"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.
"Chérie, 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 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 Würtemburg 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,
"Your F.
"N.B.—I have begun to sleep again (without narcotics)."
In January, February, and March, 1886, his melancholy appeared to be less acute. He gave a form to his work, to those notes which his fantasy had dictated to him. For four years he had ceased to publish his aphorisms, his short essays. The matter with which his notebooks supplied him was immense. He proposed to extract a volume from it; his whole task was to arrange and select.
Had he forgotten the systematic work of which he had thought the previous winter? No, for he always felt the heavy necessity and the reproach of it. He wished to make peace with his own conscience in regard to the delay: he needed a little pleasure, the amusement of a lively book, before commencing the immense work. He found a title, Beyond Good and Evil; a sub-title, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Thus he announced the more important and always deferred work. He deceived himself in connecting by an artificial tie his pleasure and his duty.