But at the close of the year 1888 this dear and masterly mind began to be deranged. His self-esteem, which had always been very great, acquired a morbid character. His light and delicate self-irony, which appears not unfrequently in the letters here given, gave place to constantly recurring outbursts of anger with the German public's failure to appreciate the value of his works. It ill became a man of Nietzsche's intellect, who only a year before (see Letter No. 2) had desired a small number of intelligent readers, to take such offence at the indifference of the mob. He now gave expression to the most exalted ideas about himself. In his last book but one he had said: "I have given the Germans the profoundest books of any they possess "; in his last he wrote: "I have given mankind the profoundest book it possesses." At the same time he yielded to an impulse to describe the fame he hoped to attain in the future as already his. As the reader will see, he had asked me to furnish him with the addresses of persons in Paris and Petersburg who might be able to make his name known in France and Russia. I chose them to the best of my judgment. But even before the books he sent had reached their destinations, Nietzsche wrote in a German review: "And thus I am treated in Germany, I who am already _studied_ in Petersburg and Paris." That his sense of propriety was beginning to be deranged was already shown when sending the book to Princess Ténicheff (see Letter No. 18). This lady wrote to me in astonishment, asking what kind of a strange friend I had recommended to her: he had been sufficiently wanting in taste to give the sender's name on the parcel itself as "The Antichrist." Some time after I had received the last deranged and touching letter, another was shown me, which Nietzsche had presumably sent the same day, and in which he wrote that he intended to summon a meeting of sovereigns in Rome to have the young German Emperor shot there; this was signed "Nietzsche-Cæsar." The letter to me was signed "The Crucified." It was thus evident that this great mind in its final megalomania had oscillated between attributing to itself the two greatest names in history, so strongly contrasted. It was exceedingly sad thus to witness the change that in the course of a few weeks reduced a genius without equal to a poor helpless creature, in whom almost the last gleam of mental life was extinguished for ever. III (AUGUST 1900)