Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé's house, Eichheimweg 10, Wolfratshausen, Bavaria. May and June are particularly blissful in Bavaria, when the snap of intense winter cold finally yields to the warm, glittering air of spring. At a friend's house during one of May's balmy evenings in 1897, the budding poet René Maria Rilke made the acquaintance of one of Europe's illustrious female personalities: Lou Andreas-Salomé. Although, as he swiftly wrote her after their first meeting in Munich, "this was not the first twilight that I was able to spend with you".
Did you realise how much I longed for yesterday afternoon? And I should have said everything to you yesterday; over a cup of tea it is so simple to say a few pretty, heartfelt, admiring words. But that's just why I could not do it . . . I always feel: if a person has to thank another for something very precious, this thanks should remain a secret between the two of them.
Like Alma Mahler, Lou von Salomé had had ambiguous friendships with a range of Europe's thinkers and literati - Friedrich Nietzsche among them. She finally married the orientalist, Friedrich Carl Andreas, after an odd, intense courtship, during which he had once picked up the pen-knife on the table between them and thrust it into his chest in desperation. Shortly after, they were engaged. Lou, however, never allowed him to consummate their marriage, and friends of hers referred to him derisively as the "Loumann".
Rilke visited Andreas-Salomé to read her some of his 'Christ-Visions', verses delineating a "blasphemous" religiosity. He wrote to her again and again, poems and letters - in one of which he confessed to wandering through the streets of Munich and the English Garden with a bouquet of roses, "trembling with the will to encounter you somewhere". It wasn't long before the polite "Sie" in his letters switched to the intimate "Du" - at that time, a dead giveaway indicating previous sexual intercourse.
In mid-June they left the city to take a summer house in the country. A rail system had been established in 1891 to Wolfratshausen, about 35 kilometres south of Munich, and it had become fashionable to spend the summer months there.
Andreas-Salomé ostensibly took this cottage with her friend, Frieda von Bülow - and without her husband - but Rilke was their constant companion.
This first of two houses (the second no longer stands) they rented out that summer lies just above the main square, a short walk along the path climbing the hill against which the town huddles. Wolfratshausen had evolved as a market town, a long collection of buildings lining the river Loisach just before its confluence with the river Isar, which runs through Munich on its way to the Danube. Constricted by the looming hill on one side and the river on the other, the town radiates out north and south from the main square, the Marienplatz, which is dominated by a large baroque church, a fountain and leafy plane trees. From its perch on what is today Eichheimweg 2, Rilke and Andreas-Salomé's house afforded a sweeping view over the town and valley without a lengthy and taxing trudge up the hill.
At 22 years old, the young Rilke was absolutely captivated by his 36-year-old lover. References in his work to his devout, smothering mother vanished through his relationship with this woman, whose religiosity and ideas were instead unconventional, and who, throughout their almost four-year affair, maintained a wary distance. During this summer, three months of ecstatic joy for Rilke, Andreas-Salomé's influence wrought permanent changes in the poet and his work. Rilke altered his bohemian lifestyle to a more natural, ascetic mode, becoming vegetarian, going barefoot and taking long, observant walks through meadows and forests. Andreas-Salomé found his poetry too sentimental and florid; he simplified it. He changed his handwriting, and even his name at her suggestion - discarding René to adopt the more German form, Rainer.
Rilke's devotion and adoration for Andreas-Salomé survives today in his letters to her, many lengthy examples written even in these months, during brief interruptions in their time together. But one letter proved more eloquent than the rest - a letter without words. While she spent a few days in Hallein, Rilke sent her a card that he filled in completely with black ink, except for a small star at the top. Andreas-Salomé knew instantly how to interpret this signal: Rilke had indicated the shutters to a room on the ground floor, which they kept closed to keep curious passers-by from looking in: star-shaped holes cut into the shutters allowed light to filter in. The stars in the shutters are still there today.