In January, February, and March, 1886, his melancholy appeared to be less acute. He gave a form to his work, to those notes which his fantasy had dictated to him. For four years he had ceased to publish his aphorisms, his short essays. The matter with which his notebooks supplied him was immense. He proposed to extract a volume from it; his whole task was to arrange and select. Had he forgotten the systematic work of which he had thought the previous winter? No, for he always felt the heavy necessity and the reproach of it. He wished to make peace with his own conscience in regard to the delay: he needed a little pleasure, the amusement of a lively book, before commencing the immense work. He found a title, _Beyond Good and Evil;_ a sub-title, _Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future._ Thus he announced the more important and always deferred work. He deceived himself in connecting by an artificial tie his pleasure and his duty. * * * * * Remember how joyously he used to announce the completion of the book; how communicative he was and how confident! Confidence and joy are gone. He knows that he will not be read. But his ill-fortune always exceeds his expectation, and Nietzsche, once again, has not foreseen the ordeal which he must endure: _Beyond Good and Evil_ finds no publisher. He negotiates with a house in Leipsic which declines his proposals. He writes to Berlin without better success. Everywhere his book is refused. What is he to do with it? He thinks of cutting it up into pamphlets which will perhaps reach the public more easily. He writes an experimental preface. "These pamphlets," he is to say, "form a sequel to the 'Thoughts out of Season' which I published some ten years ago in the hope of drawing to me 'my fellows.' I was then young enough to go fishing for associates with an impatient hope. To-day--after a hundred years: I measure the time by my measure--I am not yet old enough to have lost all hope and confidence." But he soon abandoned this idea too. "There is nothing else for me to do," he wrote to his sister, "but to tie up my manuscript with a string and put it in a drawer." In the spring he stayed at Venice, as his custom was, but did not meet his friend, who was visiting the German towns in the vain hope of "placing" his music. Peter Gast had composed an opera, _The Lion of Venice,_ which was being rejected by one theatre after another. Nietzsche wrote to comfort and encourage him. Like Nietzsche, Gast was a German by birth, a Mediterranean in taste. The one lived at Nice, the other at Venice; they had the same ambition, the same unhappy destiny.