"[J'ai] cessé depuis longtemps toute communication avec Mme Wanda de Sacher-Masoch"

Probably unpublished autograph letter, written by a secretary, dated 1^st June 1893 and signed by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch to an unknown recipient, probably a lawyer. Handwritten note by Sacher-Masoch in the upper left margin of the letter: « Répondu le 1 mai 93 ».
Two pages written in black ink on a bifolium.
The writer is preparing for a possible lawsuit brought by his first wife Wanda, the inspiration for his famous novel La Vénus à la fourrure, who sought to reclaim what was owed to her and free herself from the fantasy she had embodied through her husband’s works.

Wanda, whose real name was Angelika Aürora Rümelin, had signed with him the notorious contract stipulating that she should cover herself in furs and whip him thus attired—a veritable gospel of what would become masochism. Despite this sacred and formalised union, by the late 1870s Leopold had grown weary of life with her, Wanda being unable to fulfil his desires: « Courtisane malgré elle » and « infirmière », according to Jean-Paul Corsetti, she was, Gilles Deleuze tells us, « sa compagne à la fois docile, exigeante et dépassée ». Overwhelmed by financial difficulties, he sold the famous furs and his wife’s dresses, and their divorce was pronounced in 1886.
Haunted by her alter ego of La Vénus à la fourrure, which had made of her an imperious and venal Delilah, Wanda appears to have intended to sue her former husband: « Ayant cessé depuis longtemps toute communication avec Madame Wanda de Sacher-Masoch, il m'est impossible de m'entendre avec elle à l'amiable [...] En cas échéant, ce sera contre moi que Mme de Sacher-Masoch pourra tenter un procès?».

The lawsuit is without doubt connected with the premiere of Kassya, an opera by Léo Delibes on a libretto by Sacher-Masoch adapted by Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gilles, staged at the Opéra-Comique that same year. It is possible that Wanda, who had translated Masoch’s works during their marriage, did not receive the translation rights due to her for Kassya, based on a tale published in her husband’s Contes galiciens.
In the same spirit as his years of absolute submission to Wanda, he was determined to bear alone the burden of his wife’s accusations, in return for a sum of money paid by the other authors of the opera (Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gilles): « Je déclarerai dans un acte notariel [sic] que, en touchant la somme dite, je me charge de toute responsabilité vis-à-vis de Mme de Sacher-Masoch?».

A strange and picturesque episode in the history of the founder of masochism, still unknown to his biographers.