What is it that they call love? In this classic question, Lou Salome gives, since the distant 1900, an answer of idiosyncratic dialectic. Love is the complete union of two beings condemned to be eternally strangers! That is why it always involves a tragic price - "it is essentially a tragedy". This dense essay was written at a time when the great love of her life, with the young Rilke, had just ended - inherently dishonorable. It is therefore the theorization of a personal story of passionate love - but also an elegy to Love. To Love which, for Lou Salome, is synonymous with flesh and spirit, with happiness and pain, with life itself.