Two months later, the friendship was broken. Perhaps we may perceive what had happened. Lou Salomé came to find Nietzsche at Leipsic, as she had promised; but Paul Rée accompanied her. No doubt she wished Nietzsche to understand once and for all the nature of a friendship which was always open to him: free, not slavish; sympathy, not intellectual devotion. Had she well weighed the difficulties of such an enterprise, the dangers of such an attempt? These two men were in love with her. What was her attitude between them? May she not have yielded, when she tried to keep them both by her, to some instinct, perhaps an unconscious one, of intellectual curiosity, of conquest and feminine domination? Who can say, who will ever know?
Friedrich Nietzsche became melancholy and suspicious. One day he imagined that his companions, talking together under their breath, were laughing at him. A piece of gossip reached him, and upset his mind. The story, puerile though it be, must be told. Rée, Nietzsche, and Lou Salomé had been photographed together. Lou Salomé and Rée had said to Nietzsche: "Get into this child's cart: we will hold the shafts; it will be a symbol of our union." Nietzsche had answered: "I refuse; Miss Lou will be in the cart; we will hold the shafts, Paul Rée and I." This Miss Lou did. And she (according to the story repeated to him) sent the photograph to numerous friends, as a symbol of her supremacy.
A more cruel thought soon began to torture Friedrich Nietzsche: Lou and Rée are in agreement against me, he thought; their agreement condemns them, they love one another and are deceiving me. Then all became poor and vile around him. A miserable strife terminated the spiritual adventure of which he had dreamed. He lost his strange and seductive disciple; he lost the best and most intelligent friend of his last eight years. Finally, affected and impaired by these humiliating conditions, he himself did a wrong to friendship and denounced Rée to Lou.
"He has a marvellous mind," he said, "but it is feeble and aimless. His education is the cause of the trouble: every man should have been brought up in some sort for a soldier. And every woman, in some sort, for a soldier's wife."
Nietzsche had neither the experience nor the necessary resolution to decide an infinitely painful situation. His sister, who detested Miss Salomé, encouraged his suspicions and his rancours. She intervened in a brutal manner, and, it seems, without authorisation, wrote the young girl a letter which determined the rupture. Miss Salomé was angry. We have the rough draft of the last letter which Friedrich Nietzsche addressed to her; it throws little light on the detail of these difficulties.
"But, Lou, what letters yours are! A little angry schoolgirl writes in this way. What have I got to do with these bickerings? Understand me: I wish you to rise in my opinion; not to sink again.
"I only reproach you for this: you ought to have sooner given an account of what I expected from you. At Lucerne I gave you my essay on Schopenhauer—I told you that my views were essentially there, and that I believed that they would also be yours. Then you should have read and said: No (in such matters I hate all superficiality). You would have spared me much! Your poem, 'Sorrow,' written by you, is a profound counter-truth.
"I believe that no one thinks more good things of you than I do, or more bad. Do not defend yourself: I have already defended you, to myself and to others, better than you could do it. Creatures like you are only bearable to others when they have a lofty object.
"How poor you are in veneration, in gratitude, in piety, in courtesy, in admiration, in delicacy—I do not speak of higher things. How would you answer if I asked you: Are you brave? Are you incapable of treason?
"Do you not then feel that when a man like myself approaches you, he needs to constrain himself very greatly? You have had to do with one of the most for-bearing and benevolent of men possible: but against petty egoism and little weaknesses, my argument, know it well, is disgust. No one is so easily conquered by disgust as I. I have not deceived myself again on any point whatsoever; I saw in you that holy egoism which forces us to serve what is highest in us. I do not know by what sorcery's aid you have exchanged it for its contrary, the egoism of the cat, which only desires life.
"Farewell, dear Lou, I shall not see you again. Protect your soul from like deeds, and succeed better with others in regard to things that, so far as I am concerned, are irreparable.
"I have not read your letter to the end, but I have read too much of it. Your,
"F. N."
Friedrich Nietzsche left Leipsic.
[1] This formula is given in the Wille zur Macht, paragraph 286.