it was the touch of her feet that chiefly excited him. He now
gave up masturbation, and had a succession of mistresses, but was
always ashamed to confess his fancies until, at the age of 33, in
Paris, a very intelligent woman who had become his mistress
discovered his mania and skillfully enabled him to yield to it
without shock to his modesty. He was devoted to this mistress,
who had very beautiful feet (he had been horrified by the feet of
Europeans generally), until she finally left him. (_Archives de
Neurologie_, October, 1904.)

Probably the first case of shoe-fetichism ever recorded in any
detail is that of Restif de la Bretonne (1734-1806), publicist
and novelist, one of the most remarkable literary figures of the
later eighteenth century in France. Restif was a neurotic
subject, though not to an extreme degree, and his shoe-fetichism,
though distinctly pronounced, was not pathological; that is to
say, that the shoe was not itself an adequate gratification of
the sexual impulse, but simply a highly important aid to
tumescence, a prelude to the natural climax of detumescence; only
occasionally, and _faute de mieux_, in the absence of the beloved
person, was the shoe used as an adjunct to masturbation. In
Restif's stories and elsewhere the attraction of the shoe is
frequently discussed or used as 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