As Philippe Jaccottet reports, Salomé wrote in "Lebensrückblick": "I was your wife for years because you were the first reality, where man and body are indistinguishable from each other, an indisputable fact of life itself. I could have said literally what you told me when you confessed your love to me: Only you are real. That is how we became husband and wife even before we became friends, not by choice, but by this unfathomable marriage [...] We were brother and sister, but as in a distant past, before the marriage between brother and sister became sacrilegious".