n the 1870s, Pastor Henrik Gillot was the darling of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia. He was young, handsome, well-read in philosophy and literature, and he preached a kind of enlightened Christianity. Dozens of young girls had crushes on him and would flock to his sermons just to look at him. In 1878, however, he met a girl who changed his life. Her name was Lou von Salomé (later known as Lou Andreas-Salomé), and she was seventeen; he was forty-two.

Salomé was pretty, with radiant blue eyes. She had read a lot, particu-larly for a girl her age, and was interested in the gravest philosophical and religious issues. Her intensity, her intelligence, her responsiveness to ideas cast a spell over Gillot. When she entered his office for her increasingly fre-quent discussions with him, the place seemed brighter and more alive. Per-haps she was flirting with him, in the unconscious manner of a young girl—yet when Gillot admitted to himself that he was in love with her, and proposed marriage, Salomé was horrified. The confused pastor never quite got over Lou von Salomé, becoming the first of a long string of famous men to be the victim of a lifelong unfulfilled infatuation with her.

In 1882, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was wandering around Italy alone. In Genoa he received a letter from his friend Paul Rée, a Prussian philosopher whom he admired, recounting his discussions with a remarkable young Russian woman, Lou von Salomé, in Rome. Salomé was there on holiday with her mother; Rée had managed to accompany her on long walks through the city, unchaperoned, and they had had many conver-sations. Her ideas on God and Christianity were quite similar to Nietz-sche's, and when Rée had told her that the famous philosopher was a friend of his, she had insisted that he invite Nietzsche to join them. In subsequent letters Ree described how mysteriously captivating Salomé was, and how anxious she was to meet Nietzsche. The philosopher soon went to Rome.

When Nietzsche finally met Salomé, he was overwhelmed. She had the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen, and during their first long talk those eyes lit up so intensely that he could not help feeling there was something erotic about her excitement. Yet he was also confused: Salomé kept her dis-tance, and did not respond to his compliments. What a devilish young woman. A few days later she read him a poem of hers, and he cried; her ideas about life were so like his own. Deciding to seize the moment, Nietz-sche proposed marriage. (He did not know that Ree had done so as well.) Salomé declined. She was interested in philosophy, life, adventure, not mar-riage. Undaunted, Nietzsche continued to court her. On an excursion to Lake Orta with Rée, Salomé, and her mother, he managed to get the girl alone, accompanying her on a walk up Monte Sacro while the others stayed behind. Apparently the views and Nietzsche's words had the proper pas-sionate effect; in a later letter to her, he described this walk as "the most beautiful dream of my life." Now he was a man possessed: all he could think about was marrying Salomé and having her all to himself.

A few months later Salomé visited Nietzsche in Germany. They took long walks together, and stayed up all night discussing philosophy. She mir-rored his deepest thoughts, anticipated his ideas about religion. Yet when he again proposed marriage, she scolded him as conventional: it was Nietz-sche, after all, who had developed a philosophical defense of the superman, the man above everyday morality, yet Salomé was by nature far less conven-tional than he was. Her firm, uncompromising manner only deepened the spell she cast over him, as did her hint of cruelty When she finally left him, making it clear that she had no intention of marrying him, Nietzsche was devastated. As an antidote to his pain, he wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra, a book full of sublimated eroticism and deeply inspired by his talks with her. From then on Salomé was known throughout Europe as the woman who had broken Nietzsche's heart.

Salomé moved to Berlin. Soon the city's greatest intellectuals were falling under the spell of her independence and free spirit. The playwrights Gerhart Hauptmann and Franz Wedekind became infatuated with her; in 1897, the great Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke fell in love with her. By that time her reputation was widely known, and she was a published novel-ist. This certainly played a part in seducing Rilke, but he was also attracted by a kind of masculine energy he found in her that he had never seen in a woman. Rilke was then twenty-two, Salomé thirty-six. He wrote her love letters and poems, followed her everywhere, and began an affair with her that was to last several years. She corrected his poetry, imposed discipline

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on his overly romantic verse, inspired ideas for new poems. But she was put off by his childish dependence on her, his weakness. Unable to stand weak-ness of any kind, she eventually left him. Consumed by her memory, Rilke long continued to pursue her. In 1926, lying on his deathbed, he begged his doctors, "Ask Lou what is wrong with me. She is the only one who knows."

One man wrote of Salomé, "There was something terrifying about her embrace. Looking at you with her radiant blue eyes, she would say, 'The reception of the semen is for me the height of ecstasy.' And she had an in-satiable appetite for it. She was completely amoral... a vampire." The Swedish psychotherapist Poul Bjerre, one of her later conquests, wrote, "I think Nietzsche was right when he said that Lou was a thoroughly evil woman. Evil however in the Goethean sense: evil that produces good.... She may have destroyed lives and marriages but her presence was exciting."

The two emotions that almost every male felt in the presence of Lou Andreas-Salomé were confusion and excitement—the two prerequisite feelings for any successful seduction. People were intoxicated by her strange mix of the masculine and the feminine; she was beautiful, with a radiant smile and a graceful, flirtatious manner, but her independence and her in-tensely analytical nature made her seem oddly male. This ambiguity was expressed in her eyes, which were both coquettish and probing. It was con-fusion that kept men interested and curious: no other woman was like this. They wanted to know more. The excitement stemmed from her ability to stir up repressed desires. She was a complete nonconformist, and to be in-volved with her was to break all kinds of taboos. Her masculinity made the relationship seem vaguely homosexual; her slightly cruel, slightly domi-neering streak could stir up masochistic yearnings, as it did in Nietzsche. Salomé radiated a forbidden sexuality. Her powerful effect on men—the lifelong infatuations, the suicides (there were several), the periods of intense creativity, the descriptions of her as a vampire or a devil—attest to the ob-scure depths of the psyche that she was able to reach and disturb.

The Masculine Dandy succeeds by reversing the normal pattern of male superiority in matters of love and seduction. A man's apparent inde-pendence, his capacity for detachment, often seems to give him the upper hand in the dynamic between men and women. A purely feminine woman will arouse desire, but is always vulnerable to the man's capricious loss of interest; a purely masculine woman, on the other hand, will not arouse that interest at all. Follow the path of the Masculine Dandy, however, and you neutralize all a man's powers. Never give completely of yourself; while you are passionate and sexual, always retain an air of independence and self-possession. You might move on to the next man, or so he will think. You have other, more important matters to concern yourself with, such as your work. Men do not know how to fight women who use their own weapons against them; they are intrigued, aroused, and disarmed. Few men can resist the taboo pleasures offered up to them by the Masculine Dandy.

The seduction emanating from a person of uncertain or dissimulated sex is powerful.

—COLETTE