"It is impossible to exagerrate the importance that Paul Valery had for Rilke during the last five or six years of his life. His letters and conversations were full of the impressions which had received from Valery. What struck him most, because it touched him at his most vulnerable spot, was the the French poet only came into the open with his poetry after a silence lasting many years. How he approved, how he praised such a silence, in which the work of art could grow and ripen slowly, imperceptibly, hidden from the world! And how that silence justified his own silence, before he was able to break it at Muzot."

J.R. von Salis, Rainer Maria Rilke: The Years In Switzerland, UC Press, 1966