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He reached Tuscany. Lanzky received him, accompanied him, and brought him to the observatory of Arcetri, on the heights of San Miniato, where lived a man of a rare kind—a reader of his books. Leberecht Tempel kept on his table, near his bizarre instruments, the works of Herr Friedrich Nietzsche, many passages of which he knew by heart and willingly recited. Leberecht Tempel was a singularly noble, sincere, and disinterested nature. The two men talked for half an hour and, it seems, understood each other. When Nietzsche left he was deeply moved.
"I wish that this man had never known my books," said he to Lanzky. "He is too sensible, too good. I shall harm him."
For he knew the terrible consequences of his thoughts and feared for those who read them suffering similar to his own.
He did not stay in Tuscany: the harsh, cold air which descended from the mountains upon Florence incommoded him. He was recaptured by memories of Nice, the town with two hundred and twenty days of full sunshine—it was from Nice that he wrote to his sister, on the 15th of November, 1885:
"Do not be astonished, dear sister, if your brother, who has some of the blood of the mole and of Hamlet in his veins, writes to you not from Vallombrosa, but from Nice. It has been very precious to me to experiment almost simultaneously with the air of Leipsic, of Munich, of Florence, of Genoa, and of Nice. You would never believe how much Nice has triumphed in this group. I have put up, as last year, at the Pension de Genve, Petite Rue Saint-Etienne. I find it recarpeted, refurnished, repainted, become very comely. My neighbour at table is a bishop, a Monsignor who speaks German. I think of you a great deal. Your
"PRINCE EICHORN."
"Here I am returned to Nice," he wrote in another letter, "that is to say to reason." His pleasure is such that he observes with some indulgence the cosmopolitan city, and is amused by it. "My window looks out on the square of the Phnicians," he wrote to Peter Gast. "What a prodigious cosmopolitanism in this alliance of words! Don't you laugh? And it's true, Phnicians lived here. I hear sounding in the air something of the conqueror and the Super-European, a voice which gives[Pg 305] me confidence and says to me: Here thou art in thy place .... How far one is from Germany here—'Ausserdeutsch!' I cannot say it with force enough."
He returned to his habit of walking in the sun over the white roads which overlook the waves. The memories of seven years linked his thought with this sea, these strands, these mountains; his fantasy awoke, he listened to it and followed it. Not an hour passed vainly; each one was happy, and left, as the souvenir and witness of the gladness which it brought, an epigram, a poem in prose, a maxim, some lied or song.
He defamed the moderns; it was his pleasure, and, as he thought, his duty as a philosopher, who, speaking for coming times, must contradict his own period. In the sixteenth century a philosopher did well to praise obedience and kindliness. In the nineteenth century, in our Europe impaired by Parisian decadents and Wagnerian Germans, in this feeble Europe which is ever seeking the co-operation of the masses, the line of least effort and the least pain, a philosopher had to praise other virtues. He had to affirm: "That man is great who knows how to be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most distant; who knows how to live beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, powerful in his will. Greatness is there. And he must urgently ask: Is greatness possible to-day?"—Ist Veredlung mglich? We never cease to hear this question which he first put at twenty-six.
He defamed the Germans; this was his other pleasure, a more intimate and lively one. Germanised Europe had unlearned freedom. She dissimulated her spites, her immodesties, her cunning. She needed to recover the spirit of the old world, of those Frenchmen of former times who lived in so fine a liberty, with so fine a clear-sightedness and force. "We must mediterraneanise music," wrote[Pg 306] he, "and our taste, our manners also." Across these pages of Nietzsche, it is easy to hear the counsels of his "defunct friends," Stendhal and the Abb Galiani.
"Men of profound melancholy," he wrote, "betray themselves when they are happy: they seize upon their happiness as though they would strangle it and stifle it out of jealousy.... Alas, they know too well that happiness flies before them!" December neared its end, and those festivals, the memories of which moved his faithful heart, approached; Nietzsche had seen his happiness in flight before him. The pleasure of lively thoughts, of beautiful images, did not entirely satisfy him. He was no longer amused by the crowd at Nice, the square of the Phnicians diverted him no more. What mattered to him the Gai Saber and its precepts—sunlight, wind and Provenal song? He was a German, the son of a pastor, and it was with an oppressed heart that he watched Christmas and Saint Sylvester's day approach—that venerated time.
He took a disgust for the poor pension in which he lodged: its furniture was touched by too many hands, its sitting-room degraded by being common property. Then the cold weather came. Being poor, he could not get the warmth he needed; he froze, bitterly regretting the stoves of Germany. Wretched places where he cannot ever be alone! To the right, a child is clattering its scales; above, two amateurs are practising on the trumpet and violin. Friedrich Nietzsche, yielding to bitterness, wrote to his sister, who was spending a last Christmas at Naumburg:
"How stupid it is that I have no one here who might laugh with me! If I were stronger, and if I were richer, I should set up in Japan, to know a little gaiety. At Venice I am happy because there one can live in the Japanese manner without too great difficulty. All the rest of Europe is pessimist and mournful; Wagner's horrible[Pg 307] perversion of music is a particular case of the perversion, of the universal trouble.
"Here is Christmas again, and it is sad to think that I must continue to live, as I have done for seven years, like a man proscribed, like a cynical contemner of men. No one bothers about my existence any more; the Lama has 'better to do,' and in any case enough to do.... Isn't it fine, my Christmas letter? Long live the Lama!
"Your F.
"Why do you not go to Japan? It is the most sensible life, and so gay."
Eight days later he wrote a better letter; perhaps he had reproached himself for his confession.
"Chrie, the weather is magnificent to-day, and your Fritz must afresh put on a good face for you, though in these latter times he has had nights and days that were most melancholy. By chance my Christmas was a real festival day. At noon, I receive your kind presents; very quickly I pass round my neck your watch-chain, and slide your pretty little calendar into my waistcoat pocket. As to the 'money,' if there was money in the letter (our mother wrote me that there was), it escaped my fingers. Excuse your blind animal who undid his packet in the road; something no doubt fell from it, as I opened your letters very impatiently. Let us hope that a poor old woman, passing there, found her 'little child Jesus' on the pavement. Then I go on foot to my peninsula of Saint Jean, I walk a great round along the coast, and finally install myself not far from the young soldiers who are playing at skittles. Fresh-blown roses, geraniums in the hedges, everything green, everything warm: nothing of the north! There, your Fritz drinks three glasses of a sweet wine of the country, and perhaps gets a trifle tipsy; at least he begins to talk to the waves, and, when they[Pg 308] foam as they break too strongly against the shore, he says to them, as one does to fowl: 'Butsch! Butsch! Butsch!' Finally, I re-enter Nice and, in the evening, dine at my pension in princely style in the glitter of a great Christmas-tree. Would you believe it, I have found a baker de luxe who knows what 'Quackkuchen' is; he told me that the King of Wrtemburg had ordered some of it, similar to the kind I like, for his birthday. I remembered this while I was writing 'in princely style.' ... In alter liebe,
