Many of you will already know me as Madame X, the agony aunt of Heel! magazine. Some of you will even recognize your own submissions to that publication which have been included on this website. May I congratulate you ahead of time for your contribution to the cause espoused in these pages, in case you are overly surprised when confronted by the verbatim reproduction of your innermost thoughts. It is not the job of an agony aunt to judge, but merely to prescribe the solution to the problem that her experience reminds her is most fitting. The editing of this site, therefore, has been restricted to my selection of submissions, and no altering of words or phrasing has been considered necessary, or undertaken.
Let the servant speak with his own tongue, and freely, when offered the opportunity. With the polishing and the licking of his mistress' boot, that freedom is curtailed and rightly, and the conformity to appropriate behaviour then expected. In addition to these accounts of servitude, proposed and realised, by the male readers of Heel!, I have decided to include several of my own replies to specific inquiries of an everyday nature, relating to the equestrian and the domestic environments, in the hope that this advice might be taken and its more general application meet with public acceptance and approval.
I am often accused by our female readership of having an excessive regard for compassion in matters where discipline, whether by the lady's boot or whip, is traditionally preferred, and in anticipation of this criticism of my supposed overindulgence and kindness towards the kneeling servant and his submission, who is, according to this line of thought, permitted too free a rein by my reluctance to erase thought and trample upon wayward misconception, I would make the following points in my own defence. Either by natural inclination or by the enforcement of behaviour patterns deemed by his mistress suitable for the exploitation of potential in the normal man, the servant is led and sets out on an uncertain and difficult path. Though his uncertainty is not of course shared by the mistress who is cast in the role of patient counsellor and guide in his gradual or hurried progression to that goal of achievement which he will in time share fully with his dominating companion, the servant, or to speak frankly, the slave-to-be, finds himself in the process of becoming something utterly new. What, he knows not, and this goal or purpose, as yet ill-defined in his now dwindling mind, involving the reconstructing of his very being, becomes the source of an almost bestial frustration in the developing slave.
There is created in him a growing and apparently irresistible need to forget the memory of what lies in the past, and to complete what was begun in perhaps the lightest and most theatrical of spirits, his conversion to that which is intended for his future by the mistress. Within his reeling psyche, as if to confirm the rightness of his selection, of that original choice made by the mistress on his behalf, the instinctual and primal urge of the slave to reach his destination, wriggling there in beaten leather or rubber against imagined and opposing currents, in turn becomes a source of pleasurable enjoyment for the mistress, who delays the moment of her triumph, perversely denying herself for a while longer, observing the painful leaping and thrashing of the captivated slave splashing about in search of the polished shine of his mistress' half-submerged boots. By analogy, my indulgence towards the well-hooked servant is neither kind nor excessive, but carefully judged to prolong that intermediate period of his yearning, and the lengthy retention of the receding identity.
MADAME DE MORVILLE