[Peters is a German-born American educator and critic. In the following excerpt from his biography of AndreasSalomé, he offers an account of her love affair with the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, which left a profound stamp on Rilke's poetry.]

At the end of April, 1897, Lou went to Munich where she was joined by her friend Frieda von Billow, who was to give a public lecture on her exploits in Africa. The Bavarian capital was one of the cities Lou liked to visit, although she did not particularly care for what she called the "Munich atmosphere," that peculiar blend of Bavarian patriotism, incense and beer. Most of her Munich friends were non-Bavarians like herself and congregated in Schwabing, the Munich Latin Quarter. Some of them, like Max Halbe and Frank Wedekind, she had met before in Berlin or Paris. In Munich she got to know Count Edward Keyserling, the architect August Endell, who remained a close friend the rest of her life, and the writers Michael Georg Conrad, Ernst von Wolzogen and Jakob Wassermann. The last, a promising writer whose novel The Jews ofZirndorf had attracted much attention, introduced Lou to the young and unknown Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Rilke, then twenty-two years old, had recently moved to Munich from Prague, where he was born and brought up, ostensibly to carry on his studies at the University. Actually, he was far more interested in his literary career. He wrote poetry, plays, prose tales, book reviews, edited a literary journal and proposed the formation of a "League of truly modern writers." Although shy and retiring by nature he threw himself into a hectic literary activity because he wanted to prove to his skeptical family that he could make a living as a writer. He was a slender youth, gentle rather than robust, and with the chivalrous bearing characteristic of the young Austrian man-about-town. His small, pale face, dominated by deeply set eyes that looked at the world with anxious wonder, was framed by a thin straggling beard and a drooping mustache. In contrast to his full sensuous mouth was his slight, receding chin that sprouted a fuzzy goatee as soft and downy as the feathers on a young duck's head.

This was the young Austrian litterateur on the make, still known by his rather effeminate first name of Rene; and when Lou met him in Wassermann's apartment on May 12, 1897, he was a far cry from the great poet he was to become. A less likely contender for her feminine favors it would be hard to imagine. But Rilke's appearance was misleading. He was by no means the weak-willed youth he seemed. And what he lacked in physical prowess he made up for in an inner intensity that took Lou by surprise. Like most men Rilke was bent on her conquest the moment he met her. He applied himself to that objective with great skill and resourcefulness.

The day following their meeting he wrote her a letter in which he told her that it had not been the first time he had been privileged to spend a "twilight hour" in her company. Several months previously he had come across her essay "Jesus the Jew" in the April number of the Neue Deutsche Rundschau. It had been a revelation to him, for she had expressed with "the gigantic force of a sacred conviction" what he had been trying to say in a cycle of poems entitled "Visions of Christ." "I felt like one whose great dreams had come true," he told her, for she had said what he had merely dreamed. Her essay and his poetry were as mysteriously related as dreams are to reality. He had wanted to thank her for it but was incapable of doing so in the presence of others. Hence his letter. "For if one owes something very precious to another his gratitude should remain a secret between them." He added that it would give him great pleasure if he could read her some of these poems and closed with the hope that he would meet her the following night in the theatre.

Lou's reaction to the youthful fervor of Rilke's letter was mixed. On the one hand, she could not help feeling flattered by it. It reminded her of her own youthful impetuosity. And although she had long since learned to eschew romantic sentiments, she was still responsive to any spontaneous expression of feeling. The unbashful sentimentality of Rilke's letter made her smile. As she scrutinized his handwriting it dawned on her that he was the author of some mystifying anonymous letters she had received previously with poems enclosed. So Rilke was the young poet who had worshiped her from afar.

Lou would have been even more amused if she had known that Rilke had sent her poems because he was desperately eager to establish connections with prominent people. Having just embarked on a literary career he was anxious to be accepted by those who had made a success of it. He needed their encouragement both for reasons of self-assurance and because he wanted to impress his family with the illustrious names of his friends. Thus soon afterward he proudly informed his mother—herself an eager reader of the Almanach de Got ha—that he had made the acquaintance of the "famous Lou Andreas-Salomé" and her friend the African explorer Frieda von Billow, "two magnificent women."

Whatever reservations Lou had when she met Rilke, she could not long resist his passionate pursuit. He sought her out with a single-minded zeal that surpassed anything she had encountered before. Wherever she went he tried to be there too. When he missed her in the theatre he looked for her all over Munich.

With a few roses in my hand I have been walking about the town and the entrance of the English Garden because I wanted to give you these roses. But instead of leaving them at your door with the golden key, I have been carrying them around, trembling with eagerness to meet you somewhere.

After every meeting he rushed home and poured out his heart in poetry. He knew instinctively that the spontaneity of his lyrical adoration was his strongest weapon. It disarmed her intellectual resistance by appealing to her own emotional spontaneity. The long and severe training to which she had subjected her mind had made her wary of uncontrolled emotions, but she could not long resist the intensity of Rilke's lyrical assault. When she succumbed to him a few weeks after they had met, he rushed into her arms like a child who has finally found his long-lost mother. But once she received him, she discovered to her surprise that the child was really a passionate young man, well versed in the arts of love. Suddenly their roles were reversed; it was now Rilke who played the dominant role. Mounted on Pegasus like another Bellerophon, he slew the Chimera that guarded the entrance to Lou's privacy and made her his wife. It happened so suddenly that even in retrospect Lou shuddered when she thought of it. In her memoirs she writes:

I was your wife for years because you were the first reality, body and man undistinguishably one, the incontestable fact of life itself. I could have said literally the same you said when you confessed your love: "You alone are real." In this we became husband and wife even before we had become friends, not from choice but from this unfathomable marriage. It was not that two halves were seeking one another: shudderingly, our surprised unity recognized a preordained unity. We were brother and sister, but as in the remote past, before marriage between brother and sister had become sacrilegious.

On the face of it the whole affair was, of course, ridiculous. Here she was, a mature woman and almost old enough to be Rilke's mother—a woman, moreover, who was passionately desired by many men, some of them far more virile than Rilke. She had resisted most of them and now, in her thirty-sixth year, she succumbed to a boy. Why? Rilke's friends and admirers cast Lou in the role of a wily seductress who took advantage of an innocent youth and lured him into her nets. But it was more complex than that. Rilke was by no means an innocent youth when he met Lou. He had had his fair share of erotic adventures and knew that the surest way to win a woman's love was by appealing both to her motherly instincts and her feminine ardor. This he did with consummate skill. He penetrated Lou's intellectual armor and aroused her passion, but soon after their first embrace her critical faculties reasserted themselves and she began to look upon her young lover with increasing suspicion. His tremulous state worried her. She wondered whether his lyrical exultations, alternating with fierce moods of depression, were not the danger sign of mental sickness. There seemed to be two Rilkes, one confident and self-assured, the other morbidly introspective. In her letters and memoirs she writes that it was a frightening spectacle to see "the other" suddenly emerge, trembling with fear and giving vent to bitter self-reproaches and self-pity. She hoped at first that her love would cure him, but gradually her fears increased and she decided to end the affair. However, between its sudden beginning and its equally sudden end lay almost three years of love and poetry.

When Rilke met Lou he had already published a great deal of poetry. Under the signature of Rene Maria Rilke there had appeared in quick succession the slender volumes of Life and Songs (1894), Wild Chicory: Songs Given to the People (1896), An Offering to the Lares (1896), and Crowned with Dreams (1897). It was pure poetry of mood, vaguely yearning for something to come, vaguely nostalgic for something that has been; perfect of its kind; sentimental, sensitive and subtle. Its recurrent theme was the strangeness and mystery of life—life not lived or observed but felt, intuitively felt, as oneness:

Dreams seem to me like orchids
Rich and gay.
They draw their strength from life's
Gigantic tree.
Proud of their borrowed blood
They boast and flee
A minute later: pale and dead.
And as the worlds above
Move silently
Do you not feel a fragrance overhead?
Dreams seem to me like orchids.…

Although Lou was struck emotionally by Rilke's verbal virtuosity, by the melodious rhythms, evocative alliterations and ornate assonances of his poems, they did not appeal to her intellect. She did not deny that many of them were beautiful, some even beguilingly so, but if you tried to grasp them they dissolved, like dreams just beyond recall. She complained that she could not understand them and Rilke made a conscious effort to write more simply and about simple things.

Helped and encouraged by Lou, the young poet entered upon a long period of severe self-discipline which came to fruition many years later in the plastic splendor of New Poems. One sign of Lou's influence can be seen in the striking change in his handwriting. Before he met Lou, Rilke wrote sloppily and often illegibly. Now his writing became as neat and precise as hers. When she scorned the some-what effeminate French form of his name, Rene, he changed it to Rainer. Even after their break, when Lou told him that she could help him no longer, his letters bear moving testimony to the great debt he owed her.

I felt it then and I know it today, that the infinite reality that surrounded you was the most important event of that extremely good, great and productive time. The transforming experience which then seized me at a hundred places at once emanated from the great reality of your being. I had never before in my groping hesitancy felt life so much, believed in the present and recognized the future so much. You were the opposite of all doubt and witness to the fact that everything you touch, reach and see, exists. The world lost its clouded aspect, the flowing together and dissolving, so typical of my first poor verses. Things arose. I learned to distinguish animals and flowers. Slowly and with difficulty I learned how simple everything is and I matured and learned to say simple things. All this happened because I was fortunate enough to meet you at a time when I was in danger of losing myself in formlessness.

Lou's failure to respond to his poetry as wholeheartedly as he wished made Rilke concentrate on that theme which he knew occupied her deeply, religion. Here they were on common ground. They were both extremely fond of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament. And when they were alone together in the privacy of Lou's rooms, Rilke sometimes read to her. He selected those passages that corresponded most closely to his feeling for the beloved woman. "Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck. How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine!" On and on, Rilke read and he could feel the current of sympathy that his words aroused in Lou's heart.

Sometimes their discussions touched on the significance of the Christ figure which Lou had pondered in her essay "Jesus the Jew," and Rilke in his poetry. It is possible, indeed likely, that Rilke received further stimulus for his poems "Visions of Christ" from Lou's essay. He read it about the time he started the cycle, and certainly there are striking similarities in the treatment of the theme. Both saw in Christ, not the son of God but of man, a religious genius infinitely moving in the solitary agony of his passion.

Starting from the premise that all gods are manmade, Lou's concern was with the retroaction, as she called it, of these manmade gods on those who believe in them. The intensification of man's emotional response to figures originally created to assuage his fear of death and the unknown seemed to her to be the heart of the religious phenomenon. It propelled men to become saints. The classic example of that process was Jesus. Here was a young Jew brought up in the stern tradition of Judaism and taught to believe in the messianic promises of Jehovah, the God of Wrath. But he had concentrated the rays of his fervent heart on this forbidding deity, transforming Him into a God of Love. His childlike, unwavering faith, his absolute trust in Him whom he called his heavenly Father, had resolved the contradiction that lies at the root of all religions: men kneeling in front of a manmade God. For it is the human heart in which the mystery of the religious experience takes place, causing a manmade God to give birth to a godlike man. This happened to Jesus and made him the Christ, the begetter of a new religion.

But Lou insisted that in order to understand the real tragedy of the historic Jesus it must be remembered that he grew up in the Judaic tradition of an essentially just, if stern, God. It was this God whom he loved and to whom he cried out in the hour of his greatest need. Who knows what terrible doubts assailed him on the road to martyrdom from Gethsemane to Golgotha, and what despair filled his heart when he finally realized that his heavenly Father had forsaken him.

Even at the last moment, when he was already hanging on the cross, he must have forgiven his God, for a miracle was still possible and it had to happen: a just man could not be made to perish miserably, handed over to his enemies, least of all could he be forced to suffer that form of death most dreaded and most shameful to Jewish eyes—death on the cross, even if he was not the Messiah but merely another just Jew. God's firm and sacred promise preserved him from such a fate.

And yet it happened. Hence Christ's agonized outcry: "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?"

These anguished words, spoken by a martyr of his faith, sum up the suffering of all religious men. They pose the problem of God's very existence. But while Jesus may have died with this doubt in his heart, his disciples succeeded in transforming his moment of deepest despair into his greatest triumph by the grandiose paradox of asserting that God punishes those He loves. Christ's death on the cross became the prologue of his ascent to heaven, his solitary agony the symbol of a new religion. However, "amidst the triumphant shouts of a solid faith, useful to all, there echoes very gently and painfully the ultimate word of religion to which only now and again a poor solitary genius can rise who has experienced it deeply: Eli, Elil lama sabachthani."

Christ's anguished cry on the cross is also the theme of Rilke's poem "Annual Fair," written six months after Lou's essay. In his first letter to her Rilke told Lou that he had read her essay at the suggestion of a Dr. Conrad, one of the editors of the journal Die Gesellschaft who, having seen a few poems of his "Visions of Christ," thought that her essay would interest him. Rilke added that Conrad was going to publish five of these poems, a claim which he had made earlier in a letter to Ludwig Ganghofer. But he was mistaken. They never appeared in Die Gesellschaft, nor anywhere else until they were published more than sixty years later in the third volume of his collected works. What caused this long delay? One thing is certain: Rilke had no doubts about their poetic merits. At a time when he was very critical of his early verses he referred to them as "these great poems." The mystery heightens if we ponder the significance of Rilke's reply to Wilhelm von Scholz who, in 1899, wanted to publish them. "I have many reasons," Rilke told Scholz, "to conceal the Christ figures for a long, long time. They are the future which accompanies me all my life."

Between these two dates—1897 when he seemed eager to publish them, and 1899 when he rejected any thought of publication—falls Rilke's encounter with Lou. How intimately these poems are linked to Lou is further evidenced by the fact that it was Lou to whom he turned when in 1912 his publisher, Kippenberg, urged again that they be published:

Unfortunately, I have once hinted that the Visions of Christ exist and since Kippenberg now attaches great importance to offering unpublished work in this new edition, he urges me to include these great poems (which I myself have not seen for many years) in this new publication. Under no circumstances will I do this without knowing what you think of it. Do you think that there is something else from that time which might rather be published, or has the time really come for these things?

Lou's answer to this request appears to be lost. But whatever she said, Rilke decided against publication. He mentioned them once more to Lou eighteen months later in the postscript of a letter written in the home of his publisher in Leipzig.

Perhaps the Visions of Christ in a yellow folder have remained with you? In this case, please read them.

This time Lou replied at once telling him that he was right, his poems were in her bank safe. She had reread them and, for the first time, had been struck by amazing relationships, difficult to explain in writing.

In tone they [Visions of Christ] are very different from the two recent ones [a reference to the first two Duino Elegies] and yet everything you have written moves with an inner unity between these old Visions of Christ and the coming visions of the angel.

Rilke felt comforted by these words. Once again he was torn by self-doubts and needed reassurance. If Lou still believed in him, could he not believe in himself? Perhaps he recalled those intimate hours in Munich, now long ago, when he had first read his poems to Lou. It had been an unforgettable experience. She had listened with a quiet intensity that forged an invisible bond between them. Imperceptibly she had become involved in his poetry and, through it, in him. He could feel that it was more than sympathy he aroused in her. It was an upsurge of wonder, admiration and love. Her whole being responded; her heart to his music, her head to his words. They sounded so familiar to her that she might have written them herself and perhaps she had, perhaps she was listening to an echo of her own voice? It was certainly the voice of her brother in spirit.

In his poem "Annual Fair" Rilke treated the Christ theme in the context of a visit to the Munich Oktoberfest. In colorful images he describes the gay and noisy life at the fair, the huge beer tents, merry-go-rounds, ferris wheels, and the multitudinous attractions from all over the world that assail the eyes and ears of the visiting throng. He strolls among them until he comes to a booth at the end of the fair where a sign says that here one can see the life and death of Christ. Without knowing why, he pays ten pfennigs, gets a ticket and enters. He finds himself in the presence of waxen figures representing various scenes from the life of Christ: his birth at Bethlehem, his visit to the Temple, his entrance into Jerusalem, his solitary vigil in the Garden of Gethsemane and finally his crucifixion. As he watches the figure of Christ on the Cross his heart suddenly stops, for:

The waxen God opened and closed
his eyes, his glance concealed by thin and bluish lids,
his narrow, wounded chest heaved and sighed,
his sponge-drenched lips in deadly pallor tried
to grasp a word and force it through his teeth:
My God, my God—hast thou forsaken me?
And as I, horrified and at a loss
to understand these martyred words, remain
fixed to the spot and stare and stare
at him, his hands let go the cross.
He groans and says: "It is I."
I listen speechless to his anguished cry,
look at the walls covered with glaring cloth
and feel the cheap deception of the fair,
the smell of oil and wax. But there
it starts again and says: "This is my curse;
Since my disciples stole me from the grave,
deluded by their vain and boastful faith,
there is no pit that holds me—none.
As long as rushing brooks reflect the stars
and life bursts forth under a spring sun,
I must go on and on across the earth,
I must pay penance now from Cross to Cross …

Do you know the legend of the Wandering Jew?
I am myself that ancient Ahasver
Who daily dies and daily lives anew."

This was language that Lou understood and with it Rilke gained her love. Two weeks after their first meeting his letters already sound ardent and intimate. He sent her poems, songs of longing, that were different from his former songs because "I have looked into the eyes of longing beside me." The only clouds on the bright horizon of their love were Lou's husband in Berlin and, more immediately, a call from Rilke's Austrian draft board ordering him to appear before them. He was disconsolate and grasped every second to be with Lou. At the end of May they spent two days together in search of solitude and mountain air in the little Upper Bavarian village of Wolfratshausen. When the dreaded day of departure came Rilke was heartbroken. Fortunately, his draft board decided, after examining him, that he was not needed after all. He communicated this good news to Lou in a joyous telegram from Prague and a few days later he rejoined her in Munich. From then on they were inseparable.

The growing ardor of Rilke's letters and poems shows how quickly his love found fulfillment. On June 6, Whitsunday, he sent her greetings, told her that this spring had a particular significance for him and submitted himself humbly to her "sweet slavery." Two days later he vowed that it would be many years before she understood how much he loved her. What a mountain spring means to a man dying of thirst, her love meant to him. He said he wanted to see the world through her for "then I do not see the world but only you, you, you." In a poem three days later he called her his "Empress." She had made him rich, and even though he tried to hide his riches, everybody could see his happiness shining in his eyes. He wanted to "lose his separate identity and dissolve completely" into her. "I want to be you. I don't want to have any dreams that do not know you, nor any wishes that you cannot grant. I do not want to do anything that does not praise you.… I want to be you. And my heart burns before your grace like the eternal lamp before the picture of Mary."

Lou's answers to these rapturous effusions are unfortunately lost, because of their joint decision to destroy all documents of their love. In her memoirs she says that "the prevailing and unalterable condition of their lives"—an allusion to her marriage—made this action necessary. And there is no doubt that Andreas' fierce pride made it imperative that they be discreet and avoid an open display of their affection. For this reason Lou was not altogether happy with the lyrical adoration in prose and verse with which the young poet pursued her and she hints at blackinked corrections that resulted in the mutilation and destruction of many of Rilke's love poems. She then quotes a fragment that had somehow survived, still in the original and by now faded envelope in which Rilke had sent it to her:

With gentle blessing did your letter greet me;
I knew that distance cannot stop our love.
From all that's beautiful you come to meet me,
My spring wind you, my summer rain above.
You my June night on thousand pathways lead me,
Upon which no initiated walked before: I am in you.

It is easy to imagine what Andreas' reaction to this poem would have been if he had seen it. For it describes, although veiled in poetic language, the course of his wife's love affair. It was obviously a reply to a letter she had written Rilke, and obviously, too, he had been waiting impatiently for it. When it came his pent-up emotions burst into song. In rhapsodic language he recalls the passionate hours they had spent together. They had met in May, hence the allusion to spring wind, had become lovers in June—"my June night"—and had spent the summer months in close proximity in a small peasant house in Wolfratshausen. All these events are faithfully recorded in the poem. But most revealing, and from Andreas' point of view, most painful, is the penultimate line with its oblique reference to Rilke being Lou's first lover—or so he thought. It is understandable that Lou felt embarrassed by his lyrical indiscretions and tried to suppress them. She was not altogether successful, for many of the poems she eliminated from a manuscript collection of love poems, In Your Honor, which Rilke gave her were preserved in Rilke's notebooks.

However, the occasional displeasure Rilke's lyrical exuberance caused Lou was far outweighed by the pleasure she derived from his company. They had left Munich in the middle of June and had retired to Wolfratshausen accompanied, one suspects mainly for the sake of appearances, by Frieda von Billow and August Endell. Wolfratshausen, a typical small Upper Bavarian town with a charming old market square, baroque churches with onion-shaped steeples, and a fair number of the traditional Bavarian inns, is situated in the broad valley of the Inn at the foot of the Kalvarienberg. Pleasant walks lead up to the top of the hill and offer magnificent views of the Alpine range to the south. They had rented a small peasant house with a garden and a shady arbor in the back—an idyllic setting for a love tryst. Lou recalls that her room was on the ground floor facing the street, and that Rilke always closed the shutters when he visited her, to prevent passersby from looking in. In the semi-darkness of these summer days they celebrated their honeymoon.

It was a passionate affair, with Lou always, at first, being overawed by Rilke's male aggressiveness before her greater maturity asserted itself. Then she would take her young lover into the garden behind the house and teach him to walk barefoot over the dewy grass. She would tell him the names of her favorite flowers, make him listen to the wind in the trees and the rushing water of the brook. Her husband had taught her to observe the animals at daybreak and now she passed this knowledge on to her young lover. For the first time in his life Rilke entered into a real relationship with nature, a simple, direct and non-literary relationship. Lou communicated to him her sense of wonder at the oneness of the world, her joy of living, and her vitality. The healthy vigor of her sensuous enjoyment made him feel ashamed of the mawkish sentimentality of his adolescent dreams. A new world opened before his eyes, less tortured than the one he had known. He felt as if reborn. His whole life, he now realized, had been influenced by the false piety and the artificial values of his mother. She was responsible for the unhealthy exaltations which alienated him from reality. He had met Lou just in time. She would help him find himself. Inspired by his love for her, and with her guidance, he tried to express his feelings more simply and directly. This was not easy and many poems he wrote during this extremely productive time reflect his "pre-Wolfratshausen mood," as he called it, that floating between day and dream which is so typical of his first verses. But with others one feels the effort toward greater concreteness:

The land is bright and darkly glows the arbor.
You speak in whispers while I watch with awe.
And every word you say is like an altar
Built by my faith upon my quiet shore.
I love you. You're sitting in a chair, your cool
white hands asleep as in a bed.
My life is lying like a silver spool
within your hands. Release my thread.

Boldly this poem comes to grips with the love theme, first by setting the scene—land and arbor: an allusion to the arbor in Wolfratshausen, where they spent so much of their time. Lou is talking. We get an idea of how intently Rilke listened from the image "altar" to which he likens her words, thereby elevating his love to the level of religious adoration. But this feeling is immediately brought down to earth again by the simple statement, particularly moving in this context: "I love you." With it the poem returns to a concrete image. Lou is sitting in a garden chair, her hands folded in her lap. As he watches her the poet realizes that he is completely in her power. She holds the thread of his life in her hands. The image is completed with the gentle request, stated with the utmost verbal economy, that she untangle his life and set him free: "Release my thread."

It is in poems such as these that one can see how much Rilke was under Lou's influence. He clung to her with an almost desperate helplessness, and could not bear the thought of being separated from her. Periods of separation were, however, unavoidable. Lou could not subordinate her life completely to his as he wanted her to. This would have been against her nature. She had to interrupt even their Wolfratshausen honeymoon to keep a prearranged appointment in Hallein with her friend Broncia Koller. But no sooner was she gone than Rilke's passionate letters with their pale-blue seals followed her. He wrote her daily, protesting his love and imploring her to return to him. Perhaps he sensed the danger of another man in the background, although Lou had not told him much about Zemek. To her dismay she noted that he indulged once again in the most extravagant language, and once again she felt uneasy and disturbed.

To make matters worse her official husband, Andreas, who had been in Berlin all this time, announced his arrival and said he would spend a month in Wolfratshausen with her. It was therefore particularly important that her young lover learn to control his emotions. Since there is no record of discord, Lou and Rilke seem to have succeeded in keeping Andreas in the dark. To be sure, cynics have said that so far from trying to conceal her affection for Rilke, Lou confessed it to her husband and that he acquiesced in it. But in view of Andreas' well-known temper this is hardly likely. The fact that he did not notice anything is a tribute to Lou's expert handling of the affair. She had always been surrounded by adoring males and Andreas may have thought that of all his wife's numerous admirers Rilke was the least dangerous. He seems to have grown quite fond of the young poet and raised no objections when Rilke proposed to return to Berlin with them. Thus ended the first chapter of Lou's affair with Rilke. Henceforth she would become more and more his friend, his teacher and his mother-confessor. Their honeymoon was over.