"It is a thing which I know, which I feel," he then wrote to a woman who was helping him in his work, the mother of one of his pupils, Marie Baumgarten, "that I have in store a loftier destiny. I can make use of Philology, but I am more than a Philologist. 'I misrepresent myself.' Such was the persistent theme of my last ten years. Now that a year of retired life has made everything so visible and so clear (I cannot express how rich I feel and how much of a creator of joy, _in spite_ of every affliction, as soon as I am left alone with myself), now, I tell you with complete confidence that I am not returning to Basle to stay there. How will it come about? I do not know, but my liberty (Ah! how modest my material necessities are; little matters to me), my liberty, I shall conquer it for myself." His sister came to join him at Basle and lived with him. At first his pleasure was great, but he soon recognised that he could not talk with this girl who was altogether a Wagnerian and quite devoted to the ideas of Bayreuth. Paul Rée was the only man whose company he liked; but Paul Rée was detained in North Germany by considerations of health, and could not, as Nietzsche had hoped, come to Basle. "I hope that I shall soon learn," he wrote to him, "that the evil demons of sickness are leaving you in peace. All that I wish for you in the New Year is that you remain as you are, and that you remain for _me_ as you have been.... Let me tell you that friendship has never been so sweet to me as in this last year, thanks to you.... When I hear of your work, my mouth waters, for I desire to be with you so much. We have been made to understand each other aright; we always come together, I think, like good neighbours, to whom the idea occurs, at the same moment, that they should pay each other a visit, and who meet on the confines of their lands.... When shall we have a good conversation upon human affairs, a personal, not an epistolary conversation?"