a motive. His first decided literary success,
Le Pied de Fanchette, was suggested by a vision
of a girl with a charming foot, casually seen in the
street. While all such passages in his books
are really founded on his own personal feelings
and experiences, in his elaborate autobiography,
Monsieur Nicolas, he has frankly set forth the
gradual evolution and cause of his idiosyncrasy.
The first remembered trace dated from the age
of 4, when he was able to recall having remarked
the feet of a young girl in his native place.
Restif was a sexually precocious youth, and at the
age of 9, though both delicate in health and shy
in manners, his thoughts were already absorbed
in the girls around him. “While little
Monsieur Nicolas,” he tells us, “passed
for a Narcissus, his thoughts, as soon as he was
alone, by night or by day, had no other object
than that sex he seemed to flee from. The girls
most careful of their persons were naturally those
who pleased him most, and as the part least easy
to keep clean is that which touches the earth
it was to the foot-gear that he mechanically gave
his chief attention. Agathe, Reine, and especially
Madeleine, were the most elegant of the girls at
that time; their carefully selected and kept shoes,
instead of laces or buckles, which were not yet
worn at Sacy, had blue or rose ribbon, according
to the color of the skirt. I thought of these
girls with emotion; I desired—I knew
not what; but I desired something, if it were
only to subdue them.” The origin Restif
here assigns to his shoe-fetichism may seem paradoxical;
he admired the girls who were most clean and neat
in their dress, he tells us, and, therefore, paid
most attention to that part of their clothing
which was least clean and neat. But, however
paradoxical the remark may seem, it is psychologically
sound. All fetichism is a kind of not necessarily
morbid obsession, and as the careful work of Janet
and others in that field has shown, an obsession
is a fascinated attraction to some object or idea
which gives the subject a kind of emotional shock
by its contrast to his habitual moods or ideas.
The ordinary morbid obsession cannot usually be
harmoniously co-ordinated with the other experiences
of the subject’s daily life, and shows, therefore,
no tendency to become pleasurable. Sexual fetichisms,
on the other hand, have a reservoir of agreeable
emotion to draw on, and are thus able to acquire
both stability and harmony. It will also
be seen that no element of masochism is involved in
Restif’s fetichism, though the mistake has
been frequently made of supposing that these two
manifestations are usually or even necessarily
allied. Restif wishes to subject the girl who
attracts him, he has no wish to be subjected by
her. He was especially dazzled by a young
girl from another town, whose shoes were of a
fashionable cut, with buckles, “and who was a
charming person besides.” She was delicate
as a fairy, and rendered his thoughts unfaithful
to the robust beauties of his native Sacy. “No