Les mains chéries (Darling Hands) is one of more ambitious – and successful – projects of the Charles Fort/Louis Malteste Collection des Orties Blanches (White Nettle Collection) collaboration. As ‘Jacques d’Icy’, Malteste compiled this anthology of twelve ‘true stories and erotic confessions’ on flagellation and the art of spanking.

We shall never know how much of the text comes from Malteste’s imagination, and how much is based on real people’s actual experience, but the narratives, supposedly by Marie-Jeanne, Francesco, Madeleine, Maurice, Carmen, Monique and Nicole among others, do often have a ring of truth about them. 
Here is an extract as a taste of the contents (which are of course in French):

Before I had recovered from the stupor into which her unexpected gesture had plunged me, she drew me in, wrapped her left arm around my waist, and with the other hand pulled me up. That’s how mum held me when I was twelve. It was done with inconceivable speed. I feel her lowering my knickers and two slaps immediately fall, followed by ten slaps, twenty slaps, thirty, forty, quick, rushed, biting, which sting me violently. And it goes on and on, it’s a downpour. I am turned sideways, parallel to the window. My buttocks are presented like this, in the light. God, if a customer came in!
     She slaps, she slaps. I don’t hear what she says to me, the slaps resound so much. I am sure that it is a hundred times that her hand has already hit the middle of each of my buttocks, a mastery I recognise! It’s just like dad when he gets angry. Her hand is firm, like a man’s hand.
     How much longer will she spank me like this? Turning my head in different directions, I see myself in several mirrors. My buttocks are red, red, under the incessant back and forth of her alert hand. But I am surprised at myself, that I can still find a way to move them, my buttocks, even in this rather unfavourable position! How I can struggle when someone spanks me. Until now I didn’t realise quite how much, never having seen myself in a mirror. Oh, how much they move, my buttocks!
     Yet it’s probably those movements which excite her to slap me with such enthusiasm. Yes! It seems to me that her hand quickens its pace even more, that it lashes me with more reward, that it redoubles its ardour.
     Suddenly the bell that the door activates when it is opened is heard. Mrs Angèle stops abruptly, loosens her grip and, before going to meet the customer she has two or three seconds to say to me, bringing her face close to mine, ‘Well, what do you say, my little one? Am I capable of giving you a really good spanking, the sort of spanking you really need?’