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Hedwig Fischer, wife of the owner of the famous Fischer Publishing House, writes in the preface to her edition of Rilke’s correspondence with her and her husband, “This gentle [zart], quiet, good-looking man, of whom I had never heard or read anything, impressed me.” Finding herself recovering from a sickness, she attributes Rilke’s “immediate sense” of her fragile state to “his empathy” (5). Similarly smitten on her first meeting with Rilke, the painter Paula Becker jots down in her notebook, “a delicate lyrical talent, gentle and sensitive, with small, affecting [rührenden] hands. He read us his poems, gentle [zart] and full of foreboding. Sweet and pale” (Briefwechsel 103). Tellingly, Becker’s syntax makes Rilke and his poems almost indistinguishable—which conflation would remain a source of public fascination and not insignificant cause for Rilke’s fame. A few weeks later, she adds in a letter to Rilke the words I quote in this book’s epigraph: “For your hands convey goodness. And you love flowers” (Briefwechsel 26).