In March, Gersdorff came to sojourn in Basle. Nietzsche, encouraged by his arrival, dictated some notes to him. He seemed to have escaped from his melancholy; then once more he was plunged into it by a fresh sorrow. It had become his habit, a kindly habit and one conformable to his tastes, to live in common with his two colleagues, Overbeck and Romundt, who formed the intellectual society of which Wagner spoke with such esteem. Now, in February, 1875, Romundt announced to Overbeck and to Nietzsche that he was obliged to leave them to enter into Orders. Nietzsche experienced a feeling of stupefied indignation: for many months he had lived with this man, he called him his friend. Yet he had had no suspicion of the secret vocation now suddenly declared. Romundt had not been open with him. Subjugated by religious faith, he had lacked in simple good faith, and the duties of friendship of which Nietzsche had such an exalted ideal. Romundt's treachery reminded him of another treachery and made it easier for him to understand the news which was rumoured among Wagnerians: the master was about to compose a Christian Mystery--a _Parsifal._ Nothing was so displeasing to Friedrich Nietzsche as a return to Christianity: nothing seemed to him more weak or cowardly than such a capitulation to the problems of life. Some years before, he had known and admired the different projects on which Wagner conversed with his intimates: he then spoke of Luther, of the Great Frederick; he wished to glorify a German hero and repeat the happy experiment of _Die Meistersinger._ Why had he abandoned his projects? Why did he prefer Parsifal to Luther? and to the rude and singing life of the German Renaissance, the religiosity of the Graal? Friedrich Nietzsche then understood and measured the perils of the pessimism which accustoms souls to complaint, weakens and predisposes them to mystical consolations. He reproached himself for having taught Romundt a doctrine too cruel for his courage, and thus to have been the cause of his weakness. "Ah! our Protestant atmosphere, good and pure as it is!" he wrote to Rohde; "I have never felt so strongly how well I am filled with the spirit of Luther. And the unlucky man turns his back on so many liberating geniuses! I ask myself if he is in his senses, and if it would not be better to treat him with cold water and douches; so incomprehensible is it to me, that such a spectre should rise up by me, and take possession of a man for eight years my comrade. And to crown all it is on me that the responsibility of this base conversion rests. God knows, no egoistic thought induces me to speak thus. But I believe too that I represent a sacred thing, and I should be bitterly ashamed if I merited the reproach of having the slightest connection with this Catholicism which I detest thoroughly."