Lord Drialys
The Beautiful Flagellants of Chicago,Volume one
FOREWORD
The passion for flagellation counts numerous votaries all over the world. Birching lust flourishes in Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Russia. In all these countries, womankind is fully alive to the thrilling charm of the rod and its extraordinary effects upon the masculine organization. Innumerable are the lovers of the twigs in high society and amidst artists and intellectual folks.
It is in the United States that birching discipline is best known and most popular, being carried out with artistic, poetical sentiment until it becomes the inseparable, supreme refinement of love.
In France, flagellation has many followers, if one may judge by the fact that there are very few courtesans in Paris or the principal provincial towns who do not possess in a corner of their mirrored wardrobes a goodly selection of whipping instruments which are used by these complaisant cocottes almost every day. Many Parisian closed and shuttered houses of love can show special rooms fitted up with everything needful for the application of flogging pleasure. As priestesses, these mysterious temples are provided with most adorable, beautiful charmers, who exercise their art with finished skill, being perfectly able to lead the man who kneels before them through every delicious by-path of sublime and intoxicating voluptuousness.
The love of birching, active or passive, also exists in the upper circles of Paris. When, now and again, some sensual scandal is revealed, indiscreet newspapers lift a corner of the veil hiding these private practices, and the general public is strangely stirred.
Such propensities are generally put down as bordering on weird insanity.
When voluptuous flagellation is brought into play, it is nothing more than sublime exacerbation of tender affection, forcing a fervent lover to reach the highest pitch of adoration for the weaker sex. In that case, any pain inflicted by the female of his choice becomes a source of joy.
There are certainly many men and even women who cannot understand or permit such proceedings. To fully realise the enthralling influence of the birch, one must be predisposed by nature, instinct, temperament or education; or else specially destined to drain this cup of ineffable delight by some happy hazard of environment.
The women of France are not successful when trying to enact the part of a domineering queen. Young Parisian beauties, delightful types of femininity though they be, care for naught else in love but the simple frolic and merry laughter.
Austria, Hungary, Russia, and even Germany have given birth to haughty, superb females, such as Catherine the Great and Maria Theresa, fated to bend the lords of creation beneath their yoke, curbing manly pride by the power of an inexorable sceptre grasped in the small white hand of a woman.
Petticoated despots are still to be found in these lands. Empresses from the cradle, they have proud dispositions, and when in the flower of womanhood and wonderfully handsome, appreciative men are wafted into a terrestrial paradise, as they humble themselves before such tyrannical, capricious mistresses.