Could Fräulein von Meysenbug have guessed that her young companion, this young, tender, and enthusiastic German, had just declared war within himself on those instincts of tenderness and enthusiasm which obstructed the clarity of his views?—that Nietzsche, the continuator of Schopenhauer, the friend of Wagner, was now choosing La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Stendhal for masters? Could she have guessed that this friend who dreamed with her of setting up a lay cloister was training himself, during his long walks, to face the melancholy of a life of revolt and of solitude? He formulated the rules of such a life:

You must neither love nor hate the people.

You must in no way occupy yourself with politics.

You must be neither rich nor poor.

You must avoid the path of those who are illustrious and powerful.

You must take a wife from outside your people.

You must leave to your friends the care of bringing up your children.

You must accept none of the ceremonies of the Church.

Fräulein von Meysenbug knew at last. One day Nietzsche handed to her a pile of MSS. "Read," said he; "here are some impressions which came to me down there, under that tree; I have never sat down in its shade without plucking a thought." Fräulein von Meysenbug read, and discovered an unsuspected Nietzsche, a critic and a denier. "Do not publish that," she said. "Wait, reflect!" Nietzsche's only answer was a smile. She insisted; the conversation grew animated; they made peace in reading Thucydides.

At the beginning of May, Nietzsche, incommoded by the heat, wished to leave. Fräulein von Meysenbug wanted him to postpone his departure in order that he might master his first fatigue before he began the trying voyage. He would not listen to her.

"Nietzsche is really going to-morrow," she wrote to Rée; "you know that when he is thus determined upon something he carries it out, even though the sky sends the most serious warnings to turn him from it. In that he is no longer a Greek, as he is not attentive to oracles. Just as, in the most frightful weather, he starts out on an excursion, so now he goes, tired to death, in defiance of the raging wind which is lashing up the sea, and will certainly make him ill, for he is determined to make the voyage from Naples to Genoa by sea."

"Yes, he has gone," she wrote in another letter. "The charm of Sorrento in flower could not keep him; he must go, but it is horribly painful to me to let him travel thus; he is unpractical and so bad at extricating himself from a difficulty. Luckily the sea is a little calmer to-day.... Alas, there is so much to regret! Eight days ago we had sketched plans for his near and distant future. Was his brusque resolution dictated by a feverish desire to fly from his malady, which he suddenly fancied had some connection with our spring temperature, which is truly a little abnormal? But how could he have been any better elsewhere this miserable spring? I think that at the last moment it occurred to him that his departure was nevertheless precipitate. But it was too late.... This melancholy multiplication of departures has quite upset me...."

Friedrich Nietzsche went to take a cure at the waters of Rosenlaui. He experienced very little benefit from it, and his immediate future preoccupied his thoughts. In September he had to resume his professorial duties. It was his daily bread, and a daily discipline from which he feared to be freed. But he also knew the horrible ennui of it. He had been given reason to hope that the authorities at Basle would consent to grant him, in consideration of his services and of his illness, a definite discharge with a sufficient pension. Fräulein von Meysenbug advised him to retire; his sister, on the contrary, advised him to retain his office, and Nietzsche chose to listen to his sister. But the nearer came the date of his return, the more lively grew his revolt.

"It is a thing which I know, which I feel," he then wrote to a woman who was helping him in his work, the mother of one of his pupils, Marie Baumgarten, "that I have in store a loftier destiny. I can make use of Philology, but I am more than a Philologist. 'I misrepresent myself.' Such was the persistent theme of my last ten years. Now that a year of retired life has made everything so visible and so clear (I cannot express how rich I feel and how much of a creator of joy, in spite of every affliction, as soon as I am left alone with myself), now, I tell you with complete confidence that I am not returning to Basle to stay there. How will it come about? I do not know, but my liberty (Ah! how modest my material necessities are; little matters to me), my liberty, I shall conquer it for myself."