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Thus the condition of physical jubilation to which imminent madness brought him let him escape neither presentiment nor anguish. He wished to reassemble for the last time the memories and impressions which life had left to him, and to compose a work which should[Pg 357] be bizarre, triumphant, and desperate. Look at the titles of the chapters: "Why I am so prudent.—Why I am so wise.—Why I have written such good books.—Why I am a fatality.—Glory and eternity...." He calls his last work: Ecce Homo. What does he mean? Is he Antichrist or another Christ? He is both together. Like Christ, he has sacrificed himself. Christ is man and God: He has conquered the temptations to which He made Himself accessible. Nietzsche is man and Superman: he has known every feeble desire, every cowardly thought, and has cast them from him. None before him was so tender or so hard; no reality has alarmed him. He has taken upon himself not the sins of men, but all their passions in their greatest force. "Jesus on the Cross," he writes, "is an anathema upon life; Dionysos broken in bits is a promise of life, of life indestructible and ever-renewed." The solitary Christian had his God: Nietzsche lives alone and without God. The sage of old had his friends: Nietzsche lives alone and without friends. He lives nevertheless, and can sing, in his cruel extremity, the Dionysian hymn. "I am not a saint," he writes, "but a satyr." And again, "I have written so many books, and such beautiful ones: how should I not be grateful to life?"
No; Nietzsche was a saint, not a satyr, and a wounded saint who aspired to die. He said that he felt grateful to life; it was false, for his soul was quite embittered. He lied, but sometimes man has no other way to victory. When Arria, dying from the blow she had given herself, said to her husband as she passed him her weapon: "Pte, non dolet..." she lied, and it was to her glory that she lied. And here, may we not pass on Nietzsche himself the judgment that he had passed upon her? "Her holy falsehood," he wrote in 1879, "obscures all the truths that have ever been said by the dying." Nietzsche had not triumphed. Ecce Homo: he was broken but would[Pg 358] not avow it. A poet, he wished that his cry of agony should be a song; a last lyrical transport uplifted his soul and gave him the force to lie.
"Day of my life!
Thou sinkst to eve!
Thine eye already
Gleams half-bruised;
Drops from thy dew,
Like tears outstrewn,
Stream; the purple of thy love
Goes silent over the milky sea,
Thy ultimate, tardy blessedness....
All around, only the waves and their mirth.
What once was hard
Has foundered in a blue oblivion—
My boat lies idle now.
Tempest and travel—how unlearnt
Hope and desire are drowned,
The soul and the sea he sleek.
Seventh solitude
Never felt I
Closer to me the sweet serenity,
Warmer the rays of the sun.
—Shines not even the ice of my summit?
A rapid, silvery fish,
My bark glides away, afar."
Nevertheless he was conscious that the fame, so long desired, approached. Georges Brandes, who was going to repeat and publish his lectures, found him a new reader, the Swede Auguste Strindberg. Very pleased, Nietzsche announced it to Peter Gast. "Strindberg has written to me," he said, "and for the first time I receive a letter in which I find a world-historic (Welthistorik) accent." In St. Petersburg they were getting ready to translate his Case of Wagner. In Paris, Hippolyte Taine sought and found him a correspondent: Jean Bordeau, contributor to the Dbats and the Revue des Deux Mondes. "At last," wrote Nietzsche, "the grand Panama Canal[Pg 359] towards France has been opened." His old comrade Deussen handed him two thousand francs, the offering of an unknown who wished to subscribe to an edition of his works. Madame de Salis Marschlins offered him a thousand. Friedrich Nietzsche should have been happy, but it was too late.
How were his last days spent? We do not know. He lived in a furnished apartment, the guest of a humble family, which lodged him and, if he wished, fed him. He corrected the proofs of Ecce Homo, adding a postscript to the early text, then a dithyrambic poem; meanwhile he prepared a new pamphlet for publication, Nietzsche contra Wagner. "Before launching the first edition of my great work," he wrote to his publisher, "we must prepare the public, we must create a genuine tension—or it will be Zarathustra over again." On the 8th of December he wrote to Peter Gast: "I have re-read Ecce Homo, I have weighed every word in scales of gold: literally it cuts the history of humanity into two sections—the highest superlative of dynamite." On the 29th of December he wrote to his publisher: "I am of your opinion, as to Ecce Homo; let us not exceed 1,000 copies; a thousand copies for Germany of a book, written in the grand style, is indeed rather more than reasonable. But in France, I say it quite seriously, I count on an issue of 80,000—or 40,000 copies." On the 2nd of January another letter (in a rough and deformed hand): "Return me the poem—on with Ecce!"
There exists a tradition, difficult to verify, that, during these latter days, Nietzsche often played fragments of Wagner to his hosts. He would say to them: "I knew him," and talk of Triebschen. The thing does not seem improbable, for now his memories of his greatest happiness may well have visited him, and he may have found delight in recounting them to simple people ignorant of his life. Had he not just written in Ecce Homo:
"Since I am here recalling the consolations of my life, I ought to express in a word my gratitude for what was by far my most profound and best-loved joy—my intimacy with Richard Wagner. I wish to be just with regard to the rest of my human relationships; but I absolutely cannot efface from my life the days at Triebschen, days of confidence, of gaiety; of sublime flashes—days of profound happiness. I do not know what Wagner was for others: our sky was never darkened by a cloud."
On the 9th of January, 1889, Franz Overbeck was sitting, with his wife, at the window of his quiet house in Basle, when he saw old Burckhardt stop and ring at his door. He was surprised: Burckhardt was not an intimate, and some intuition warned him that Nietzsche, their common friend, was the cause of this visit. For some weeks he had had disquieting notes from Turin. Burckhardt brought him a long letter which all too clearly confirmed his presentiments. Nietzsche was mad. "I am Ferdinand de Lesseps," he wrote, "I am Prado, I am Chambige [the two assassins with whom the Paris newspapers were then occupied]; I have been buried twice this autumn."
A few moments later Overbeck received a similar letter, and all Nietzsche's friends were likewise advised. He had written to each of them.
"Friend Georges," he wrote to Brandes, "since you have discovered me, it is not wonderful to find me: what is now difficult is to lose me.
"THE CRUCIFIED."
Peter Gast received a message the tragic significance of which he did not understand:
"A mon maestro Pietro.
"Sing me a new song. The world is clear and all the skies rejoice."
"Ariadne, I love you," he wrote to Cosima Wagner.
Overbeck started immediately. He found Nietzsche, watched over by his hosts, ploughing the piano with his elbow, singing and crying his Dionysian glory. He was able to bring him back to Basle, and introduce him, without too painful a scene, into a hospital, where his mother came to seek him.
