The following year, on 28 April, he and Clara married in Bremen; they spent much of 1901 together at a cottage they rented in nearby Westerwede, where Clara had her studio; and on 12 December their daughter, Ruth, was born. But January 1902 brought a harsh reminder of the weak economic foundation of their life. Rilke's family discontinued the allowance they had paid him when he was still a student, a sum on which he still depended. What he earned from newspaper reviewing would not keep him, and certainly not a family, nor would royalties or the anticipated income from his next collection of poems, The Book of Images (which was to be published in July); so he was glad to accept a commission to write a monograph on the Worpswede artists, and wrote it quickly that spring, before in June accepting another commission, this time to write on the great French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Clara and Rilke had talked of relocating to Paris, and she for her part already knew Rodin, but in the event Clara did not find it feasible to move, and when Rilke set off on 26 August their thoughts of establishing working lives together in Paris had been shelved. He went alone.

His work went well. Within days he had paid a first call on Rodin, and he swiftly established an almost daily routine of studio visits; as the autumn deepened into winter, he found the monograph growing almost of its own accord, and his little book on Rodin, with which he declared himself satisfied, was speedily published, in March 1903. His poetry benefited as well, and the habit of looking fully and carefully at the subject in hand, which he had seen in Clara and which he now acquired from Rodin, bore fruit that autumn in the first of those poems he immediately recognized as ‘new’, one of the most frequently translated of all twentieth-century poems, ‘The Panther’. In letters to Clara, he emphasized the possibilities for work, for a life dedicated to beauty and art, that Paris held for both of them. But, while his regained solitude was conducive to productivity and a sense of aesthetic purpose, the experience of the immense modern city, coming hard as it did upon rural tranquillity and the company of sensitive friends, was altogether terrible and unsettling.

In the following summer, back in Worpswede, he felt able fully to take stock of the impact of Paris upon him, in a letter of 18 July 1903 to his friend and former lover Lou Andreas-Salomé. ‘Paris,’ he told her, ‘was an experience similar to that of the military school; just as in those days I was seized by an immense, fearful amazement, so now I was beset by horror of everything that is known, as if in some inexpressible confusion, as life.’ The Paris he described to Lou was a place where the fear within him had grown rapidly. It was a city where people were merely ‘transients among transients, abandoned and left to themselves in their own fates. One registered them as an impression, at most, and observed them with a calm, objective curiosity as if they were a new species of animal that had of necessity evolved special organs, organs of hunger and dying.’ Among those he observed were the sick being transported to the Hôtel-Dieu, old women, beggars and a man with St Vitus's dance:

And all these people, men and women, who are in some kind of transition, perhaps from madness to health, or perhaps into madness; all with something infinitely delicate in their faces, a love or knowledge or joy, as if it were a light burning just a little dimly and fitfully, which could surely grow bright once again if only someone were to see and help… But there is no one who does help.

Rilke's great terror was that he might become one of them:

Often I had to say to myself out loud that I was not one of them, that I would once again leave that dreadful city where they would die; I said it to myself and was aware that it was no self-deception. And yet, when I realized that my clothes were becoming shabbier and heavier from week to week, and saw there was many a threadbare patch in them, I was alarmed, and felt that I would inevitably be numbered among the lost if some passer-by saw me and half unconsciously counted me as one of them.

Was he himself not as good as homeless? Was he himself not hungry too? Was he himself not poor?

The life we think of as Rilke's – a life of graceful acceptance of patronage freely and gladly given by a number of the wealthy or influential around Europe, from aristocrats to publishers, who themselves felt privileged to be connected with so extraordinary a writer – was one he had as yet barely begun to establish. At this still precarious point in his life, nothing could afford him the certainty that he might not indeed slip into anonymous poverty. Of course his horrified recoil from the street life of a crowded modern city, with its unstable or sick or down-and-out characters, has in it a fastidious hypersensitivity, a revulsion from what his age was learning to think of as the masses, that is not attractive. But the existential panic is overwhelming in its raw sincerity, and cries out to be taken seriously. At the time of his letter to Lou, Rilke did not yet know where that panic might lead him, and in particular despaired of being able to transform it into a thing, an enduring work:

If I had been able to make something of the fears I had, if I had been able to fashion things out of them, things of true repose, which it is serenity and freedom to create and which, once they exist, are calming, all would have been well with me. But the fears that beset me every day roused up a hundred other fears, and, within me, they all rose up against me […]

What he had not yet been able to achieve, Rilke told Lou, was ‘to make things out of fear’.

It is here, in the disturbing experience of Paris, in the first sustained attempt to put that experience into words in this and other letters of summer 1903 to Lou Andreas-Salomé, and in the resolve to ‘make things out of fear’, that we find the seed that grew, over a six-year writing period from February 1904 to January 1910, into The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

The novel is brimful of autobiographical detail, if by that we mean Rilke's own observations in Paris. The woman at the corner of the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, the man coming round the corner from the Champs-Elysées carrying a crutch, the woman pushing a barrel-organ on a hand-cart, the shopkeepers in the rue de Seine, the man selling cauliflowers from a barrow of vegetables, the patients waiting at the Salpêtrière, the women feeding the birds, the man with St Vitus's dance, and (in the second part of the novel, where people seen on the streets of Paris make far fewer appearances) the blind newspaper-seller – all of these will have been seen by Rilke, and some can be discovered in his letters. But once they have been woven into the fabric of the text, their effect ceases to seem merely autobiographical. Instead, the paraded ‘transients’, simply by lacking their names and identities, have the effect of shading Rilke's named narrator with colourlessness. An illuminating comparison might be made with the unnamed convalescent who narrates Edgar Allan Poe's story ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (1840). The man is defined by the ‘clerks’ and ‘pick-pockets’ and ‘gamblers’, the ‘street beggars’ and ‘ghastly invalids’ and ‘modest young girls’, the ‘drunkards’ and ‘organ-grinders’ and ‘exhausted laborers’ he observes on the city streets – defined (for his existence consists in observing) but not individuated (for he himself remains shadowy and indistinct). Rilke's Malte, like Poe's narrator, is an observer, and the more we are shown the people and things that he sees, the more we become conscious that Malte himself is a blank screen on to which images can be projected, rather than a sharply contoured and richly realized individual.

As the comparison with Poe's story implies, there is a literary dimension to Rilke's purely personal response to the city, a dimension that involves literary responses to the modern city. The experience of cities so populous as to render individuality an anachronistic anomaly was still relatively novel in Rilke's time. His response to it, as transmuted into the Notebooks, takes its place in a fictional lineage that passes from Poe and Charles Dickens through Knut Hamsun and Andrei Bely to James Joyce and Alfred Döblin, writers who all sought to make sense, in very different ways, of the metropolitan onslaught on the self. As cities sprawled, and the crowds inhabiting them became larger, and the technology (first railways and tramcars, then automobiles) became louder and more unavoidable, it could seem that human values and human contact were being stifled. The narrator of Hamsun's Hunger (1890), who spends the duration of the novel wandering the streets of Christiania (Oslo), admittedly bears a family resemblance to Fyodor Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment, 1866), but what is more striking is the frantic, pressured, often panic-stricken nature of his responses to the people with whom he comes into contact. This man exhibits, in every nervous recoil, in every frenetic surge of hope, the sense of dislocation and alienation that was coming to be widely recognized as a characteristic response to the experience of anonymity in the crowded modern city.