[2] This intimate history has never been known except to a few people, who are now, for the most part, out of our ken. Two women survive: one, Frau Förster-Nietzsche, has published some accounts which one would wish were more lucid and tranquil; the other, Miss Salomé, has written a book on Friedrich Nietzsche in which some facts are indicated and some letters cited; she has refused to enter into polemics on a subject which, as she considers, concerns herself alone. Oral traditions are numerous and contradictory. Some, rife in Roman society, where the adventure took place, are less favourable to Miss Salomé; she appears as a sort of Marie Bashkirtseff, an intellectual adventuress who was somewhat too enterprising. Others, rife in Germany among Miss Salomé's friends, are very different. We have heard all these traditions. The first have influenced the account which we have given in the Cahiers de la quinzaine, the second volume of the tenth series, pp. 24 et seq.; the second, which we learned later, we now prefer. But all hope of certainty must be adjourned.
[3] "Da ist eine Seele welche sich mit einen Hauch eine Körperchen geschaffen hat."
[4] The y in the word Gaya does not seem to be Italian. We follow Nietzsche's orthography.
[5] "Who that hath once been seized by thee can fly, if he hath felt thy grave look turned on him? I shall not save myself, if thou takest me, I shall never believe thou dost naught but destroy. Yea, thou must visit all that liveth upon earth, nothing upon earth can evade thy grip: life without thee—it were beautiful, yet—thou too art worthy to be lived."
II
Thus Spake Zarathustra
His departure was prompt, like a flight. He passed through Basle and stopped with his friends the Overbecks, who listened to his plaint. He had awakened from his last dream; everyone had betrayed him: Lou, Rée, feeble and perfidious; Lisbeth, his sister, who had acted grossly. Of what betrayal did he complain, and of what act? He did not say, and continued his bitter complaints. The Overbecks wished him to stay with them for some days. He escaped them; he wished to work, and surmount alone the sadness of having been deceived, the humiliation of having deceived himself. Perhaps he also wished to put to profit that condition of paroxysm and the lyrical sursum whither his despair had carried him. He left. "To-day," said he to his friends, "I enter into a complete solitude."
He left, and stopped in the first instance at Genoa. "Cold, sick. I suffer," he wrote briefly to Peter Gast. He left this town, where he was importuned perhaps by memories of a happier time, and moved away along the coast. At the time of which we speak, Nervi, Santa Margherita, Rapallo, Zoagli, were places unknown to the tourist, market towns inhabited by fishermen who, each evening, drew in their barques to the recesses of the coves and sang as they mended their nets. Friedrich Nietzsche discovered these magnificent spots, and chose, to humiliate his misery there, the most magnificent of them, Rapallo. He relates, in simple language, the circumstances of his sojourn:
"I spent my winter, 1882 to 1883, in the charming and quiet bay of Rapallo that is hollowed out by the Mediterranean not far from Genoa, between the promontory of Portofino and Chiavari. My health was not of the best; the winter was cold, rainy; a little inn,[6] situated at the very edge of the sea, so near it that the noise of the waves prevented me sleeping at night, offered me a shelter very unsatisfactory from all points of view. Nevertheless—and it is an instance of my maxim that all that is decisive comes 'nevertheless '—it was during this winter and in this discomfort that my noble Zarathustra was born. In the morning I would climb towards the south by the magnificent mountain road, towards Zoagli, among the pines and dominating the immense sea; in the evening (according as my health permitted it) I would go round the bay of Santa Margherita as far as Portofino.... On these two roads came to me all the first part of Zarathustra (fiel mir ein); and more, Zarathustra himself, as type; more exactly he fell upon me (überfiel mich)...."