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"Fie, sir! So you are the calumniator of my character, and Miss Salom has only been the mouthpiece, the very unsatisfactory mouthpiece, of the judgment which you passed on me; so it is you who, in my absence, naturally, spoke of me as though I were a vulgar and low egoist, always ready to plunder others; so it is you who have accused me of having, so far as concerned Miss Salom, pursued the most filthy designs under a mask of idealism; so it is you who dare to say of me that I was mad and did not know what I wanted? Now, of a surety, I understand better the whole of this business which has made men whom I venerated and many whom I esteemed, as my nearest and dearest, strangers to me.... And I thought you my friend; and nothing, perhaps, for seven years has done more harm to my prospects than the trouble that I took to defend you.
"It seems then that I am not very well advanced in the art of knowing men. That furnishes you no doubt with matter for mockery. What a fool you have made of[Pg 268] me! Bravo! As regards men of your stamp, rather than understand them, I had rather they mocked me.
"I would have great pleasure in giving you a lesson in practical morals with a pair of pistols; I would succeed perhaps, under the most favourable circumstances, in interrupting once and for all your works on morals: one needs clean hands for that, Dr. Paul Re, not dirty ones!"
This letter cannot be considered sufficient to condemn Paul Re. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote it in a moment of anger upon information given by his sister, who was often more impassioned than accurate. It is a precious witness to his impression; to the ill-known data of the cause, it is a mediocre witness. What was the conduct of Paul Re? What were the rights and wrongs? In April, 1883, six months after the difficulties of Leipsic, he had offered Nietzsche the dedication of a work on the origins of the moral conscience, a work altogether inspired by Nietzschean ideas. Nietzsche had refused this public compliment: "I no longer want," he wrote to Peter Gast, "to be confounded with any one." A letter written by George Brandes in 1888 shows us Paul Re living in Berlin with Miss Salom, as "brother and sister," according to both their accounts. There is no doubt that Re helped Miss Salom, towards 1883, to write her book on Friedrich Nietzsche: a very intelligent and a very noble book. We incline to believe that between these two men there was only the misfortune of a common love which the same woman inspired in them.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote long and febrile letters. He complained of being alone at forty years, betrayed by his friends. Franz Overbeck grew anxious and went up to Sils-Maria to distract him from the solitude which wounded and consumed him. His sister, a prudent lady, and bourgeois in her tastes, advised him in answer to his[Pg 269] complaints: "You are alone, it is true," said she to him; "have you not sought solitude? Get an appointment in some University: when you have a title and pupils, you will be recognised and people will cease to ignore your books." Nietzsche listened indulgently, but did listen, and wrote to the Rector of Leipsic, who, without hesitation, dissuaded him from making any overtures, no German University being in a position to allow an atheist, a declared anti-Christian, among its teachers. "This reply has given me courage!" wrote Nietzsche to Peter Gast; to his sister he sent a strong letter whose thrusts she felt.
"It is necessary that I be misunderstood, better still, I go to meet calumny and contempt. My 'near ones' will be the first against me: last summer I understood that, and I was magnificently conscious that I was at last on my road. When it comes to me to think, 'I can no longer endure solitude,' then I experience an unspeakable humiliation before myself—I feel myself in revolt against what there is of highest in me...."
In September he directed his steps towards Naumburg, where it was his intention to stay some weeks. His mother and sister inspired in him a mixed feeling, which baffles analysis. He liked his own people because they were his own, and because he was tender, faithful, infinitely sensible to memories. But every one of his ideas, every one of his desires, drew him from them, and his mind despised them. Nevertheless the old house of Naumburg was the only place in the world where there was, so long as he stayed there for a short time only, some sweetness of life for him.
Mother and daughter were quarrelling. Lisbeth loved a certain Frster, an agitator, an idealogue of Germanist and anti-Semitic views, who was organising a colonial[Pg 270] enterprise in Paraguay. She wished to marry him and to follow him; her despairing mother wished to retain her. Madame Nietzsche welcomed her son as a saviour and related to him the mad projects which Lisbeth was forming. He was overwhelmed; he knew the person and his ideas, he despised the low and dull passions which the propaganda excited, and suspected him of having spoken maliciously of his work. That Lisbeth, the companion of his childhood, should follow this man was more than he could allow. He called her, spoke violently to her. She answered him bravely. There was little that was delicate or subtle in this woman's composition, but she had energy. Friedrich Nietzsche, so weak in the depth of his soul, valued in her the quality which he lacked. He might sermonise, scold, but he could not get his way.
The late autumn came, and Naumburg was covered with fogs. Nietzsche left and went to Genoa. These quarrels had lessened his self-respect.
"Things go badly with me, very badly," he wrote in October to Frulein von Meysenbug; "my visit in Germany is the cause. I can live only at the seaside. Every other climate depresses me, destroys my nerves and eyes, makes me melancholy, puts me into a black humour—that awful tare; I have had to combat it in my life more than the hydras and other celebrated monsters. In trivial ennui is hidden the most dangerous enemy; great calamity adds to one's stature...."
Towards mid-November he left Genoa, and, circling the western coast, began the quest for a winter residence. He passed by San Remo, Mentone, Monaco, and stopped at Nice, which enchanted him. There he found that keen air and that plenitude of light, that multitude of[Pg 271] bright days which he needed: "Light, light, light," he wrote'; "I have regained my equilibrium."
The cosmopolitan city displeased him, and at first he rented a room in a house of the old Italian city, not Nice, but Nizza, as he always wrote. For neighbours he had quite simple people, workmen, masons, employs, who all spoke Italian. It was in similar conditions that in 1881 he had enjoyed at Genoa a certain happiness.
He chased away his vain thoughts and made an energetic effort to complete Zarathustra. But then arose the greatest of his misfortunes: the difficulty of his work was extreme, perhaps insurmountable. To complete Zarathustra—what did that imply? The work was immense: it had to be a poem which would make the poems of Wagner forgotten; a gospel which should make the Gospel forgotten. From 1875 to 1881, during six years, Friedrich Nietzsche had examined all the moral systems and shown the illusion which is at their foundation; he had defined his idea of the Universe: it was a blind mechanism, a wheel which turned eternally and without object. Yet he wished to be a prophet, an enunciator of virtues and of purposes: "I am he who dictates the values for a thousand years," he said in those notes in which his pride bursts forth. "To imprint his hand on the centuries, as on soft wax, write on the will of millennia as upon brass, harder than brass, more noble than brass, there," Zarathustra was to say, "is the beatitude of the Creator."
