He lived, nevertheless. Paul Rée came to see him, read to him, and succeeded in distracting his thoughts. The weather, which had tried him so severely, grew warmer, and the snow, which had dimmed his eyesight, melted. Peter Gast, living as in the previous year at Venice, steadily wrote and called to him. In the middle of February he felt, with surprise, a reawakening of strength; his desires, his curiosities returned to him, and he set out at once. He stayed for a month on the shores of Lake Garda, at Riva, and the improvement in his letters gave his relatives some hope. On the 13th of March he was at Venice: from that day the end of this crisis and his convalescence must be dated. He had not yet loved Italy. What parts of it did he know? The Lakes: but their somewhat oppressive tepidity was ill-suited to him, and he did not relish their over-soft harmonies. Naples and its Gulf: but he was repelled by the Neapolitan crowd; the splendour of the spectacle had no doubt conquered, but it had scarcely charmed him. No intimate union had been established between this dazzling scenery and his spiritual passions. But from the first moment he yielded to the fascination of Venice. In Venice he found, at a glance, without effort, what his Greek masters--Homer, Theognis, Thucydides--had formerly given him: the sensation of a lucid intellect, which lived without dreams or scruples. Against dreams, against scruples, against the prestige of a romantic art, he had been fighting for four years. The beauty of Venice was his deliverance. He remembered his agonies and smiled at himself. Had he not flattered himself in supposing that he was the most wretched of men? What man who suffered has not had this thought, this childish conceit? "When a first dawn of assuagement, of recovery, supervenes," he wrote, "then we ungratefully humiliate the pride which formerly made us bear our sorrow, we deal with ourselves like naïve simpletons--as if something unique had happened to us! Again we look around at men and at nature, with desire; _the tempered lights_ of life recomfort us; again health plays its magical tricks with us. We contemplate the spectacle as if we were transformed, benevolent and still fatigued. In this condition one cannot hear music without weeping." Peter Gast attended him with touching kindness. He accompanied him in his walks, read to him, played him his favourite music. At this period Friedrich Nietzsche liked Chopin above all musicians; he discovered a daring, a freedom of passion in his rhapsodies, which is seldom the gift of German art. Doubtless we must think of Chopin in reading those last words, "In this condition one cannot hear music without weeping."