[CHAPTER II]
YEARS OF YOUTH
In the middle of October, 1862, Nietzsche left Naumburg for the University of Bonn, accompanied by Paul Deussen, his comrade, and a cousin of the latter. The young people did not hurry. They made a halt on the banks of the Rhine. They were gay, a little irresponsible even, in their sudden enjoyment of complete liberty. Paul Deussen, to-day a professor at the University of Kiel, tells us of those days of exuberant laughter with all the satisfaction of a very good bourgeois who brightens up at the memory of his far-off pranks.
The three friends rode on horseback about the country-side. Nietzsche—perhaps he had appreciated too highly the beer supplied at the neighbouring inn—was less interested in the beauty of the landscape than in the long ears of his mount. He measured them carefully. "It's a donkey," he affirmed. "No," replied Deussen and the other friend, "it's a horse." Nietzsche measured again and maintained, with praiseworthy firmness: "It's a donkey." They came back at the fall of day. They shouted, perorated, and generally scandalised the little town. Nietzsche warbled love songs, and girls, drawn by the noise to their windows and half-hidden behind curtains, peeped out at the cavalcade. Finally an honest citizen, who had left his house for the express purpose, cried shame on the roisterers, and, not without threats, put them back on the road to their inn.
The three friends installed themselves at Bonn. The Universities enjoyed at that time an uncommon prestige. They alone had remained free, and maintained in a divided Germany a powerful life in a weakly body. They had their history, which was glorious, and their legends, which were more glorious still. Every one knew how the young scholars of Leipsic, of Berlin, of Jena, of Heidelberg, and of Bonn, kindled by the exhortations of their teachers, had armed themselves against Napoleon for the salvation of the German race; every one also knew that these valiant fellows had fought, and were still fighting, against despots and priests to lay the foundations of German liberty; and the nation loved these grave professors, these tumultuous youths who represented the Fatherland in its most noble aspect, the laborious Fatherland, armed for labour. There was not a small boy but dreamt of his student years as the finest time of his life; there was not a tender girl but dreamt of some pure and noble student; and among all the dreams of dreamy Germany there was none more alluring than that of the Universities. She was infinitely proud of those illustrious schools of knowledge, bravery, virtue, and joy. Their arrival at Bonn moved Nietzsche and his comrades very deeply. "I arrived at Bonn," says one of the numerous essays in which Nietzsche recounts his own life to himself, "with the proud sense of an inexhaustibly rich future before me." He was conscious of his power, and impatient to make the acquaintance of his contemporaries, with whom, and on whom, his thoughts were to work.
Most of the students at Bonn lived grouped together in associations. Nietzsche hesitated a little before following this custom. But from fear of too unsociable a withdrawal should he not impose upon himself some obligation of comradeship, he joined one of these Vereine. "It was only after ripe reflection that I took this step, which, given my character, seemed to me an almost necessary one," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff.
During the next few weeks he allowed himself to be absorbed by the course of his new life. No doubt he never touched either beer or tobacco. But learned discussions; boatings upon the river; hours of light-headedness in the riverside inns, and, at evening on the way home, improvised choruses—Nietzsche made the best of these simple pleasures. He even wished to fight a duel so that he might become a "finished" student, and, lacking an enemy, chose for his adversary an agreeable comrade. "I am new this year," said he to him, "and I want to fight a duel. I rather like you. Let us fight." "Willingly," said the other. Nietzsche received a rapier thrust.
It was impossible that such a life should content him for long. The mood of infantile gaiety soon passed away. At the beginning of December he withdrew a little from this life. Disquiet was again gaining on him. The festival of Christmas and that of the New Year, passed far from his own people, were causes of sadness. A letter to his mother lets us divine his emotion: