Lou Salomé and I he Quest for Intimacy 255recently the idea suddenly struck me that we could wind up facing each
other as enemies someday" (Peters, Lou Andreas-Salomé 134). This is
exacdy how things turned out. Nietzsche did not want to acknowledge
that Salomé did not love him as he perhaps wished. The intensity
between them and the special delight Salomé took in her conversations
with him, he had mistaken for love, which she did not feel. He could not
hold anything against her, because love cannot be produced on
demand, and his self-deception in this matter did not result from con-
scious deception on her part. Salomé never deluded him. In Im Kampf
um Gott (A Struggle for God, 1885), the autobiographical novel she
wrote three years later, Salomé shed light on the dramatically misguided
relationship they had shared: "There is no avenue from sensual passion
to an intellectual meeting of minds—but many avenues from the latter
to the former" (Peters, Lou Andreas-Salomé 157).
Clearly, on Nietzsche's side, their "meeting of minds" had evolved
into a passion with sensual overtones, which Salomé could not recipro-
cate. Even for Nietzsche, the sensual aspect was only ambivalent at best.
After their breakup, all of the physical revulsion he appears to have har-
bored toward Salomé rose to the surface. He described her in a letter to
Paul Rée's brother in these terms: "This scrawny dirty smelly monkey
with her fake breasts—a disaster!" (.Β 6,402; mid-July, 1883). The letter
remained unsent.
When Nietzsche looked back on the whole story, it seemed to him
like a "hallucination" (B 6,374; May 10, 1883). He interpreted the cir-
cumstances as follows: a recluse in the extreme and unaccustomed to
contact with people, he no longer understood them. He was at the mercy
of others: "my soul was missing its skin, so to speak, and all natural pro-
tections" (Β 6,423; Aug. 14, 1883). Consequendy, he did not figure out
the game that was being played with him. He had been lured to Rome to
meet Salome. Could it be that Malwida von Meysenbug and Rèe had
actually had the best of intentions and only wanted to provide him with
an interesting conversational partner? His friend Rèe had deceived him
by not revealing his own feelings for Salomé. Nietzsche also chided him-