Wo ist zu diesem Innen

ein Außen?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, II

Disturbed by what he saw, smelled, and heard from the city that was foreign to his ear and to his sensibilities, twenty-six-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke passed his nights in Paris among company well known for mixing wretchedness with exultation: Job and Baudelaire. In a letter to Lou Andreas-
Salomé, he describes the unlikely consolation the French poet provided him at the time:

How far away from me [Baudelaire] was in everything, one of the most alien to me; often I can scarcely understand him, and yet sometimes deep in the night when I said his words after him like a child, then he was the person closest to me and lived beside me and stood pale behind the thin wall and listened to my voice falling. What a strange companionship was between us then, a sharing of everything, the same poverty and perhaps the same fear.

A strange companionship indeed!—particularly when the feelings he describes are those one might experience with one’s wife in the same setting: living together, listening, sharing, and fearing. The year was 1902, and in coming to Paris alone to write his first of two monographs on Rodin, Rilke regrettably left such possibilities behind in Germany, along with his infant daughter Ruth (who on later visits would simply call him “Man,” or, if he was lucky, “Good Man”). Though he still preserved a refined intimacy with his