The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- From High Drama to Low Farce -- (Chapter VIII, Part 10)

Although the conventional view nowadays is that Krafft-Ebing ruined the writer's reputation, in truth, if anyone ruined Sacher-Masoch's career, it was the Chevalier himself.

Forever striving for high drama, his sexcapades usually collapsed into low farce.

While Wanda was still recovering from the birth of their third child, for instance, her husband excitedly showed her a personal ad from a Viennese newspaper:

'Handsome, rich, energetic young man would like to meet pretty, elegant young woman; admirer of the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch preferred.'

The writer himself quickly drafted a reply for his wife, enclosing a photo of Wanda.

The man returned the favor, including a picture of himself in Eastern garb.

'A Turk, Wanda!' Leopold exclaimed. 'Now at last we've got hold of someone who understands how to make love!'

Sacher-Masoch then hastily dispatched his ailing wife to a health spa to have sex with the stranger.

However, Wanda returned the very next afternoon, informing her far from gallant Chevalier that the 'Turk' was actually 'a very nice boy' from Vienna—real name: Nikolas Teitelbaum—whose mother was a friend of the family.

'We talked half the night, but nothing happened,' Wanda told him. 'I felt ill, anyhow.'

LUDWIG THE MAD

In another intrigue, a mystery correspondent tried to sound out whether The Love of Plato might reflect Sacher-Masoch's true tendencies.

Wanda quickly worked out that the fan was a man, not least because of his nom de plume: Anatol.

But Sacher-Masoch fantasized that he was a frustrated 'she-devil,' a manly woman who would beat him like an evil Queen Mother of Constantinople.

The famous author then embarked on a bizarre charade that at one point involved him sitting blindfolded alone in a hotel room at midnight (to meet a man he couldn't see) and at another him and his wife trying to arrange a ménage-a-trois, sitting in the dining room of a hotel in Graz so that Wanda could be seduced by Anatol.

When she was finally summoned upstairs, instead of the deep-voiced man Sacher-Masoch had met, she found a crippled pipsqueak with red hair.

After a tiresome cat-and-mouse game (even Sacher-Masoch got bored), the couple found out years later that they'd been outwitted by two royal friends: Holland's invalid Alexander of Orange and Bavaria's 'Mad' King Ludwig II, who wound up drowning himself and his doctor in a lake (Krafft-Ebing had warned his colleague to keep an eye on Ludwig).

Mad? Me?