Fräulein Nietzsche, who had passed the month of March at Bayreuth with the Wagners, came back to her brother, whose condition alarmed her. He seemed obsessed by the memory of Romundt. "That such a misadventure should occur between friends living under the same roof," he was constantly saying. "It is appalling." In reality he was thinking of the other friend, Richard Wagner, of the master he was losing. "What a peril I have run," he said to himself. "I admired, I was happy, I delivered myself over to and followed an illusion, but all illusions are connected, and accomplices. Wagnerism borders upon Christianity." Tirelessly he listened to his sister's accounts of the marvels of Bayreuth, of the activity, the enthusiasm, the joy of all. Walking one day with him in a public garden, she related for the tenth time this same story: she noticed that her brother was listening to her with a strange emotion. She interrogated him, plied him with questions, and then the secret which he had kept for a year escaped him in a long, eloquent plaint. He was suddenly silent. He remarked that a wayfarer was following and spying on him. He dragged his sister precipitately away, terrified by the idea that his words would be repeated at Bayreuth. A few days later, having recognised again the too curious wayfarer, he was able to learn his name: it was Ivan Turgenieff. July, 1875, the month fixed for the rehearsals of the Tetralogy, approached, and these rehearsals were the sole preoccupation of Nietzsche's friends, the sole subject of their letters and their conversations. He continued to dissemble and dared not decide the question which was becoming urgent: Should he go to their rehearsals or not? His enervation increased day by day, bringing on the ordinary troubles; headaches, insomnia, sickness, internal cramp: finally his health served for an excuse. "As you are going to Bayreuth," he wrote to Gersdorff, "warn them that they will not see me. Wagner will be greatly provoked, I am not less." About the beginning of July, when his friends were hurrying towards Bayreuth and the University of Basle had closed its doors, he retired to the little therapeutic station which his doctor had recommended, Steinabad, a spot lost in a valley of the Black Forest.