Even before that, however he had definitely decided on the egocentric life. Writing to a friend on the subject of marriage, he declared: “I shall certainly not marry; on the whole, I hate the limitations and obligations of the whole civilised order of things so very much that it would be difficult to find a woman free-spirited enough to follow my lead.” He was himself the measure by which he measured all the values of life. “I am not quite satisfied with Nature,” he had said in an early letter, “who ought to have given me a little more intellect as well as a warmer heart.” But this mood of modesty did not last. At that time, he saw in his egoism his greatest weakness. “One begins to feel constantly as if one were covered with a hundred scars and every movement were painful.” As his consciousness of his genius grew, every scar and every pain seemed to him to bear witness, not to his egoism, but to his greatness. He assures his sister in 1883 that he is grateful even for his physical suffering because through it “I was torn away from an estimate of my life-task which was not only false but a hundred times too _low_.” He declares that he naturally belonged to “the modest among men,” so that “some violent means were necessary in order to recall me to myself.” He was unquestionably heroic in the way in which he accepted all the miseries of his life as the natural lot of a saviour of mankind. He boasted of his isolation and his sufferings magnificently. No sooner, however, did the world begin to smile on him than he began to boast on a more normal plane of delighted vanity. His most attractive braggings were addressed to his mother. He wrote to her from Turin: Oh, if you only knew on what terms the foremost personages of the world express their loyalty to me--the most charming women, a _Madame la Princesse Tenichefl_ not by any means excepted. I have genuine geniuses among my admirers--to-day there is no name that is treated with as much distinction and respect as my own. You see that is the feat--sans name, sans rank, and sans riches, I am nevertheless treated like a little prince here, by everybody, even down to my fruit-stall woman, who is never satisfied till she has picked me out the sweetest bunch from among her grapes.