Lou Salomé

On or about April 26, 1882, in St. Peter's Basilica, Rome, Nietzsche kept an appointment with a young Russian who, beautiful and brilliant, was to be the cause of the most traumatic events of his life and a significant change in his intellectual outlook. The meeting had been arranged by Paul Rée, who sat in a nearby pew, pretending to read some notes but actually, for reasons that will become apparent, keeping a sharp eye on proceedings. Though the Messina poems suggest the intimation that its course might not be entirely smooth, they also suggest that Nietzsche was already in love with love, was ready to be rescued from his life of solitude. And so he greeted her with an echo of Romeo and Juliet almost certainly prepared beforehand: ‘what stars’, he asked, ‘have brought us here together?’ (In the just completed Gay Science he says farewell to Wagner with the thought that different ‘stellar orbits’ have drawn them apart: here he suggests the reverse.)

The recipient of this portentous introductory line was Lou Salomé (see Plate 24), at twenty-one eleven years younger than Rée and sixteen years younger than Nietzsche. Lou was the daughter of a Baltic German who, in the pro-German atmosphere of late-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg (both Tsars Nicholas I and Alexander II had German wives and mothers), had risen to the rank of general in the Tsar's army.