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long, however, before jealousy set in and destroyed the union before it had a chance to materialize. Salomé decided that she wanted to spend the winter in Berlin with Rée alone. He was only too happy to comply, writing, “I really ought to be thinking about ‘the origin of conscience in the individual,’ but, dammit, I am always thinking about Lou.”
    Nietzsche, feeling betrayed and abandoned, met Rée and Salomé at a train station in Germany only to storm off and never see them again. He wrote a letter soon after to inform them that their cruelty had compelled him to take an “enormous quantity” of opium. But instead of committing suicide, Nietzsche actually retreated to northern Italy, where in ten days he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra , which includes the famous line thought to refer to Salomé, “Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!”
    Four years later, Salomé married the forty-one-year-old philologist Carl Andreas. (He, too, reportedly threatened to kill himself, if she rejected him.) Her consent came with two considerable caveats, however: no sex and no children. She was to remain free to continue her affair with Rée or anyone else she might fancy, and Andreas could also take lovers. She even offered to help introduce him to prospective paramours. The arrangement did not always go smoothly—Andreas fathered a child with their housekeeper, who lived with the couple for the rest of her life—but they never parted.
    Andreas-Salomé’s main gift was her acutely analytical mind. She had an uncanny ability to comprehend abstruse ideas from the era’s most formidable thinkers, often illuminating aspects of their own arguments that they had not even conceived. She was a kind of intellectual therapist: listening, describing, analyzing and repeating back their ideas in order to illuminate the places where shadows fell in their logic.
    Rilke added himself to Andreas-Salomé’s long list of admirers almost from the moment he learned of her existence. He had just written his “Visions of Christ” cycle, a Nietzsche-inspired challenge to Christian dogma, when an editor friend suggested he read her essay on similar themes, “Jesus the Jew.”
    As he pored over her words, an intimate literary kinship formed in Rilke’s mind overnight. Soon he began mailing her unsigned poems. She did not learn who this anonymous correspondent was until the spring of 1897, when she paid a visit to Munich. When Rilke heard she was coming to town he convinced Wassermann, a mutual friend, to stage an introduction over tea.
    Andreas-Salomé, fourteen years Rilke’s senior, arrived to Wassermann’s apartment in a dress of loose, cottony layers that softened her muscular contours. She had a wide, Russian face and tied her ashy hair in a tousled knot atop her head. Rilke quickly saw that she was a mesmerizing storyteller. She commanded the room’s attention with her direct, matter-of-fact descriptions of people and places, yet, strangely,she told narratives out of order, without regard to temporality or linearity at all. Rilke gazed at her “gentle dreamy lost smile,” while she remarked later in her journal upon his soulful eyes. Less kindly, she also wrote that he had “no back to his head.”
    Rilke was so instantly enraptured with Andreas-Salomé that he wrote to his mother that night to tell her about meeting “the famous writer.” The next morning he wrote another letter, this time to Andreas-Salomé, confessing that the late nights he had spent reading her work had aroused in him a sense of intimacy: “Yesterday was not the first twilight hour I have spent with you,” he told her, adding that he hoped he might one day read her some of his own verses. “I can think of no deeper joy.”
    Andreas-Salomé was more compelled by Rilke’s “human qualities” than by his poetry at first. She