Erotic Fantasy. Hans-Jürgen Döpp

      There were shoe fetishists who aroused themselves with the shoes and boots which used to be placed outside the doors of hotel rooms for cleaning. Hirschfeld describes the case of a man who engaged in masturbation when he looked at a pair of large men’s boots, preferably a soldier’s boots with spurs, next to delicate women’s shoes that were placed outside the door; during the cover of night, he would sneak over to where the shoes were to caress, smell, and kiss them.

      An expressive example of how both the foot and the shoe can become a fetishist object is provided by the French writer Rétif de la Bretonne (1734–1806). He represents the type of a pure shoe fetishist. When looking at women’s shoes, he used to quiver lustfully and blush in front of them as if they were the girls themselves. He collected the slippers and shoes of his lover, kissed and smelled them, and sometimes masturbated into them. In his autobiographical novel, Monsieur Nicolas, Rétif wrote the following about his shoe fetish: “Dragged away from the stormiest, completely adoring passion for Colette, I imagined seeing and feeling her in body and spirit by caressing the shoes she had worn just a moment ago with my hands. I pressed my lips on one of these jewels while the other substituted as woman during a frenzied fit… This bizarre, mad pleasure seemed to – how should I say? – seemed to lead me straight to Colette herself.”

      His famous story Fanchette’s Foot was conceived in 1767. One Sunday morning, at the corner of Montorgueil Street he saw a pretty girl standing in front of a boutique. She was dressed in a white slip, silk stockings, and pink shoes with high stiletto heels. He was enchanted by what he saw, including the charming walk of the girl, and in his mind immediately began writing the first chapter of the above-mentioned work, which starts with the words: “I am the actual historian recording the glorious conquest of the small foot of a beauty.” The following day, when his imagination had somewhat cooled, he wanted to see his muse once more but instead noticed a woman on Saint-Denis Street whose foot was a “miracle of daintiness” dressed in a delightful gold-trimmed shoe made by the premier shoemaker of Paris. Full of enthusiasm he hurried home and in two days wrote the first fourteen chapters of Pied de Fanchette.

      A friend reports about Rétif: “Our dear Nicolas had a rather strange but I believe excusable obsession. No matter how ugly a woman’s face was, whether she was hunchbacked or limped, our dear friend always fell madly in love with her if she had a pretty foot and especially if she wore pretty shoes. He relished a woman’s feet more than anything; they were everything for him in terms of bliss and pleasure.” The woman herself was viewed as a somewhat insignificant appendix of her foot or her shoes.