The Hermit Of Muzot

Castle Muzot, Switzerland

During his feverishly creative final years, Rilke lived at Castle Muzot, idyllically positioned above the town of Sierre in the upper Rhône valley. Here he lived in silence and solitude, with no telephone, electricity or running water. His housekeeper, whom he called a 'ghost', kept out of his way as much as possible. Living on the second floor of his 'tower', Rilke worked at a heavy oak table with glorious views over the valley. He ate meagre vegetarian meals and saw almost no one except, occasionally, Baladine Klossowska (whom he called 'Merline'), his last lover and confidante. Muzot, and its surrounding countryside of mountains, forests, rivers and streams, became dearer to him than any place he had ever lived.

Here, in a letter to Marie von Thurn und Taxis dated 25 July 1921, Rilke has just found Muzot, and is considering living in this enchanting place:     

So, if everything works out, I could live at Muzot for a while, with a housekeeper. The castle is situated at the top of quite a steep hill, twenty minutes from Sierre. It's a rural area, charming, and not too dry, with abundant springs — from it your gaze extends down the valley towards mountain slopes and the most wonderful depths of sky. A small, rustic chapel lies a little higher on the left among vineyards...     

Rilke in the garden of Castle Muzot

In the same letter Rilke continues to praise his new home in the Swiss canton of Le Valais:

In these last weeks I have often come very near to announcing my visit, and a peculiar current came into my rather sluggish spirit whenever I wanted to do so; but what keeps me here is this wonderful Valais. I was imprudent enough to travel down here, to Sierre and Sion; and I have told you what a singular magic these regions worked on me when I first saw them last year at the time of the grape harvest. The fact that Spain and Provence are blended together so strangely within the features of the landscape struck me immediately even then, for, in the final pre-war years, both these lands spoke to me more strongly and decisively than anywhere else. And now to find their voices united in a broad, Swiss mountain valley! This echo, this family likeness is not fanciful. Just recently I read, in a brief treatise on the plant life of the Wallis, that certain flowers appear here which are otherwise found only in Provence and Spain; it is the same with the butterflies: thus does the soul of a great river (and to me the Rhône has always been one of the most wonderful) bear endowments and kinships through the countries. Its valley here is so wide, and so grandly filled out with little heights within the frame of the big border mountains, that the eye is continually provided with a play of the most delightful changes, a chessgame with hills, as it were...

Rilke At Muzot

For the last five years of his life the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) lived at Castle Muzot — barely a castle, more a castellated house — which impressively overlooks the broad, high-sided valley of the upper Rhône. Rilke had been looking for a permanent place to stay in Switzerland since the summer of 1919. After two years of unsettled and fruitless searching he finally chanced upon a photo of Castle Muzot in a shop window in Sierre, and immediately fell in love with the place. It was available for rent. Thanks to the patronage of Werner Reinhart, who subsequently bought and renovated Muzot, Rilke was able to live there rent-free and relatively untroubled till the end of his life. It was here that he spent his most intensively productive years — completing The Duino Elegies which he'd begun in a gifted trance at Castle Duino near Trieste; writing The Sonnets To Orpheus in rapid bursts of frenzied inspiration; composing nearly four hundred lyric poems in French (many of them evoking the beauty of his beloved Valais, the Swiss canton where he now lived); and translating the works of Paul Valéry, his favourite French poet.

On Thursday 5 January I stepped from the railway station at Sierre in a quest for Castle Muzot. According to the girl in the tourist office it was easy to find — though she seemed rather surprised I was going on foot. Armed with maps, I set off uphill in the direction of Veyras. The rain poured down. Remnants of hard-packed snow made some sections of the pavement tricky to negotiate. After three-quarters of an hour I'd reached the village of Veyras, on the north-western slope above Sierre. I headed up the Route du Moulin. There, suddenly, on my right-hand side, behind a small vineyard, was Muzot! Smaller than I'd envisaged, more compact, more hemmed in now by the houses and chalets which had sprung up over the last fifty years. But it was Muzot nonetheless — despite the 'Private' sign at the gate, despite the cold and the rain, despite the mist partially obscuring the superb view down the Rhône valley. And there still, in the garden, stood the poplar tree about which Rilke went into such ecstasies!

    

 

Here's Rilke at Castle Muzot with the lover of his final years, the painter Baladine Klossowska (1886-1969) — or 'Merline', as he affectionately called her. She was married to the art historian Erich Klossowska, but they separated in 1917. Baladine was the mother of the artist Balthus and the writer Pierre Klossowska.   

This is the fine eighteenth-century building of the Maison de Courten, Rue du Bourg 30, Sierre. It's home to the Rainer Maria Rilke Foundation, which was established in 1986 to promote knowledge of Rilke's work through exhibitions, lectures, conferences and publications. The museum is open to the public between April and October each year. And every third year the Foundation stages a Rilke festival. 

Rilke is buried in the churchyard at Raron/Rarogne, a little further up the Rhône valley. The self-composed epitaph on his gravestone reads, enigmatically:

 Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,

Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel

Lidern.

(Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight

of being no one's sleep under so

many lids.)

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)