"The sky is beautiful, worthy of Nice, and this has lasted for days," he wrote to Peter Gast on September 30th. "My sister is with me, and it is very agreeable for us to be doing each other good when for so long we had been doing harm only. My head is full of the most extravagant lyrics that ever haunted a poet's skull. I have had a letter from Stein. This year has brought me many good things, and one of the most precious of its gifts has been Stein, a new and a sincere friend.
"In short, let us be full of hope; or we may better express it by saying with old Keller—
"'Trinkt, O Augen, was die Wimper hält
Von dem goldnen Ueberfluss der Welt! '"
Brother and sister left Zürich, the one bound for Naumburg, the other for Nice. On the way Nietzsche stopped at Mentone. Hardly had he settled down there than he wrote: "This is a magnificent place. I have already discovered eight walks. I hope that no one will join me. I need absolute quiet."
It is possible that the project which he had formed at the beginning of the summer, when he spoke of six years of meditation and of silence, was again in his mind. But he lacked the force of will which long and silent meditation demands. He was, however, deeply moved by the hope of a friend and by the loss of a sister, and his lyric impatience broke the bonds. Yielding to instinct he composed poems off-hand—songs, short stanzas, epigrams. Practically all the poems which are to be found in his later works—the light verse, the biting distich, inserted in the second edition of the Gaya Scienza, the grandiose Dionysian chants—were finished or conceived during these few weeks. And once more he began to think of the still incomplete Thus Spake Zarathustra. "A fourth, a fifth, a sixth part are inevitable," he writes. "Whatever happens I must bring my son Zarathustra to his noble end. Alive, he leaves me no peace."
At the end of October Nietzsche left Mentone. The sight of so many invalids disturbed him, and he set out for Nice.
There an unexpected companion, Paul Lanzky by name, soon joined him. Lanzky was an "intellectual," by birth a German and by taste a Florentine, who lived a wandering life. Chance had put the works of Nietzsche into his hands; and he had understood them. Applying to Schmeitzner, the publisher, for the author's address, he was told—" Herr Friedrich Nietzsche lives a very lonely life in Italy. Write to Poste Restante, Genoa." The philosopher replied promptly and graciously, "Come to Nice this winter and we will talk!" So Nietzsche was not so unsociable and solitary after all! This correspondence took place during the autumn of 1883, but Lanzky was not free at the moment, and begged to be excused. In October, 1884, he reached the rendezvous. Meanwhile he had had the opportunity of acquainting himself with the two last sections of Zarathustra, and had published very intelligent summaries of them in a Leipsic magazine and in the Rivista Europea of Florence.
On the very morning of his arrival in Nice there was a knock at his door. A gentle-looking man entered the room and came towards him smiling. "Also Sie sind gekommen!" said Nietzsche. "So here you are!" He took him by the arm, and examined curiously this student of his works. "Let's see what you are made of!"
Nietzsche's eyes were fixed upon him; those eyes which had once been beautiful, and were, at moments, still beautiful, clouded though they now were by reason of prolonged suffering. Lanzky was astonished. He had come to do honour to a redoubtable prophet, and here was the most affable, the simplest, and, as it seemed to him, the most modest of German professors.