Story of O

by Pauline Reage

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

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

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

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

  “Come along now, O,” Yvonne said, “he’s waiting for you.”

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

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

  “Here she is,” said Anne-Marie, when Yvonne had brought O before them, “the rings can be put on whenever you like, she’s been pierced.”

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

  “Right now, if it’s all right with you.”

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

  “Any time,” Sir Stephen said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Which do you prefer, O?” he asked her.

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

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

  He asked her for some nails, and having found a way to arrange them in a decorative manner, whips and riding crops crossed, he showed O a panel of wainscoting between her mirror and the fireplace, opposite her bed, which would be ideal for them. He hammered some nails into the wood. There were rings on the ends of the handles of the whips and riding crops, by which they could be suspended from the nails, a system which allowed each whip to be easily taken down and returned to its place on the wall. Thus, together with the bracelets and the rope, O would have, opposite her bed, the complete array of her instruments of torture. It was a handsome panoply, as harmonious as the wheel and spikes in the painting of Saint Catherine the Martyr, as the nails and hammer, the crown of thorns, the spear and scourges portrayed in the paintings of the Crucifixion. When Jacqueline came back … but all this involved Jacqueline, involved her deeply. She would have to reply to Sir Stephen’s question: O could not, he chose the dog whip himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Go on, say it.”

  “Come, it will be simpler to show you.”

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

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

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

  Sir Stephen nodded.

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

  “Since you’ve been back.”

  “Then why? …”

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

  “But I belong to you,” O said. “Punish me. When Eric comes …”

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

  IV

  The Owl

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

  “What in the world’s the matter?” she said.

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