SOURCE: My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salomé, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1962, 320 P.

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...