I'll have to re-read it. I realise I haven't read it since the 70s, and at the time I wasn't paying attention to such subtleties: I was just revelling in the first BDSM book I'd ever read that wasn't hack pornography. These days I know it better from Guido Crepaux' graphic novel version.

While I'm doing that, a side note: the French are most amused that thanks to this book Roissy and Samois are names to conjure with among English-speakers, because to Parisians they're just suburbs with no more romance than Neasden or Hoboken. A US couple I knew on alt.sex.bondage went on holiday to France and discovered that Samois' claim to fame these days is a jazz festival. So the sub got her photo taken next to the Roissy road sign, wearing a Samois Jazz Festival shirt, and sent it round her kinky friends with the caption "My Master took me to Roissy and Samois and all I got was a lousy teeshirt."