By the summer of 1882 Nietzsche had, in a sense, already started writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The foundations of the book had been laid in the series from Human, All Too Human to The Gay Science, and in the last work the specific outlook and tone of Zarathustra appear in many passages. Part One of Zarathustra was put on to paper in February 1883. These facts should help us to see the ‘affair’ of Lou Salome in its proper perspective. At the time, Nietzsche thought it very important, and his disappointment at its failure threw him off balance for a while: but there is no ground for thinking it changed him in any way or that his work from 1883 onwards would have been any different in its essentials if he had never met Lou Salome.

After staying for about a month with Nietzsche in Genoa, Paul Rée left on the 13th March (1882) and shortly afterwards turned up in Rome, where, at Malwida's house there he encountered Lou Salome and fell in love with her. Lou (properly Louise) was born in St. Petersburg in 1861, daughter of a Russian general of Huguenot extraction. Determined to live a life of independence she had left Russia in September 1880 in the company of her mother to study at the university of Zurich; there she fell ill and a friend gave her a letter of introduction to Malwida and the suggestion she should go to Rome to recuperate. She arrived at Malwida's in January 1882, and was staying with her when Rée arrived.

Rée proposed marriage to her, but she declined and counter-proposed that they should live and study together ‘as brother and sister’, with a second man for company. This idea surprised Rée (and outraged Malwida when she heard of it), but he accepted it and suggested Nietzsche as the third party. Nietzsche had left Genoa on the 29th March and gone to Messina, where he stayed for three weeks: his health was very low, and he was probably on his way back to Germany to consult his doctor when he appeared in Rome towards the end of April.