At the approach of spring, he wished to leave Basle: Gersdorff offered to go with him, and the two friends settled on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, at Chillon. They spent a bad fortnight there. Nietzsche's nerves were irritated by the least variation of the atmosphere, which was more or less humid and more or less charged with electricity, and he suffered from the "föhne," a soft wind which melts the snows in March. He let the softness and tepidity depress him, and could not restrain the heartrending expression of his doubts and his agonies. Gersdorff, obliged to return to Germany, went with an uneasy mind on his friend's account. But Nietzsche felt better once he was left alone. Perhaps finer weather favoured him; perhaps he felt his distress less acutely when the compassionate Gersdorff was not near by, ever ready to lend an ear to his complaints. His humours became less bitter, and chance procured him a decisive relief, a liberating hour. Fräulein von Meysenbug had just published her _Memoirs of an Idealist._ Nietzsche had put these two volumes in his bag. Of this woman of fifty he was very fond, and every day he liked her more. She was always suffering and courageous, always fine and good. He did not put her on the level of Cosima Wagner. The superiority of her mind was not dazzling; but she was great-hearted, and Nietzsche infinitely esteemed this woman who was faithful to the real genius of women. Doubtless he began reading her book with moderate expectations: yet the work held him. It is one of the most beautiful records of the nineteenth century. Fräulein von Meysenbug had gone all through it: she had known all the worlds, all the heroes, all the hopes. Born in old Germany with its petty Courts--her father was Minister in one of them--as a child she had listened to the friends of Humboldt and Goethe; as a young girl, the humanitarian gospel touched her: detached from Christianity, she abandoned its observances. Then came 1848, and its dream; the Socialists, and their essays towards a more noble, a more brotherly life: she admired them, and wanted to work with them. Blamed by her people, she left them and went alone without asking help or advice. An idealist of action, not of dreams, she joined the communists of Hamburg; with them she instituted a sort of phalanstery, a rationalistic school in which the masters lived together. This school prospered under her direction; but, threatened by the police, she had to fly. Next she was in London among its proscripts of all the races, that mournful refuge, and tomb of the vanquished. Fräulein von Meysenbug earned her living by giving lessons: she knew Mazzini, Louis Blanc, Herzen: she was the friend and the consoler of these unhappy men. At the time of the second Empire, of Napoleon III., of Bismarck, and of the silence of the peoples--in Paris, with its brilliant culture--Fräulein von Meysenbug met Richard Wagner. She had long admired his music: she admired the man, listened to him,