Pauline Réage

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26 / 03 / 2026

Pauline Réage

Words by JOUISSANCE

Behind the Bottle

JOUISSANCE was sparked by the words of women who taught us to desire. Our fragrances are unapologetically feminine, evocative of the literary and sensual interior lives of women who held up a mirror to their secret selves and erotic discoveries, their intense pleasures and pains. This Women’s Month, we’re taking a moment to celebrate the three iconic female writers behind the JOUISSANCE scents – scroll for the second in the series, LA BAGUE D’O muse Pauline Réage, AKA Anne Desclos

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

"One day a girl in love said to the man she loved: "I could also write the kind of stories you like..."” So begins the writer’s own account (published as ‘A Girl in Love’, the preface to Story of O’s sequel Return to the Chateau) of how an unassuming editor and translator, too discreet even to sign her real name to her essays, journalism and works of literary criticism, wrote the most famous and enduring erotic novel of all time.

In the early 1950s, Anne Desclos was a respected editor and translator, translating writers such as T. S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald into French at the prestigious publishing house, Gallimard. It was under the pseudonym of Dominique Aury that she became a prominent woman of letters in post-war Paris. She also had a long-time lover, 20 years her senior, fellow critic Jean Paulhan.

As well as being married, Paulhan was a ladies’ man and a fan of the debauched tales of the Marquis de Sade. Desclos was in her 40s (hardly the ‘girl’ she describes herself as), in her own words “not pretty” and worried about losing his attention. When he sneered at her claim that she could, “write the kind of stories you like” she took it as a personal challenge.

The pages she showed him – a dreamlike narrative of a woman who submits to ritual torture, humiliation and sexual degradation at the request of her lover – were never meant to be published. But Paulhan persuaded her to continue writing until she’d produced a novel, ordering her to read passages aloud to him during their assignations in her car or cheap hotel rooms. Desclos’ enthusiasm for the project eventually ebbed away, apparent in the book’s slightly lacklustre second half and abrupt ending.

It took two years to find a publisher who would touch it, but eventually French publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert (who made something of a specialism of standing against accusations of obscenity) and Olympia Press (publisher of Lolita) both published it 1954.

Anne Desclos photographed in 1929 at the age of at 21

Still from Histoire d'O (1975), dir. Just Jaekin

A 1942 drawing of Declos by Bernard Milleret

But behind the often-told tale of a woman seducing her lover through erotica is another love story. In many ways, the most romantic and enlivening detail of Reage’s account is the nights she spent in a fever – not of love making – but of writing.

The girl was writing the way you speak in the dark to the person you love when you've held back the words of love too long and they flow at last. For the first time in her life she was writing without hesitation, without stopping, rewriting, or discarding, she was writing the way one breathes, the way one dreams. The constant hum of the cars grew fainter, one no longer heard the banging of doors, Paris was slipping into silence. She was still writing when the street cleaners came by, at the first touch of dawn.

An orgasmic, ecstatic flow of creativity is something all writers long for, but it’s rarely bestowed on us, thanks to the pressures of deadlines, debts and the ever-present inner critic. Desclos had it for those precious few nights, and perhaps that’s one reason for Story of O’s seemingly eternal afterlife. The legend may tell us that she wrote the book for her lover, but for those hours, it’s clear she wrote only for herself.

‘A Girl in Love’ by Pauline Réage

SECRET SELVES

For Story of O, Desclos chose a new pseudonym. She discovered the name Rèage in a real estate register, and borrowed Pauline from "two famous profligates": Napoleon's youngest and favourite sister Pauline Borghese and the early French feminist and socialist Pauline Roland. Her nom de plume not only protected her reputation in professional and literary circles, it also shielded her from the Brigade Mondaine, the French vice squad.

Initially published to little fanfare (partly because it was overshadowed by Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, published the same year) Story of O spent its first year as the subject of literary gossip, but received scant critical attention. All this changed when it unexpectedly received the Prix des Deux Magots, a prestigious French literary prize awarded to new works. The prize brought new readers, but also obscenity charges. These were defended successfully by Paulhan and Pauvert, along with Olympia Press’s Maurice Girodias, while Desclos remained in the background, shielded by the cloak of her anonymity.

Shortly after writing the book, Desclos attended a dinner party at which Story of O was the hot topic of conversation. “People who write that [sort of thing] are very ill”, her friend’s date declared. Desclos stayed silent. With no face to the name, speculation grew that the book could only have been written by a man, with some guessing that Desclos’ lover Paulhan was the true author. By the 60s, a small circle knew the truth, but kept the secret among them. Finally, in 1994, Desclos allowed the journalist John De St. Jorre to reveal her professional name, Dominique Aury, in the New York Times.

It’s unclear if, during those decades of anonymity, Desclos ever longed for recognition. Perhaps her web of pseudonyms suited the opposing parts of her personality. On the one hand, she was a shy, serious professional. She “looked like a nun.. Navy blue suit, flat shoes, no make-up at all,” according to journalist Jacqueline Demornex. She once slapped a man for using the informal ‘tu’ instead of the respectful ‘vous’ while on a date with her. On the other, she delighted in secrets – working with the French Resistance, seeing a married man and inventing a secret society in Story of O.

An Olympia edition of Story of O, from the JOUISSANCE Bookshop

In her own words, from a 1979 interview, Desclos connected the secrecy of illicit love affairs to the childish instinct “to have, in the woods, or at the bottom of the garden, a place no-one knows they go to and where they meet.” She also admitted she experienced a gulf between her desires, and what she was willing to allow herself in real life: “I was capable of telling myself stories, to stick my neck out a bit, but apparently, I was unable to act.”

Story of O, with its hidden emblems, countryside retreats and separation from the realms of work and family was Desclos’ own world, one in which she could live unconstrained by propriety. To give up her secret would have meant sharing it completely with others.

French lobby card from Histoire d'O (1975), dir. Just Jaekin

German lobby card from Histoire d'O (1975), dir. Just Jaekin

THE WORLD OF O

In Story of O, a young woman known only as ‘O’ goes for a drive with her lover, and is taken by him to a mysterious chateau in the countryside. There, she is initiated into a clandestine society where women are trained to become objects of sexual service. O consents to this, and the narrative carefully traces her progression: she is stripped of autonomy, subjected to rituals, marked, and conditioned to exist entirely for the desires of others. In her ‘sacred submission’ she finds true freedom. It’s a story that continues to provoke strong reactions, from the scandal it evoked in 1950s society, to its rejection by some second-wave feminists.

So, what was it about Story of O that caused Susan Sontag to include it in the handful of erotic novels she considered “authentic literature”, in comparison to the “trash” of its contemporaries. It’s the same quality that lent it beautifully to the seventies, soft-focus film adaptation by Emmanuel director Just Jaekin (as well as what made it ideal as a source of olfactory inspiration) – the atmosphere created by Desclos’ lyrical prose.

A woman’s eye for pretty detail decorates the extreme acts of Desclos’ story. Characters, spaces and garments are all painted in the same romantic strokes – a woman who looks like “a girl-from-the-land-of-snow”, “an enormous bouquet of chrysanthemums...smelling of earth and leaf mold”, a dress made of “stiff, crackling silk”.

For our present moment, ruled by vibes and aesthetics, Story of O is the perfect text. Its rituals and ceremonies feed a growing hunger for care, attention and physicality in a world dominated by the ever-more jarring swirl of content on screens. In the 2020s, O would be a star of the Get Ready With Me.

At Roissy, O had learned not to be in a hurry: she perfumed herself three times, each time letting the perfume dry on her body. First she put on her stockings, then her high-heeled shoes, then the half-slip and the skirt, then the jacket. She put on her gloves, took her bag... She sat down on the edge of the bed and, her eyes fixed on the dial of the little clock, in perfect stillness awaited the sound of the doorbell.

The woman who wrote that perfumed patience into existence sat in silence at a dinner party while someone called her sick. She knew what O knew: that some freedoms are only possible in secret.

French lobby card from Histoire d'O (1975, dir. Just Jaekin

“What we want to hold on to, we must pay for. We pay with silence, we pay with patience, with obscurity.”

—Pauline Réage

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Words by JOUISSANCE