The simple Italians who rent him his attic room in Genoa understand him better perhaps than he can be understood by more pretentious folk. They know his greatness, though they cannot classify it. The children of his landlady call him “Il Santo”; and the market-women keep their choicest grapes for the bent philosopher who, it is whispered, writes bitterly about women and “the superfluous.” But what they know for certain is that he is a man of exceeding gentleness and purity, that he is the very soul of chivalry; “stories are still told of his politeness towards women to whom no one else showed any kindness.”[132] Let him write what he pleases, so long as he is what he is. He lives simply, almost in poverty. “His little room,” writes a visitor, “is bare and cheerless. It has evidently been selected for cheapness rather than for comfort. No carpet, not even a stove. I found it fearfully cold.”[133] His publisher has made no profit on his books; they are too sharply opposed to the “spirit of the age”; hence the title he gives to two of his volumes: _Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen_,--_Thoughts Out of Season_. There is no money, he is now informed, in such untimely volumes; hereafter he must publish his books at his own cost. He does, stinting himself severely to meet the new expense; his greatest books see the light in this way.[134] He works hard, knowing that his shaken frame has but short lease of life; and he comes to love his painful solitude as a gift. “I can’t help seeing an enemy in any one who breaks in upon my working summer.... The idea that any person should intrude upon the web of thought which I am spinning around me, is simply appalling. I have no more time to lose--unless I am stingy with my precious _half-hours_ I shall have a bad conscience.”[135] Half-hours; his eyes will not work for more than thirty minutes at a time. He feels that only to him to whom time is holy does time bring reward. “He is fully convinced,” an acquaintance writes of him, “about his mission and his permanent importance. In this belief he is strong and great; it elevates him above all misfortune.”[136] He speaks of his _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ in terms of almost conscious exaggeration: “It is a book,” he says, “that stands alone. Do not let us mention the poets in the same breath; nothing perhaps has ever been produced out of such a superabundance of strength.”[137] He does not know that it is his illness and his hunger for appreciation that have demanded this self-laudation as restorative and nourishment. He predicts, rightly enough, that he will not begin to get his due meed of appreciation till 1901.[138] His “unmasking of Christian morality,” he says, “is an event unequalled in history.”[139]