” She is not sickened so much as exposed. O has become the evidence of a world Jacqueline has been circling without entering, and the pride — O’s pride — is what she cannot metabolize. O laughs, lets her explain Roissy, coaxes her into bed, and begins the long, patient project of persuading her toward the gates. Jacqueline will go, she says, “only to see what it’s like,” a formula O lets stand while knowing it is meaningless. Once inside, O thinks, there will be enough valets, chains, and whips to teach Jacqueline to obey. The tenderness of her caresses and the coolness of this calculation sit in the same sentence.

Already, then, the fourth part has reoriented the book. The person being tested is no longer O. O is the one doing the testing.

The farmhouse near Cannes

Sir Stephen has taken an old farmhouse restored into a villa on the coast near Cannes, and the household assembles there for August: Sir Stephen, Rene, O, Jacqueline, and Jacqueline’s younger sister Natalie, who is fifteen. Natalie comes because her mother has been hounding Jacqueline to bring her, not because Jacqueline wants her.

Réage describes the house with the flat, inventorying precision she uses for everything that matters. Whitewashed walls, red tile floors, yellow-and-white linen curtains, a heavy Regency walnut bureau, a long peasant table waxed till it shines like a mirror. O’s bedroom opens onto a second-story terrace shaded by a reed lattice; the tops of the black cypresses come up level with the parapet. The Mediterranean does not move her. She finds the landscape mineral and hostile — “No real trees,” she thinks, staring at the lichen-warm stones; the sea smells wrong, is too blue, laps at the same bit of shore. The indifference of the setting is the right register for what follows.

One detail of the architecture is not decorative. The wall between O’s alcove and Sir Stephen’s bedroom looks solid but is not: a trompe-l’oeil lattice conceals a blind that Sir Stephen can raise at will, through which he can see and hear O’s bed as clearly as if he were standing beside it. O has planned the coming surrender of Jacqueline around this wall.

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.

It happens on a cool Sunday afternoon. Rene is napping downstairs. Jacqueline, sun-gilded to the point of seeming powdered with silver, comes up to O’s alcove. O is careful — she draws back her legs, keeps them spread in the bedside lamp, positions Jacqueline so that the hidden watcher can see. For more than an hour she works Jacqueline toward and through pleasure; Jacqueline finally cries out, her hands circling the wooden bars of the headboard; O bites the crest of flesh at the point between her thighs where the dainty, supple lips joined, and Jacqueline comes apart and is sent back, moist with pleasure, to sleep in her own room.

Natalie, and a change in Jacqueline

Natalie has already discovered O. One morning she ran onto the terrace looking for her sister and found O alone on the Oriental pillows, naked. What shocked Jacqueline filled Natalie with envy. Her sister has tried to scare her off with the story and accomplished the opposite: the child is in love with O and has been carrying it privately for a week.

On the Sunday that Jacqueline is sent back to her room, Natalie has been listening behind the door. She erupts into O’s bedroom like one of the Furies.

“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!”

O sits her in an armchair and wipes her tears with one of Sir Stephen’s handkerchiefs. The child, on the floor now, hugs her knees and pleads to be kept.

“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.”

She is fifteen going on sixteen, she says, and furious at being called too young. Sir Stephen has just come in. He grants her the permission Natalie is asking for, but with conditions that are his own. O is forbidden to teach her the least caress, not a kiss on the lips; he intends Natalie to arrive at Roissy completely untouched by hands or lips. In exchange, Natalie is not to leave O’s side. She is to be present when O caresses Jacqueline, present when O yields to Sir Stephen, present when the crop is used, present when old Norah flogs her. Réage gives her the image of Dinarzade at the foot of Scheherazade’s bed — the child crouched on the carpet, watching, jealous of her sister, admiring, impatient, untouched.

Jacqueline, meanwhile, is pulling away. She stops coming to O’s bed. She grows cool with Rene, though she spends every day and night with him. Rene, for the first time in the book, is losing his footing. He has fallen in love with Jacqueline in a way he had not known himself capable of — a worrisome, uncertain love, one he was far from sure was requited, a love that acts not, for fear of offending — and he moves through the house like a man trying to catch a departing train. O watches this with a clarity that surprises her.

“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.”

The rings, she realizes, have done the displacing. Rene had held her with ropes of straw, anchors of cork, paper chains; Sir Stephen holds her with iron through flesh, and the iron is a comfort. With Rene, she concludes, she had been an apprentice to love, learning how to give herself, enslaved and surfeited, to someone else. But seeing Rene now — hobbled, unsure, no longer free — produces in O something new: hatred for Jacqueline. And the hatred, Réage notes carefully, will lead her to an error.

The drive back

The error begins in Cannes. O and Jacqueline go alone to the hairdresser and then to the terrace of the Reserve Café for an ice cream. Jacqueline is dressed in tight black slacks and a sheer black sweater, tanned and hard and bright, and she has arranged to meet the director of the film she has been shooting in Paris — a young man, forthright, obviously in love with her. Jacqueline listens to him half-reclined in a beach chair, eyes lowered, using the small trick O has seen her use before: watching a man’s desire from under motionless eyelids when she thinks no one is watching. But this time she is upset in a way O has never seen in Rene’s presence — hands still, face expressionless, no smile. When O leans forward for her water glass their eyes meet, and Jacqueline gives her the briefest smile. It tells O that Jacqueline knows she has been seen, and does not care; and it is O who blushes.

“Are you too warm?” Jacqueline said. “We’ll be leaving in five minutes. Red is becoming to you, by the way.”

They leave. Outside, the palm trees look as though they had been cut out of metal, the strollers like poorly fashioned wax models, animated by some absurd mechanism. The black Buick climbs the upper coast road. O breaks the silence.

“You really like him all that 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.

Jacqueline does not answer the question. She answers a different one.

“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 does not move. Jacqueline adds that she is not supposed to cross her legs. It is a neat, almost casual reversal: the threat of reporting O for a posture will buy Jacqueline’s silence on everything else. And in the small, precise interior of O’s mind, Réage shows us why the threat works without quite working.

They drive the rest of the way without speaking. At the farmhouse Jacqueline picks a white geranium and crushes the leaf in her hands as she walks, and O, following close behind, can smell both the geranium and the sweat darkening the armpits of Jacqueline’s black sweater. In the big whitewashed room with the red-tile floor, Rene is waiting alone.

Part IV: The Owl — The Masked Ball and the Endings

The Commander’s inspection

The final movement begins on the terrace of the old farm. Rene and Jacqueline are dispatched from the frame; Sir Stephen opens a door, and O, pinned against the wall, is kissed so completely that she understands, again, what she is for:

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?

A man is waiting on the terrace. Réage does not name him.

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.

Norah undresses her. Natalie slips in barefoot. The Commander does not touch — he circles, measuring, the way a buyer measures livestock. He compliments Sir Stephen on the contrast between her bosom and her waist, on the irons, which he finds longer and thicker than usual. A loan is arranged for the following week. O, held from behind by Sir Stephen, hears it the way a child under ether hears nurses discussing her hair.

The mask

Upstairs, Sir Stephen sends Natalie for the white cardboard box. Inside are masks — the book’s final prop, and its central image.

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, and 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.

O tries each. The owl is the one.

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 wipes the lipstick from her mouth. He tells her she will be taken to the Commander on a leash. Natalie fetches a chain — an actual dog chain — and Sir Stephen pries open the last link with pliers, fastens it to the second ring in her loins, and forces it shut. Four or five feet long, a leather strap at the end. Natalie walks her around the room by it three times. The Commander has requested she be shaved; she is shaved the next day at a beauty parlor, where the girl doing the wax turns from pity to horror at the irons and the welts and the pale, pale skin. O is unbothered. She notices only that the feathers of the mask demand smooth flesh, the way an Egyptian statue demands it.

The ball

They leave an hour before midnight. O is wrapped in a brown mountaineer’s cape with wooden clogs on her feet; Natalie, in black sweater and slacks, holds the leash, its leather strap fastened to the bracelet on her own right wrist. Sir Stephen drives. The moon is almost full.

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.

They arrive at a walled property. A cloister with Renaissance arcades on three sides. A dozen couples dancing on the terrace and in the courtyard, women in low-cut dresses, men in white dinner jackets, candlelight, a record player in the left-hand gallery, a buffet on the right. The cape and clogs stay in the car. O walks in naked, masked, chained.

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.

The Commander disperses the crowd and calls for torches to examine her more closely. “Who is she,” they ask, “who does she belong to?” He answers: “You, if you like.” He seats her on a stone bench against a low wall, cushions behind her back, hands on her knees, Natalie on the ground at her feet still holding the chain. Sir Stephen watches from a chaise longue at the other corner of the terrace. The music starts again.

From midnight to dawn she sits there while the party uses her as a centerpiece. She is not spoken to.

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.

Couples come over. They part her knees, lift the chain, bring two-branched Provencial candlesticks close enough for her to feel the flames warming the inside of her thighs, to see how she is attached. A drunk American grabs her, feels the iron, sobers instantly, and flees with the same horror-and-contempt face she saw at the beauty parlor. A young girl in a white debutante dress with a pearl choker and tea-scented roses at her waist is made to sit beside O; a boy takes the girl’s hand and guides it over O’s breasts, her belly, the chain, the hole the chain passes through. The girl does not seem shocked. She will, the boy tells her, receive the same treatment.

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 pointless to speak to her? Or didn’t they dare?

At five the moon is going down and the eastern sky is lightening. The dancers leave. Sir Stephen and the Commander wake Natalie, who has fallen asleep at O’s feet. They help O up, lead her to the middle of the courtyard, unfasten the chain, remove the mask, lay her back on a table, and possess her one after the other.

The two endings

Then Réage closes the book with two paragraphs, set apart from the scene, in a register outside the narrative — the editor’s voice, or the author’s, or neither. They are the most famous closing lines of the novel.

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

There exists a second ending to 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.

Claude’s Take

What makes Story of O a canonical novel and not a notorious one is the prose. Réage writes about flagellation, piercing, and branding with the ceremonial exactness of a sacristy inventory. There are no hot adjectives; there is no camera lens. Sentences arrive with the impersonal calm of a jurist’s summation, and the book’s most extreme events — the branding, the owl-masked ball — are described in the same register as a window being closed or a dog laid flat at the foot of a beech tree. This is the discipline Susan Sontag identified in The Pornographic Imagination: that pornography becomes literature when the prose treats the unthinkable with the weight of a theological argument, and that Story of O is one of the very few modern books that does. The theology here is explicit. Rene tells O he possesses her the way a god possesses the creatures he gives and reclaims. Submission is framed as the annihilation that restores. The rings and the brand are sacraments. Paulhan’s preface reads the book as a mystic’s handbook, and although that is an overstated reading, it is not a foolish one — the architecture of the novel really does require the reader to take submission as a category not of psychology but of grace.

What strains — and must be said plainly — is Part IV, where Jacqueline’s fifteen-year-old sister Natalie is brought in as O’s charge. Réage keeps Natalie technically untouched, on Sir Stephen’s orders, until her eventual delivery to Roissy. But the moral bracketing of a fifteen-year-old is, by any contemporary standard and by most non-contemporary ones, a real cost of the book, not a decorative provocation. Réage’s impersonal register does not neutralize it; if anything it compounds it, because the register refuses to register what a reader’s conscience will not let pass. It is worth saying this out loud rather than pretending the book gets away clean. It does not. The deeper structural critique, related but separate, is that Réage’s theological ambition requires O to have no internal life outside submission — which makes her, by the final scenes, almost a void the book has successfully emptied. The owl mask is the book’s most honest image of what it has done to its protagonist: she is a creature visible to everyone and addressable by no one, looking out from her feathers and making no sound. Whether this is a triumph of the form (Sontag’s reading) or a failure of humanity (Dworkin’s reading) is ultimately the question the book puts to every serious reader, and the book does not settle it.

In the lineage, Story of O stands where it should — downstream of Sade, adjacent to Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928) and Mandiargues’s The Margin, upstream of late-twentieth-century debates about female agency and desire that the revelation of Dominique Aury’s authorship reframed entirely. The novel was for forty years widely assumed to be the work of a man, and the assumption was itself a commentary on how the culture parsed female authorship of explicit material. Aury’s late-life confirmation that she wrote the book as a private proof of love for Paulhan — that the subject of the book was not, originally, O’s condition but her own longing to be read by one specific reader — opens a dimension of the work that no first reading can supply. It is, among other things, a love letter in the form of a mystery play.

Who should read it: readers of Bataille, Mandiargues, Genet, Henry Miller at his most formal; anyone serious about how French mid-century literature absorbed and transformed Sade; readers who want to understand what a Prix-winning erotic novel looks like at the hinge of the 1950s; and, perhaps above all, readers willing to spend three hundred pages in the company of a prose voice that refuses to flinch, apologize, or melt. It is not a book for readers seeking warmth, a moral, or titillation. Its eroticism is cold, its violence is accountantly rendered, and its ending — in either of the two versions — is not earned by anything you could call therapy.

Claude’s score: 8/10. A canonical novel that has to be graded on two axes at once — as literature, where it is very near the top of its lineage; as an ethical object, where Part IV exacts a real cost that serious readers should not pretend away. The prose carries it; the Natalie material pulls it back; the owl mask remains, honestly, one of the great final images in postwar fiction.