September came. The proofs were corrected, the Engadine became cold. The wandering philosopher had to find new quarters and new work.
"To tell the truth," he wrote to Peter Gast, "I hesitate between Venice and Leipsic; I should go there to work, I still have a lot to learn, many questions to ask and much to read for the great thought of my life of which I must now acquit myself. It would not be a matter of an autumn, but of a whole winter spent in Germany. And, weighing everything together, my health dissuades me very strongly from essaying a like experience this year. It will be then Venice or Nice; and from a quite personal point of view, that is better perhaps. Moreover, I need solitude and contemplation rather than study and inquiry into five thousand problems."
Peter Gast was at Venice, and Venice, as one might have foreseen, carried the day. Nietzsche lived for some weeks, a flaneur and all but happy, in the town with a "hundred profound solitudes." He scarcely wrote: his days, according to Peter Gast, were idle or seemed to be so. It was not to shut himself up in a room in Venice that he gave up the libraries of Leipsic. He walked, frequented the poor "trattoria," where at midday the humblest, the most courteous of lower classes sit down to eat; when the light was too strong he went to rest his eyes in the shade of the basilica; when day began to decline he recommenced his perpetual walks. Then he could look at St. Mark, with its flocks of familiar pigeons, without suffering, at the lagoon with its islands and temples. He kept on thinking of his work. He imagined it logical and free, simple in its plan, numerous in its details, luminous with a little mystery, a little shade on every line; he wished in short that it should resemble that city which he loved, that Venice whose sovereign will allied itself to the play of all fantasy and grace.
Let us read this page of notes, written in November, 1887; L'Ombra di Venezia, is it not obvious there?
"A perfect book to consider:
"(1) Form. Style. An ideal monologue, all that has a learned appearance, absorbed in the depths. All the accents of profound passion, of unrest and also of weakness. Alleviations, sun tasks—short happiness, sublime serenity. To go beyond demonstration; to be absolutely personal, without employing the first person. Memoirs as it were; to say the most abstract things in the most concrete, in the most cutting manner. The whole history as if it had been lived and personally suffered. Visible things, precise things, examples, as many as possible. No description; all the problems transposed into sentiment as far as passion.
"(2) Expressive terms. Advantage of military terms. To find expressions to replace philosophical terms."
On the 22nd of October he was at Nice.
Two events (the word is assuredly not too strong) occupied the first two weeks of his stay. He lost his oldest friend; he acquired a reader.